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Oregon eliminated burdensome parking regulations in most larger cities and: it's fine.

Many home builders still add parking to new projects because there is market demand for it - and they are also competing for tenants or buyers against existing housing which has parking.

But there is now the flexibility to do some projects without parking, which really helps at the affordable end of the spectrum, and is a good fit for more walkable locations.

BTW, Nolan Gray, cited as the author, has a book out himself that's really approachable and good reading if you're interested in cities: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines

Near my house in Portland a 6-unit complex just went up on a lot that was vacant for at least a decade prior. Three blocks from there they are building at least twice as many units on what was an abandoned church and parking lot. Neither project provides any parking, and the units are cheap. Something like 320k for a brand new 1000 sq-ft build. It’s so amazing.

That's awesome! And, given current prices, a great opportunity for someone to own a home they otherwise might not have been able to.

Here's an article about some of the other things happening: https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-va...

Does Portland have good public transport?

Hit and miss. Good for North America, horrible compared to Europe. Where these are located, it's a bit of a train desert, but the bus system is pretty good. There are three lines within short walking distance, and they go to pretty good destinations, and trains.

But on the other end, there's still street parking, and it's plentiful. I'd say Portland is a good 1-car city, if you're a family. Lot's of stuff is one bus away, but you definitely get into situations where some appointment is 1:30 away by bus, 20 minutes by car, so it's nice to have options. If I was a bachelor, I'd be fine with no car, and using a bike or cab when needed.

It's spread out but I found the bus system very usable when I visited.

There's gotta be some middle ground. I think of san francisco, where the streets are clogged with people circling the block and folks are double parked everywhere.

The solution, as Donald Shoup advocated, is to raise (or in some cases, lower, and in general, have it be dynamic) parking rates to market-clearing prices for parking spots such that there are is always one (but not too much more) free spot available on the block.

That's a necessity, but I'd also add legalizing construction of dedicated parking structures in more places. Land is at a premium in any desirable place and street parking is a lot less efficient usage of that than a multi-level parking structure. As a driver I also prefer them. Circling around blocks is a waste of time and annoying and my car is safer in a dedicated building that typically has some cameras

This is not really because parking lots are not legalized (they are, and in fact are often required) but because structured parking is so expensive to build; $25-35k per space in an above ground garage and $35-50k per space underground. https://dcplm.com/blog/cost-of-building-a-parking-garage/

The only place I'm aware of that bans new parking garages in the US is Manhattan, which has a general parking cap; but providing enough spaces for the actual car travel demand to Manhattan would necessitate leveling the whole island and then some, so the policy is there to get people to stop driving to a narrow, congested island.

At least here in California the big driver is Prop 13. The flat parking lots all over Los Angeles have been owned by the same people for decades, usually since the 70s or earlier, so they’re paying a few thousand bucks in property tax while absolute raking in cash - they can usually meet their obligations with a week of revenue and the constant cash flow is a guaranteed lever for credit and loans. Selling or redeveloping the lots would trigger a reassessment, so the owners just keep them as the cash cow they are.

I have a friend who inherited three such lots in downtown ($$$) and he lives very comfortably off just that revenue because their old assessments totaled under a million so they never got reassessed (though the rules have become far less generous with Prop 19).

A good very argument for a taxing the value of the land instead of the improvements/building.

All my homies are georgists

I've also heard that it's popular as a literal cash-heavy business. This allows it to be used for manipulating tax filings, in both directions: laundering other income, or under-reporting profits.

I am pretty sure that most areas here in Portland affected by the shortage of parking aren't zoned to allow building a parking structure. I haven't looked this up though. Edit: It's not downtown here that has this problem, but smaller, hip neighborhoods where you have a shopping street surrounded by an ocean of SFHs

If high cost is the issue, it seems like people are complaining about lack of parking but don't want it enough to pay the real, unsubsidized price. So why should everyone else pay for them?

> it seems like people are complaining about lack of parking but don't want it enough to pay the real, unsubsidized price.

That's exactly what it is. The normalization of "free" street parking does a lot of damage here.

Boston also has a longstanding parking space freeze downtown.[1]

[1] https://www.boston.gov/departments/environment/air-pollution...

When I last worked in Boston (decades ago... pre Big Dig), I shared a spot with a coworker (we alternated days) that was $600 a month for parking (total).

Im in Sydney AU and parking spots are more like 50-100k. In the city center, or desirable suburbs you might see $150-200k. The city has also restricted parking permits to 1/residential address, and eliminated them for businesses.

This has all been more-or-leas fine, with residential prices factoring in parking, and multi-tenant developments pulling in density via car stackers and the like. Oh, and a pretty functional transit system, of course.

> $25-35k per space

Seems unreasonably high.

It's about right from what I've seen. "The high cost of free parking" isn't just an ironic title.

https://cityobservatory.org/the-price-of-parking/ - and this is from before the pandemic.

You might think so at first glance, but if you multiply a regular parking space (9' x 18', 162 sq ft) by the median price per sq ft of a normal house ($244) you get $36288. Obviously these figures are specific to the US, but cars take up more space than you think, either because we're usually inside them or because we're just used to it.

For a whole parking garage you need many large I-beams, tons of concrete, frequently elevators are added, etc. Not surprising builders opt out of including them when they can.

A parking garage also needs a gigantic ramp since cars don’t really use stairs.

Perhaps they can be trained to use them? :-)

Autonomous vehicles will reduce the need to park. Eventually.

