Hacker News Reader

Comment by newaccount2021 | Hacker News Reader

newaccount2021

remove or charge for parking and people park on the street...no one is giving up their cars, all of the social engineering just ends up creating more problems

in many Bay Area communities you will see cars as tightly aligned on both sides of residential streets as is physically possible...homeowners don't even have room to put out trash bins without blocking their own drives. and why? because apartment complexes and offices don't provide spaces for their users. so, people just clutter up the streets. win?

any time there are measures to make parking inconvenient, you end up with annoying ordinances banning street parking...or "members only" local passes...or meter maids who exist to torment us all

how can the government get us out of our cars when they otherwise encourage car use as broadly as possible?

View on HN

The last line of your reply there really says it all. Every facet of how our cities are built caters to the automobile owner. Universal street parking, parking minimums, highways through urban cores, not prioritizing public transit infrastructure... these things all reinforce automobile dominance, and they've been public policy for the last 70 years.

In order to fix the issue of congested and dangerous streets, we need to get drivers to shift to other transit modes, and part of the answer is to stop coddling them with free parking.

> we need to get drivers to shift to other transit modes

No thank you. I've tried them all, and driving is better than all of them.

> and part of the answer is to stop coddling them with free parking.

Yup, can't make the other options better, so instead the only alternative is to make driving worse. Great plan.

I've been thinking about other transit modes for medium and long distances and I'm having a hard time thinking of great ideas for where I live (central Texas).

Public transportation is one, but the last thing many of us want to do right now is get on a crowded train.

Bicycles are great until it gets too hot or too cold which is a pretty large chunk of the year. They also aren't an option for many of us with health issues.

Ride sharing and taxi services are available, but they can be more expensive and unreliable.

In smaller neighborhoods I think electric golf carts can work, but the range isn't great and they usually don't have heat or air conditioning.

I saw an older Waymo video where the car was somewhere between a golf cart and a regular car. I think something like that has a lot of promise, but nobody is making them.

If downtown areas get rid of free parking, I wonder if that would just push business out to the 'burbs where there's unlimited parking? That's not great for cities either.

If you try to conceive of The One Weird Trick that will solve urban mobility, it's an impossible problem.

The best general purpose plan I can conceive of is to build mixed housing and commercial in places where there is already decent transit. No parking minimums.

Build in earnest for a city where people can literally walk to any errand they may need. European planners actually do this -- they require neighborhood plans that offer a mix of residential, commercial (restaurants and nightlife), schools, other amenities. If the local grocery store is 2 blocks away, you don't need to get on a crowded train at all!

But what's decent transit? I don't think mass transit options like buses or trains fit that description anymore, at least not for everyday.

Cities ultimately have to be built for the people who live there. In Austin, I'm pretty sure voters are going to continue to demand better car-based infrastructure first and then bus, train, and bicycle infrastructure second.

Definitely agree with mixing commercial and residential though. I live in the suburbs but that's because my office is also out here.

> we need to get drivers to shift to other transit modes, and part of the answer is to stop coddling them with free parking.

Another approach might be to make other transit modes suck less. A lot less.

If you approach the issue holistically, you both improve transit and wind down subsidies and aids for drivers.

Tangent: there's an interesting equilibrium effect with commuter traffic - if a commute is served by an automobile route and a train line, the commute times will be similar. If for some reason, automobile traffic is delayed by loss of road capacity, over the long term some of that auto traffic will switch modes to the rail option, until the systems are in equilibrium once again.

Obviously in the real world this is much more complex but it's still observable... let me see if I can find a link...

I can believe that; I look at total door to door time as the primary factor in choosing my transit (with cost as a second, but pretty distant second [I’m not commuting daily into the city->I’d have to consider cost higher if doing it 20x/month]).

I live in Cambridge, MA (1.4 miles from the Boston red line subway) and, excluding rides where I’m coming home from the airport, I bet I ride the subway less than once per year on average. It’s just not remotely competitive on door-to-door time with a private car, an Uber, or [most commonly] driving in the other direction to an alternative restaurant or shop with parking. (And Boston is probably in the top 10 of functioning mass transit systems in the US.)

Somerville here :)

Like you, I commute to somewhere where it's annoying to take transit. I've settled on a combination of cycling, WFH and driving on occasion. I can pick up a rail trail for about half my commute, which means that it's actually faster to bike than to dive.

I'm actually looking for employment that's a little bit closer. If I worked within about a 2 mile radius, I'd actually have a feasibly walk-only lifestyle.

I had that living by Museum of Science and later in Cambridgeport and walking to Kendall Sq for years. It was awesome! When it came time to have a family, a one BR apartment didn’t cut it any more so we moved to a less dense part of Cambridge and I got a job in a suburban office park just off Rt 128 with a reverse commute. My 9 mile commute time went way down, but it’s not nearly as pleasant as a 1.5 mile walk in the city.

> no one is giving up their cars

When you live in the downtown of a city, and parking at your apartment is $300/month, that's a strong incentive to give up your car

As I've found out first hand, when you live in a neighborhood where it's more convenient to walk to the grocery, gym, bar, friends' houses, it really makes you wonder what you're spending all that money on that car for. Not just the parking spot, but depreciation, fuel, maintenance, insurance, parking tickets...

> it's more convenient to walk to the grocery, gym, bar, friends' houses, it really makes you wonder what you're spending all that money on that car for

I would never use my car for any of those examples (living in a small EU city). The car is just there for leisure activities, to access skiing in winter and mountain biking/hiking/camping spots in the summer. Yeah it's more expensive than not owning a car but for some hobbies it's hard to give it up.

Same. Most places in the US aren't built in a way where everyday errands are walkable. I feel insanely lucky to have semi-randomly ended up in one of the few places that are. I'm in love with the format of small European cities, enough that I'm considering attempting to emigrate before trying to start a family.

Even if day to day errands are reasonably walkable/bikable/transitable, in most US cities you're adding a lot of overhead and inconvenience for carless people who want to regularly get out of the city on weekends. Very few people I know (so somewhat older folks) don't own cars even in walkable cities.

Speaking as someone who lived in the Bay Area, most of the impediment to getting out of town on the weekends was traffic on 80/101 from people commuting to and from work. Once you escaped past Sacramento most of the traffic disappeared.

That’s strong incentive to give up living downtown, parking costing 1/4 of far more spacious accommodations (with lots of parking).

>any time there are measures to make parking inconvenient, you end up with annoying ordinances banning street parking...or "members only" local passes...or meter maids who exist to torment us all

"annoying ordinances banning street parking", as if street parking isn't itself extremely annoying to pedestrians and cyclists.

"free" parking is not free. just like any other scarce good that the government mandates to be "free", someone, somewhere is paying for it.

> all of the social engineering

Do you mean forcing, by law, business and homebuilders to provision parking?

no, I mean the laws that mandate that they can only build a maximum of 80% of parking needed

these laws aren't new...when Yahoo's "new" campus was built in 1999, only 8 parking spots per 10 employees were allowed to "encourage mass transit use" (lol)...so people just wasted hours driving around aimlessly

Yes, saw the same when my employers new campus in Santa Clara was built around the same timeframe. Parking was impossible, so people would drive around for a long time wasting fuel to find someone leaving. I settled on working from home the mornings and timing my arrival at lunchtime when spots were available. This of course left people coming back from lunch driving around for a long time. A huge waste.

> remove or charge for parking and people park on the street...

Parking in the street is still parking. The first parking to charge for (and the one to charge most for) is street parking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com