> is usually ~€16/h
Holy HELL that is crazy. I thought £5/hr in London was crazy.
Holy HELL that is crazy. I thought £5/hr in London was crazy.
If there are professionals willing to pay continually-higher portions of their salary to live in the city regardless of who they displace then why can't we find ways to build new areas they want to live in? In some places there is a huge weather or natural-feature draw that will always prop up demand, but in others there isn't. There's just a lack of imagination and effort.
Because people want to live their lives today, while what you propose takes decades and must be a process worked on by Town Halls, not "the people". And no, it's not the same. The Town Hall of rich people who didn't yet have the need to leave, is dominated by rich people who didn't yet have the need to leave, not the people who is more affected by the excessive centralization.
Cars are simply not viable past a certain density. It's silly (misleading at worst) to take a distance (say 40km) and a speed (say 80kph) and just claim the journey by car takes 30mins, ignoring everything else!
Trains + metro + bikes are the only way to make the journey you describe viable (and comfortable and fast).
My (European) experience is the opposite: it takes longer to go to work by car, you're sitting in traffic whereas subways and trains take a fraction of the time as they are not impacted at all.
I live in Rome, which isn't known for great public transport. Yet I've seen multiple times people going from Rome suburbs to Naples downtown (a completely different region, 150 miles away) than it took me by car to do 7 miles.
I live in Munich and yet going by car is often the fastest, and only during rush hour it's worse. I generally use my bike though, which is so-so. If was 5min by foot from the subway station (and not 15) it would change drastically.
Also I mean it's not terrible, but 30-45 minutes to get somewhere by public transport is the norm. 5min to the bus stop, bus to the subway, subway then is quick. And by car this is often faster, also more reliable, and no walking in the rain.
My city has "great" public transport. It's been appraised multiple times, which I guess means that average public transport must be worse than what I've grown up with. I take 20 mins by car from home (in an outer neighborhood) to my workplace (in a central area), 55 mins otherwise. When you consider roundtrips, it adds up (and if we add a middle stop coming out from work to somewhere else for some shopping, the time counting goes out the roof).
The 30 mins vs 1h30 comparison was assuming a trip from a nearby dormitory city 25 kms away, which is the minimum (insisting: minimum) distance everyone nowadays is being pushed out in order to being able to buy any home at a reasonable price. For example: where my parents live to my work is further away 30 Km: that's 30 min by car and 1h10 by p.t., but that outer city had reasonable prices 15 years ago, not today, so nowadays you would go live somewhere farther than that.
I find that typically people talk about public transport benefits from the perspective of being able to buy a home within the centre that is well connected. Yeah, the subway is great here if you live in a 10 Km radius, but talking about it is out of scope for most.
Trains don't have stop lights nor traffic. They don't care about rush hour. They are always going to be the fastest connection to a city center.
I live 4 minutes by foot from the Colonna Galleria train station, in a village 30 kilometers outside Rome, Italy. The train to Termini (Rome central station) takes 28 minutes, and Termini is the crossway of the 2 main metro lines and the most important city bus lines.
It's 33 minutes at night with empty streets and it's 1:15 at rush hour. Leaving work at 5:30 can easily cost you 2 hours in your car.
But sure, put me 3 miles from the train station, put my office in a place that is just 10/15 more inconvenient from metro/termini and it's drammatically different.
Woah yeah that changes the calculations, I had a similar situation before, andof course I preferred the subway by far. But you know, it depends. I work late into the evening and when getting out of the office, the streets are empty. So it's a hard sell for me to use a transport option that will cost me 1 hour of my already short free time before bed. But everyone's situation is different, that's why I am in favor of keeping all options open.
The London subway system is just wonderful.
It's a rare case where American Exceptionalism is a fact.
Out of zone 1 it can be done though I believe
As to the GP, it’s refreshing to hear about a reliable VW. Most folks I know, that own VWs, complain about reliability.
But they still love their cars. I’ve never driven a VW, but, apparently, they handle quite well.
The two are related. The whole point of charging for parking is to leverage scarcity to convince people to not make the problem worse and just find alternatives to driving to the doorstop that work well for them.
This goes doubly so for all the additional roads you need to get the cars to their parking spots.
Indeed, and to build upon your comment, how entitled can some people be to expect they can just take over random ~10m² spots in a property you do not own and expect that to be ok? It isn't. Those spots ain't yours, and I would love to not have to come across your car.
Are you against renting homes, hotel rooms etc too? Do you object to the vast spaces that hotels occupy?
And if it's public property, well, we all pay taxes and could argue it's collectively owned. Why would it be entitlement?
I could say public transport advocates are entitled expecting taxes to pay for vastly expensive public transport infrastructure projects
If you talk of taxes, then yes, you can argue against tax payers subsiding free parking for people living outside that city
It's one way to put a lot of cars in a small space. Much of the space in a conventional parking garage is lost to the driveways.
And sometimes city councils restrict the amount of parking that can be built because they want to create that scarcity to encourage people to take transit instead of driving, because they know that the owners of the (fewer) parking areas will charge more, making it less desirable to drive and park.
Do people seriously think that these companies want to charge more, for environmental reasons? Of course not. They care only for profit.
https://news.wttw.com/2025/05/21/final-tally-chicago-taxpaye...
The parent says that the reason the price is high, is because someone is trying to up the price for environmental reasons. What proof have they for this? I'd really like a citation, because instead I see almost all parking being profit based.
If someone is saying it's for environmental reasons, likely they're lying to make more profit.
if less space is allocated, it becomes more expensive (scarcity), driving down car use. this is an easy case of pricing in environment and external impacts.
The post I replied to said "The whole point of charging for parking" was to force people to, essentially, drive less. This is saying it's the only reason people charge for parking. Clearly not so.
And there is artificial scarcity too. I've seen cities where one company owned almost all the parking lots. In that situation, they controlled pricing entirely.
I've seen a lot more of "doing it for profit", including the city doing it for profit, than for environmental reasons.
That's doesn't mean I support this position or not. Describing reality as it stands is important, one cannot effect change one way or the other, without understanding what is.
And they lie because they get vilified otherwise by people who can't stand the idea that they make a profit.
BTW, whenever someone gives you a reason why they do something, odds are pretty good that you're given the palatable plausible reason, not the actual unflattering one.
Did you think they should just let you park in Cambridge Common, Harvard Yard or the Charles River park? Why park at all— just stop your car in the middle of the street.
The T is atrocious. Parking is simply expensive.