I don't think this is actually necessarily true. Most of the AV fantasies involve cars driving about aimlessly when not in use or increasing congestion in the reverse peak towards parking lots in the suburbs during dead times, and to the extent that those scenarios increase vehicle miles traveled that might actually be worse than parking lots everywhere.

Cars are about as healthy as Daleks are for cities.

The other part is to make public transport more appealing.

Yes, the system developed as it did for a reason, some of the more obscure being: + entrenched rent-seekers controlling properties in cities (it's almost axiomatic) + centralized transportation systems being subject to political and labor capture-- the main purpose is not great customer service + red tape in urban areas for everything + market forces created last-resort poor quality housing in cities + the car vs transit battle is winner-take-all at a neighborhood level, and transit does not compete properly on a metro or regional level, nor is the park-and-ride system fully competitive + car-compatible density negates transit density + different ownership model for rolling stock leads to over-investment for cars and under-investment for transit (you buy the car you personally can afford and it sits idle while you ride the subway car your grandparents' generation was willing to pay for collectively )

And cheaper! A roundtrip 10 min bus ride into town costs my family £6. That's more expensive than driving in and parking for 3-4 hours.

Is there at least seats available? As shouldn't public transport too be market clearing. So price should be high enough that there is always empty room in busses and the busses fully pay for themselves.

Usually yeah. London has buses every 10 mins on most routes. It can get very crowded at rush hour or school run time though. Several groups (OAPs, kids, disabled people...) get discounted or free bus passes which I wouldn't want to change.

Don't get me wrong - London public transport is fantastic. Extensive, frequent, convenient, and multi-modal. But the pricing is quite static so that people who use it for short inner-city journeys lose out a bit.

How large is the family?

I think you are right and this is one of my issues with busses in most American cities. Basically, it's just going to be viewed as a worse version of your car. You have to create a categorical change and that's best achieved with rail, biking, and walking which can't be replicated by cars or busses. This doesn't mean we shouldn't have bus routes or anything, that's not great either, but we need to break the habit of hopping on/in motor vehicles if we want to see change.

But also, we need to actually fund public transportation. In most states the amount of funding allocated toward non-car infrastructure amounts to a rounding error.

So what can be done?

Write to your representatives at your city, county, and state level. When your state's department of transportation issues surveys or maps for feedback make sure to give feedback! If there are other opportunities where your local leaders are engaging with the public just mention you'd like to see better transit and walking infrastructure to reduce cost for taxpayers and increase quality of life. Ask for a meeting. Ask for explanations. Ask questions and keep asking questions.

Of course, the backlash to that will be "so parking is only for the rich?"

Same as when we built express highways and priced the tolls to demand - see the complaints about "Lexus lanes".

Capitalism is still the least-bad way of allocating a scarce resource, but of course those who get priced out will be unhappy.

The rich use helicopters...

You mean one spot available to pay for, right? Not a free one :-)

my solution is to look both ways before flipping the windshield wipers up on a double parked villain

How does this benefit poor people who could barely afford their homes and can barely afford to commute to their job halfway across the city by car?

If applied to an area that already is only middle-class people, then sure.

Or resident parking permits.

The solution to poor people not having enough money is to give them more money (if you really want to help them).

It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.

In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!

When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.

I know this probably doesn't add a lot to the conversation but for me it articulated and cleared some inconsistencies I was failing to square up in my mind. So, nice, thanks. Do you have any books or articles that helped you in your analysis, I wonder?

You're welcome!

The topical book to recommend here is obviously The High Cost of Free Parking.

https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...

It's quite a big book. Henry Grabar's book, mentioned elsewhere, is apparently more approachable.

It’s big, but it’s very clearly written and you can likely understand the entire premise after a few chapters.

>If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor,

Why does it seem as though some people believe there is an infinite supply of rich people?

Income disparity is so great that the cost of parking is irrelevant to the mythical army of rich people waiting off to the side for parking prices to come down.

I'm not even in the 99%, I'm in the 97% and I don't give a fuck about parking. I'm driving downtown to buy a $600 Barbour jacket from Orvis. I don't care about $20 for parking and I'm not coming downtown more often if parking is $0.

>Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free.

If you are poor milk and bread should 100% be free.

Support for SNAP (food stamps) routinely and consistently polls at >70%.

People who assert what you just did are in the extreme minority.

Making milk and bread free for everyone != making milk and bread free for poor people by giving them SNAP.

The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!

SNAP doesn't make food free in the sense of free parking, it gives money to poor people to buy food. The equivalent for parking would be market-rate parking with means-tested parking vouchers, which would be a much, much better solution than what we have now.

You're missing the trade-off between time and money (and how it differs based on wealth).

"Free for all" parking spaces allow you to trade your time (hunting a spot) for parking, the same way coupon-clipping trades time for a discount on food.

You can say "eliminate coupons, all food should be at market price", but coupons really are an effective way of helping people. They segment the market by being too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

You can trade your time for goods, but others might trade money for time. Something to think about maybe.

Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”

This is only true if you completely discount the very significant cost of owning a motor vehicle.

The closest option to truly free continues to exist and has always existed: walking

And, unlike with food so much of the time, in this case the cheaper option is also healthier.

That's not why coupons exist, though, it's just a side effect. If coupons didn't exist and your goal was to help poor people eat, coupons would be a weird way to do it.

