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Comment by disillusioned | Hacker News Reader

This is... ambitious. Very ambitious. Tempe is not a pedestrian mecca. And while it's nice that they're planning on bringing in some retail and grocery and entertainment options into the community itself, people obviously want variety and light rail only gets you so far here.

They're apparently intending to supplement this with car sharing spaces, which might help, and if you _work_ along light rail, this might be doable. They also mention they'll still have parking spaces for guests and such, so that means, ostensibly, they'll need to police them? Or just because they're not reserving spaces for residents, the demand will always outstrip the supply.

Either way, while I agree that transitioning away from dependence on individual automobiles is a noble effort, this concept has its work cut out for itself here. That being said, I have several friends who go car-free here, so...

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The way it's done in Vauban in Germany is that there are big quads with cycle paths around them and then outside the main body of the development there is a multistorey car park that residents can rent a space in. There are also popular car rental services. This means that if you need a car you can have one at extra cost and you can't normally bring it right to your building.

It's a fantastic place to live.

What's wrong with just charging market rate for parking and road usage, i.e., just enough to so that there's always a few free parking spots and traffic flows at capacity?

That involves city law, and it's political suicide to do it everywhere, so it doesn't happen. You need bootstrap efforts like this so people can know what the alternative is like.

I believe this neighborhood has already received special exemption from the city to not build normally-required parking with new apartment buildings. Logically, parking prices and road-usage pricing can be hyperlocal, so it seems very feasible to just use it in this specific neighborhood.

Why would it involve city law to charge market rate for parking at this particular development?

Not at the particular development, but everywhere in the city, which is what I think he was implying.

Imagine that the city started charging for the 'free parking' everywhere, either through permit schemes or parking meters, created photo enforced no stop tolling for major highways and busy commuting corridors and reduced property taxes w/ low income exemptions for the new driving fees.

You would get a revolt even with the tax reductions.

Small localized new greenfield experiments like this is not political suicide for a city to approve.

> Not at the particular development, but everywhere in the city, which is what I think he was implying.

That's not what I was implying.

The market doesn't capture the externalities of the car. Its downsides are pushed to the people who don't use them.

What externalities are you thinking of besides road usage and parking?

* Pollution: exhaust, noise, brake dust

* Wide right-of-way required for travel, stretching out cities, making walking impossible

* Pedestrian safety: driving successfully requires full concentration

* Both drivers and pedestrians experience stress. Traffic drives even the calmest to madness.

* The industries that support cars are vast and environmentally destructive.

The list goes on and on...

This isn't a thread for your general complaints about cars. This is a thread about the Culdesac's building project. As described in the article, the neighborhood is already going to have roads necessary for delivery vehicles, carshare vehicles (Uber, etc.), and the private vehicles of visitors. So your second and fifth points are off-topic. The other three points are easily covered by an already-mentioned road-usage charge.

Cool, that doesn’t have anything to do with a market discovery mechanism for parking prices.

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