Why is it weird? It's a lot like the 10c can and bottle levy. Ostensibly for recycling, but also gives homeless people a job. Sneaks under the radar of regular-sized market forces, and gives them some agency in their lives.

It’s pretty badly targeted. Lots of poor people don’t have much time, and lots of better off people have lots of time and enjoy things like screwing around with coupons to get a discount. It also doesn’t do much for extreme poverty. If you have no money, it doesn’t matter if you can get a coupon for half off a loaf of bread or whatever, you still can’t afford it. So you end up giving more help to people who need it less.

If you want to help poor people buy food, give them money to buy food.

Let's go back to may example of bread and milk.

Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.

Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.

If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.

> a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange

You've just described how rationing in Eastern Bloc countries worked.

> Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange?

Sounds almost exactly like the argument made here https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

> too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.

What makes you think poor people have more free time than wealthy people?

That makes a lot of sense, but (mostly conservative) politicians still criticize many innovations because of their supposed effect on the (more or less) poor. Recent example: the 2023 reform of the Gebäudeenergiegesetz (Building Energy Law) in Germany, which sought to promote energy efficient ways of heating and decrease heating using fossil fuels, was met with furious opposition (including a lot of disinformation) from the conservative press and parties because of the poor poor building owners who can't afford a heat pump (which is more expensive to install, but already has much lower operating costs, which are likely to become comparatively even better in the future).

Part of what it allows is more housing (something that places like San Fran fail miserably at) because it's not constrained by having to provide 1.5 spots per bedroom or whatever arbitrary number.

And more housing is what is needed to contain housing costs.

It benefits the poor by allocating resources as efficiently as possible. If there is someone who is poor enough that they need help from society/the government, it would be much more effective to transfer money directly to the, rather than very very poorly (probably regressively in fact) target that help by having the public subsidize parking on their block.

They would rather have the $100 in efficient redistribution rather than the government spend $100 so that they can benefit by $1.

Most poor people don't own their house and often don't have a car – if you do own both you're middle class.

That's true but I'm not really worried about them. I'm worried about the people who are doing everything right and about to not be poor. Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff. Public policy should strive to avoid doing stuff like that.

I'm of the opinion that when public goods are cheap enough to face shortages all the time the market economy steps up because better off people will spend more to save time/hassle.

The problem is when things are expensive enough to kick out a lot of people, but not enough people actually alleviate shortage, which is basically how it currently goes with parking.

> Increasing the cost of every rung of the ladder, like for example slogging out a shitty commute and parking situation for some time decreases the number of people who make it up the ladder. It's almost like a pseudo welfare cliff.

No, it's the opposite. A city built around everyone having a car makes car ownership a cliff. Normalising not having a car (and a reliable bus service - like the kind you get by turning street parking spaces into bus lanes - helps with that) makes the ladder gentler. If people are late for work because they couldn't find a parking spot just as often as people are late because the bus was late or didn't show, maybe there will be fewer horror stories of people getting fired because their car broke and they couldn't afford to get it fixed.

The market economy has solved none of these problems, and I suggest looking up just how socioeconomically mobile people in the US really are (it's not great).

Price parking at the market rate. Demand for other forms of transportation increase substantially. Provide it. Poor people can now take cheap buses and trains instead of expensive cars.

If you're worried about the transition, subsidize other forms of transport and build that out first, but forcing poor people to own cars just to make it to work is not a good way to help them.

Price parking at the market rate. Political competitor criticizes you for being an "eco-dictator" and promises a return to free parking. You lose the next election.

Sorry for the cynicism, I'm actually for increasing the price of parking, but recent political events have robbed me of any illusions that environmentally friendly policies have a future. When they have a choice between the environment and paying less money (short-term), most people will choose paying less money.

> most poor people don't have a car

Outside of maybe a couple urban areas like NYC, that's patently untrue in the United States. It would not surprise me if the poor frankly had more and older/rougher cars than their more wealthy counterparts.

One of the ways it benefits them is by reducing traffic congestion so buses can get through. A significant amount of traffic in parking-contested areas is from cars looking for parking.

You can't means-test a parking space. You could, in theory, set parking prices based on the value of the land its by.

You can means-test a parking permit. It's dumb, but some cities do.

Rather than implementing all these complex and weird rules, you can just ensure everyone has enough money to afford the essentials.

Shoup wrote a LOT about how charging too little for parking leads to everyone using it, which makes parking worse for everyone involved. San Francisco charges about $50c a day for residential street parking in areas that have a parking permit zone - which is decided on a block by block basis. Most street parking in SF is completely free.

Raise prices even slightly, and people's behaviors will adjust accordingly. I have a friend who street parked two cars until he moved to a different neighborhood and had to start paying for permits. Now he just keeps his commuter and leaves his overlander in the suburbs.

In the case of San Francisco it is a state law that limits cities to charging only as much as it costs to administer the program. San Francisco cannot have responsive residential parking under state law.

California loves kneecapping itself.

I guess the solution would be to make these spots 2/4 hr parking, instead of permanent overnight parking for all. Or remove parking all together and make it easy to build private parking lots.

SF's lack of grade separated transport outside the narrow BART corridor also makes it hard to convince people out of driving. Buses and trams aren't acceptable alternatives for a city as rich and dynamic as SF.

I think they can be more creative. Hire an administrator of residential parking and pay them $100 million. Also have a special 100% marginal income tax for city employees earning over a million.

No, according to this article by Chris Elmendorf and Darien Shanske https://www.spur.org/news/2020-12-18/how-solve-transit-budge..., Proposition 218, 26, and the California Vehicle Code probably do not prohibit market pricing of residential parking permits as endorsed by Donald Shoup, since street parking is not just a fee-based service, but city-owned land that the city has the right to rent at market rate. San Francisco just hasn’t tried.

Speaking of having not tried, that legal theory could be right but it's novel. On the one hand you have Elmendorf's hypothesis, and on the other you have every city attorney in the state.

What does administer the program mean in this case? Does it include the maintenance? It could also include the property tax the city pays itself for the valuable land that is being kept available.

There are no good solutions for existing neighborhoods with street parking. In new or completely redeveloped neighborhoods, you can make the streets narrower, the lots larger, and the property owners responsible for parking. But street parking in existing neighborhoods doesn't scale. If the neighborhood is getting more dense with gradual redevelopment, every solution to street parking is going to feel unfair to one group or another.

You could issue street parking permits to the residents of the old properties but not of the new ones. Or you could adjust the prices of the permits to achieve the desired occupancy rate. Or you could keep parking free, fine improperly parked cars, and let the residents decide for themselves if the car is worth the inconvenience of finding parking.

> You could issue street parking permits to the residents of the old properties but not of the new ones.

London does this and it works well. New buildings have to be zero parking, there's some grumbling but residents of a new apartment block don't feel so bad when they lose something they never had - they know from the day they move in that they won't have parking, so if that's going to screw them over then they don't move there in the first place. And then you gradually reclaim the parking spaces as the area is developed.

Or you could provide meaningful alternatives to driving, which is my preferred solution but has a whole different set of problems (mostly zoning-related).

It's not enough. Driving is always the better option for an individual, even in cities with great public transport, so you need a bit of stick as well as the carrot.

I hear takes like this all the time but it's just not true. Even without high parking costs the time and frustration expenditure of driving rules out that option for a huge fraction of trips.

The only solution to traffic is viable alternatives to driving. Not more parking, not more lanes, not more parking lots, nor more highways, not wider roads. It's viable alternatives to driving.

Aye. Can't have your cake (car) and eat (drive) it, too. You just get 40 years of pussyfooting around the problem and making it worse.

Donald’s book The High Cost of Free Parking is about this! Really great read, highly recommended.

Rest in peace.

You should actually read Donald's book this is very well covered.

I wonder if Waymo will get big enough in San Francisco to affect this.

> Waymo will get big enough in San Francisco to affect this

SF public transportation is "good enough" that owning a car in SF is already a decision outside of pure transportation needs.

I lived in SoMA for 2+ years without a car using ZipCar occasionally to drive to SouthBay, which was cheaper than the car payment, insurance and the parking fee put together. Plus my commute was to Palo Alto which was neat because every Caltrain out of SF stopped in PA in the mornings, I used the bullets both ways every day.

Bicycles got me and my partner everywhere, faster and more conveniently (including in a bus or BART). We even went by to Napa on the ferry with bikes on it (once the Vine Trail cycle path connects all the way to Vallejo, I want to do it again - for now you can put your bike on a bus from Vallejo, no problem).

The Lyft would be used for the Costco runs or to lug things out of Tech Shop back home, when working on something bulkier.

Then I had a kid + moved to Mission bay which was still great for my Caltrain commute, but the kid changed the way I could just grab an Uber. There was no travelling light anymore.

I struggled to use a cab because we had to drag stroller car-seat everywhere we went with the kid and often even when didn't have the kid, because you'd pick them up on the way back.

The car was bought, even though it was a bad deal financially simply because it offered a fixed set of storage items we always had.

Even getting from location to location, the car was the slower option, it didn't make any sense except to serve as a home base for all things you needed to have with you.

yep. People railing against cars are usually the younger ones without kids, pets, etc. So they don't understand the value of the car from their own experience, nor able to put themselves into the shoes of others due to that egoism of the youth (i've naturally been there myself :).

I'm a nearly 50 year old dude and cars are awful because I have kids and want to leave them a better city and planet.

They are massive sources of CO2 right now.

Even electric cars produce a lot of particulate matter from tires.

They crowd out housing and businesses when we require their needs be addressed first and foremost.

It's not so much a matter of a binary choice either for most people. You can use a car less and still have one for that occasional hiking trip or something.

And electric cars still produce a lot of CO2 in manufacturing, to the point that though an electric car is a reduction in CO2, its on the same order of magnitude of an gas car for regular usage.

That's not true at all. There's a bit more CO2 during manufacture, at the moment, but a single year of driving and the EV has caught up to a gas car on emissions. Given that lifetime of cars is multiple decades now, the savings are huge for EVs.

https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric-emissions

I think I overstated my case, its not as bad as I thought.

Do you have a car? If you don’t - respect for putting money where you mouth is. If you do - what is the point of your glorious virtue signaling statement when your actions confirm what I said?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I feel like you are really running against the spirit of HN with this comment.

Jesus https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/036/647/Scr...

>Jesus

Not surprisingly that you mentioned it, preaching and enforcing virtues - let’s get rid of the cars - upon others while enjoying the opposite vice yourself - driving a car - is at the core of the Christianity.

Much the contrary. Like another post has said, I don't want to leave as inheritance to my kids a polluted planet and cities stuffed with dangerous cars.

But it's not only that. Quality of life is precisely the kids being able to just cycle to school and sports with their friends, rather than being stuck on the back of an SUV in traffic for hours every day, being driven around by their parents.

I have lived in places where the former lifestyle is available and where the latter is mandated. There is NO QUESTION which one is better. That's why I'm working to campaign very hard for this to be a reality where I live in ~10 years time :)

You describe my childhood in USSR. I don't see it repeating at any meaningful scale. I do dream though, while slowly working on human carrying electric VTOL, that we'll get to the world with residential neighborhoods kind of like golf-courses - a lot of green space with minimum paved paths for short hops (and last mile various cargo) on electric "golf-carts"/etc. while electrically-VTOL-ing to any destination farther than 5-10 miles.

Parents driving kids to school and hobbies seem to be an almost uniquely American obsession. I live in an affluent not-USA country and my kids go to school and hobbies by walking/bike/bus. If I had to chauffeur them around all the time my quality of life would go way down.

Car dependency is definitely not a US specific thing, sadly.

Of course not, didn't mean to imply that. But the US seems to take it to 11.

Don't take this the wrong way but I definitely think it's "peak hn" to consider that building 1m wide cycle paths is somehow just an impossible thing to have, so much so that you see some weird scifi vision of flying cars as being easier than that.

If anything, cars (and the necessary infrastructure for cars) severely limit the independence of children and senior citizens. Children often can't get to school without their parents driving them. And seniors become homebound and isolated sooner when they're no longer able to drive themselves to the grocery store and their friends.

>seniors become homebound and isolated sooner when they're no longer able to drive themselves to the grocery store

large supermarkets (naturally can't be just in every small neighborhood) -> efficiency and lower costs. What is the point of local (thus small and high priced) store that a senior can walk to, yet can't afford to shop at?

This is simply your gut feeling, smaller (and cheap) supermarkets are common basically everywhere outside North America. Chile which is in no way rich or some urbanist paradise is a specific counterexample, prices only go up with specialist stores (e.g Whole Foods equivalents) or small business of the size of a parking spot in someones home, think like NYC bodegas.

Cars are expensive, the total domination of personal cars is only possible if you are a rich country. Much like gout.

Small stores can be perfectly affordable. National Co+op Grocers lets local coops buy from UNFI at a national bulk rate, just like the giant chains can. I shop at a member store and usually pay less than I would at one of the big chains.

You are partly correct to note that local markets are often not economical, but the reasons for that are precisely low density, car dependence and restrictive zoning.

For a local market to be economical it needs a catchment area containing enough customers.

Once customers start driving they prefer to drive a bit longer to go to a mega market or mall with good parking options, i.e. not a local market.

Local markets thus have a catchment area that is defined mostly by walking and biking.

(Not having a lot of parking can also help to make local markets more economical)

Some important conditions for local markets are then:

1. Zoning needs to allow the shop to be very close to residential areas, and with only few parking spaces.

2. Residential density needs to be high enough to have a large number of customers within walking or biking distance.

3. Walking and biking should be sufficiently safe and pleasant.

It is easy to see the why there are few local markets in suburban North America, but they are very common in urban places all over the world, as well as in thoughtfully designed and slightly denser suburbs in many countries.

Having kids radicalized me against cars more not less. Cars kill kids. Suburban isolates kids from their friends and in person activities.

Often "flexibility" simply becomes providing less parking to make room for more units on a given lot, effectively outsourcing to the surrounding community.

I lived in an area that allowed "senior" developments for 55+ people. As old people are all retired and so do not commute/drive, there were far fewer necessary parking spots and the development was deemed not to increase local traffic. Without the need to commute to work, upgrades to mass transit were deemed unnecessary. Total BS. All the care providers and visiting families ended up parking at the nearby mall. And retired people still drive. They don't commute to work but they don't sit still at home all day either. The whole pack of lies was simply a way to bypass parking regs and squeeze more condos onto the lot to the detriment of the surrounding community.

So you make the street parking paid.

It’s insane that so much land is dedicated to giving people free space to store their personal vehicles.

“But that’s unfair!” People can take the bus.

“But the bus service isn’t good!” That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added. The biggest determinant of transit use is the availability of parking.

> That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added.

You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after. Otherwise people will never accept your proposal (and nor should they tbh, as there's no guarantee that the promised supply will arrive). Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo. In a democratic system of government, that means you need to convince them to change, and that won't happen unless you address their objections in advance.

People parking cars on the street are simply freeloading off the taxes of people who don't do that. They should pay for what they are using, so they can make better choices.

And people living without parking, but who still expect the services of plumbers, carpenters, pizza delivery, amazon vans, taxis, home care workers, not to mention emergency services, are also freeloaders. When such vehicles have to park on the street they block roads and pedestrian traffic.

Some communities are starting to enforce against amazon trucks that park inappropriately on the street. They often force traffic into dangerous situations as everyone must skirt around them.

People often say this when parking spots are being taken away, but when they try to placate it with having short time parking spots or paid parking (which would increase the likelihood of a pizza driver or handyman finding a free spot) they somehow aren't happy. As it turns out, it was never about those services, only about having free storage for their own car.

To add, somehow in Europe you can have pedestrian zones with no street parking, and still people live there and everyone has functioning plumbing.

None of us are freeloaders. We all pay taxes and consume our own unique constellation of public resources. It's good that we're all different, concentration rarely ends well.

> You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after.

Isn't pricing street parking the solution the parent comment proposed? It increases parking availability in the short term, while increasing demand for public transport.

Well, there’s a lot of people in this thread not content with the status quo.

The whole urbanism movement of the past decade is evidence of that I think.

Moreover, even if a community is happy with free parking and expensive housing within that community, it doesn’t mean that people outside that community are happy with it.

I think it’s a bit more complicated than people are happy with the status quo.

This same logic applies for every single other proposal (charge money for on-street parking, etc.). Many people would not be able to afford to live where they already do if that change was done overnight.

Im not talking about taking away parking per se, im talking about taking away free parking.

> You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after.

If you can't change anything then you can't change anything. Replacing parking spaces with bus lanes can be a huge improvement, but obviously you have to take the parking space away before you can put the bus lane in.

> Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo.

Boomers might be. Young people who have no hope of ever owning a home anywhere where the jobs are aren't.

> “But the bus service isn’t good!” That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added. The biggest determinant of transit use is the availability of parking.

Public transport is not some enterprise, but rather public service. It's literally in the name. You flip the chicken and egg problem around with corporate bs: make public transport usable and use will skyrocket.

I work in public transportation, at the end of the day there is a finite supply of resources and you have to decide where and how to deploy them.

The biggest determinants of quality of service are geographic coverage and frequency. Good luck getting political will to increase frequency or extend geographic coverage on routes that no one is riding.

Try working in care. Try doing home care for maybe five or six different elderly clients every day, each at a random location. If we want to support elderly people we need to provide for the poorly-paid care providers who must bounce around doing that support. Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

This is a great example of a specific problem with a specific solution that people use as an excuse to try and impose blanket, one-size-fits-all city-wide rules for automobile storage.

This must be why Europe just kills everyone over age 75, since it is impossible to support the elderly without 12-lane highways and subsidized gasoline.

Giving viable alternatives to driving (be that cycleways or public transport) reduces traffic, and reducing traffic makes it easier for people that actually DO need to drive motor vehicles.

>Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

Ironic that you bring this up as an absurd example, when this is exactly what happens in dense cities with good cycling infrastructure (Holland, Denmark, etc).

This edge case that you came up with warrants a car, but is that really the reality of most cars parking in any given community?

And honestly, it’s questionable whether it warrants a car too. In Tokyo it would be perfectly fine to do those trips by public transport. My biweekly cleaner gets around by train to all the places she works at. And local delivery companies all use bicycles for last mile delivery.

Maybe that’s not viable right now, but I think that’s the point of Donald’s advocacy. By not pricing parking correctly we provide perverse incentives as a society that lead us down a vicious cycle. Free parking means more cars means less transit ridership means we need more free parking, and repeat.

This shapes our cities into places that prioritize cars over humans. High housing costs, air pollution, less mobility, less freedom.

If you price parking appropriately, you get a virtuous cycle instead. Expensive parking means less driving means more transit ridership means more free parking slots means more room for other development, etc.

It is not an "edge case" in a development for 55+s. And, with the shifting economic, we will soon see a great many more seniors growing old in condos rather than detached houses.

To be fair I don’t know how often elderly care workers are going to 6 different locations in a single day, but it’s hard to imagine it’s a very common thing. If there’s a large condo with lots of residents wouldn’t it be more efficient to hire a permanent employee?

Malls usually have huge, empty parking lots, so it sounds like it's a win:

More people got a home to live in that costs less, and some formerly squandered land was better utilized.

And if you start doing other things like legalizing corner stores and neighborhood businesses, rather than designing everything for the automobile Uber alles, maybe some of those people will find they don't need a car.

Also, policy changes almost never happen in one nice tidy package where you do all the things at once, like eliminating expensive and arbitrary parking rules, adding a bunch of transit, re-legalizing neighborhood commercial, right-sizing roads, etc... so there are going to be fits and starts and bumps along the way. Still worth doing though.

To be fair, those mall parking lots were busy at one point in history.

Strong Towns had people take pictures on 'Black Friday' of mall parking lots, just to see. Many of them still had a ton of excess capacity.

I meant history like 1993, not history like several months ago.

Funny how you consider less parking to be outsourcing, but you wouldn't consider free parking to be subsidizing. Curious.

Might be worth taking a drive through formerly "suburb" neighborhoods that are now a battle royal for street parking thanks to high density units with zero parking.

I mean, it is portland, and they will do it wrong no matter what, but still; if you expect the people we've been mass producing to handle this well going forward, I've got bad news for you.

People are the "big rocks" in cities. Housing and businesses for people is more important than storing automobiles.

If there's not enough free street parking, charge more. That's part of what Shoup talked about.

Portland's problem is that they aren't charging enough (or at all) for curb parking.

If a city offers land for free, what incentive is there to pay for building parking on your property?

Free is always going to outcompete non-free. The answer is to get rid of free on street parking.

If only there were other ways to get around in high-density areas that didn't necessitate a private vehicle. Could we all brainstorm some ideas?

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Oregon has a severe housing shortage:

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/28/oregon-needs-to-build...

That is the root cause of homelessness:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

This video also does a good job of explaining it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQW4W1_SJmc

Eliminating costly parking regulations are quite helpful for building the kinds of housing that will help people get out of homelessness.

Thanks for introducing me to Justine Underhill ( https://www.youtube.com/@justine-underhill ). She is a new YouTuber (4 videos so far) with excellent urbanist content! Her well-argued essays remind me of Oh The Urbanity!, Not Just Bikes, and About Here.

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This is clearly why people pay less for housing in locales like New York or San Francisco with very efficient land use than, say, rural Oklahoma.

San Fransisco housing is cheaper than rural Oklahoma? Source, please. San Francisco is notorious for being an extremely expensive place to live.

In my experience, housing outside cities (suburbs or rural areas) is usually much, much cheaper per square foot than housing in metro areas.

As the other poster notes, I was being sarcastic. People pay a ton of money to live in denser cities like NY, London and Paris.

But in that case that's already what the comment you were replying to was saying: that higher density results in higher costs. So I guess I'm confused about what your point is. Were you just trying to say you agree?

The high costs are because an area is desirable, not because it's dense. Density is how you do something to mitigate the high costs of a place like NYC. Imagine if you chopped off the upper half of all buildings there, what prices would do!

You could build a bunch of dense housing in Burns, Oregon and you wouldn't be able to charge much for rent there!

It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing because the density is a huge component of the desireability.

This is obviously sarcasm.

How does down zoning lower housing costs? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.

By forcing companies to expand away from dense city cores. Ideally into smaller cities.

Assuming you don’t believe in forced sterilization there is actually no public policy way to reduce density.

It’s just a mathematical fact. More people means on average the population density increases.

Since all solutions involve increasing density somewhere the argument actually reduces to the question of where.

Assuming you think Oregon, specifically, should be less dense or remain the same, then you are necessarily an advocate for increased density somewhere else.

So maybe tell us where?

> Assuming you don’t believe in forced sterilization there is actually no public policy way to reduce density.

There is. Restrict the dense office space, by cap-and-trading it. Like we did with sulfur emissions.

Also, "forced sterilization"? WTF are you talking about?!? The US population is likely peaking within the next decade and the peak population will likely be 5-7% more than the current level.

Indeed.

When the US population is 7% higher the country will be 7% more population dense.

As mentioned this is a mathematical certainty.

Since all outcomes have higher average density, anyone who argues against density has some further explaining to do.

The average US population density is 4 people per square kilometer.

Correct. And when we have more of them, the density will increase.

The argument is not about higher or lower density. The answer to that question is higher.

The argument is about where these people will live

The area of the United States is 9.8 million square kilometers. Its population is 347 million. Average population density is 347/9.8 = 35 people per square kilometer.

This is entirely untrue. You are responding to a poster who has provided high-quality sources by just saying "nuh-uh".

> Homelessness is through the roof

Allocating space for car parking does not help address homelessness. In fact, it hurts it a lot.

Nope. Allocating space for cars and prohibiting the orgy of real estate densification improves the homelessness situation. It puts less stress on people to move into The Downtown, so they are more likely to stay in more reasonably-priced areas.

The argument that density puts stress on people to move _towards_ that density seems to me to have the direction of causation reversed. People look at prices when they move, not density.

No. I have the causality arrow correct. Density forces people to move, it acts as a black hole of misery.

The _main_ reason people move ever closer to Downtowns is economic. They _have_ to do it, because that's where the high-paying jobs are.

Prices going up is a clear market signal of desirability.

Desirability as housing or as investment? Because speculation has a tendency to overlook the little things that make a quality product.

Housing as an investment is driven by scarcity. Commit to making housing abundant and it starts being a much less interesting investment.

If the housing isn't desirable for housing, why would it go up as an investment?

Because your analysis indicates that many other people think it will go up even more later.

HN on USian real estate / urban development: this experiment has been running for two weeks and it's fine.

Also HN on USian real estate / urban development: everyone prefers this district developed two hundred years ago, because it was not fine.

It's funny (and sad) to me that people who are familiar with congestion-solving pricing schemes for something like AWS services act so unable to see parking and road networks as containing the same dynamics.

I'm working on solving the problem because my life is actively being ruined by mismanaged parking.

I think low enough of my own skills and capacities, and yet.

https://josh.works/parking

Unfortunately 'parking' is just a component of a larger mobility network that, in America, is mismanaged to better accomplish ethnic cleansing. I wish I were kidding, I wish I were wrong.

A book has been written titled: 'the slaughter of cities: urban renewal as ethnic cleansing'

It sorta ruined my ability to function as peacefully as before in segments of society common in the greater united states.

Edit: the 2nd of Donald shoup's 3 part fix was 'spend all collected money on the curb where it's collected'.

This piece, mixed with the proper clearing price for maintaining a 10% availability of parking spaces means parking could possibly provide for really substantial and beautiful upgrades to the area.

Feels like lots of times the conversation forgets that beautiful things will be added if parking gets managed rightly.

> congestion-solving pricing schemes for something like AWS services act so unable to see parking and road networks as containing the same dynamics

While I do see the irony, I think one of the differences is that nobody needs AWS, but a lot of poor or lower-middle-class people in America have no realistic choice but to drive to places. I'm not against paid parking, but like you said, there is something funny (and sad) about the solution effectively being "reduce demand for parking, unless you're rich enough to not care".

The solution isn't to reduce the demand for parking.

It's to dynamically price the parking high enough that there is always ten percent of the parking available.

When there is less or no demand, the price would fall.

Just like AWS services that guarantee certain availability all the time. Sometimes the moment by moment utilization cost can go quite high to accommodate, and it's not to make aws rich, it's to mediate the demand.

Shoup's parking fix would benefit the regular person far more directly than AWS does.

Maybe I didn't completely get the idea yet, but wouldn't those 10% then by definition be priced so high that no one could reasonably afford it? And certainly not people who have trouble to make ends meet anyway.

It would be high enough that it would be available for people who needed it urgently.

Perhaps a plumber making an urgent visit, using a company credit card. What a perfect use case to spend a lot of money on expensive parking.

In the greater United States, of the people comprising the bottom 30% of income earners, only 10% of them have a car.

Requiring or supporting any sort of car infrastructure is dramatically regressive to them.

Read shoup's book! He shows that not only is it not regressive to implement policies like this, but it is in fact regressive and harmful to the poor people to not have policies like this in place.

Your parking blog post is pretty good and I noticed that you have a substack that hasn't been posted on in a while. How did it go running a substack about parking and what made you decide to stop?

For context, I recently started https://urbanismnow.substack.com/ to bring you the best ideas from around the world to inspire action where you (c)are. It's been about a month and it's more work than expected but I think the opportunity to bring people together is pretty high.

The substack was for me to scratch an itch. It's so I can write then link to what I've written when talking with others.

I hang out with a lot more city planning and city engineering ppl than some, and it stirs up so many thoughts.

I've got more coming soon on the substack. Specifically about a totally new thing called 'coning'.

Gonna be good.

I long ago committed to never committing to a publishing schedule. I wrote when it's easy, often enough it is.

I like your stuff!

An under appreciated part of cities in America is how much some ppl in America hated others, and how widely shared that belief was.

That hate lives in today in a dozen ways that cannot be seen if one is committed to believing that this kind of hate was done by backwards, old fashioned people.

When I moved to the Portland area, I was amazed by how convenient the public transportation system was. During my two years there, I drove my car fewer than 50 times.

Yet, nearly every native Portlander I met thought I was crazy for relying on public transit. Many looked down on those who used it.

I had moved from the Caribbean, where public transportation was nonexistent, and traffic and parking were a constant nightmare. To me, Portland’s transit system felt like a game-changer—but locals didn’t seem to see it that way.

> moved from the Caribbean, where public transportation was nonexistent, and traffic and parking were a constant nightmare

Not Just Bikes did a great rant on the carbrain of The Bahamas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz6FeQLuHQ

I was in the V.I for almost 10 years. They have the safari system set up but it only runs on the tourist routes. So you're out of luck unless you lived on one of the two main routes that had the safaris.

When the ports were full of cruise ships, you could expect to spend 45+ minutes getting from Charlotte Amalie to Red Hook. Sometimes I spent an hour going from Charlotte Amalie to Havensight. That was only a distance of about 2 miles.

The V.I is extremely corrupt and the taxi unions there have a great deal of influence. That's why the public transportation never improved while I lived there.

yeah, whenever the Cruise ship was in port I just walked everywhere on St. Thomas. You aren't going anywhere anyways

Who hated on the MAX? Other than it being a cattle car pre-covid and shutting down at like 10 or 11 everyone I knew liked it; There were more and more issues with the homeless, sure, but I don't know many portlanders who'd admit that was why they didn't like it.

I think there's some kind of filter bubble effect going on. And a little classism. People who use public transit like it and think everyone likes it, and people who never use it hate it and think everyone hates it. My ex-boss never used public transit despite living right next to a train stop, because he was rich and trains are for poor people. He probably didn't know that's how I got to the office Christmas party (in that area).

Perhaps, but from my experience, everyone in downtown PDX circa ~2015 rode the max to some degree. I am the least public transit friendly person in the world and even I rode it and loved it.

I left the area in October 2010, so maybe public transit became more popular after I was gone. I owned a home in SW Portland, about a 15-minute walk from the MAX station. That's a perfectly reasonable distance, even in the cold or rain.

I never knew where my neighbors worked, but I never saw them walking to or parking at the MAX station. None of my coworkers used it either.

For me, though, it was invaluable especially when I wanted to go out for a few drinks. And since it only ran until 10 or 11, it was the perfect excuse for not staying out too late.

I visited Portland, and ended up using the public transit every day there. I can't say that about many US cities I've been to.

I read the high cost of free parking last year and it permanently changed how I see the world.

In particular...the book shows how supply and demand still affects behavior, even when we don't culturally like to believe that it does.

If you have a say in the parking decisions in your city...please read the book. And if not, try to set the parking cost so there is, on average, one free space per block. Your city will be a better place if you do!

Thanks professor Shoup...rest in peace.

> Nor are minimum parking requirements even needed: developers have the knowledge and incentives to provide the appropriate amount of off-street parking. If a developer builds too little parking, she will struggle to attract tenants and command lower rents.

This isn't entirely true. In cities where parking requirements are eliminated, many new businesses move into locations that would have previously been illegal, showing that many commercial tenants view parking requirements as excessive.

In my city, judging by public comment, support for parking requirements comes not from business owners or developers but from voters who fear a lack of parking at the businesses they frequent and who fear that parking for nearby businesses or apartment buildings will overflow into their neighborhood (the horror.)

> This isn't entirely true. In cities where parking requirements are eliminated, many new businesses move into locations that would have previously been illegal, showing that many commercial tenants view parking requirements as excessive.

That's the entire point though. The parking requirements are excessive. The businesses do know better. You're agreeing with the article.

I don't disagree with much in the article, but I disagree with the implication that parking requirements are, or ever were, designed to meet the needs of businesses and business owners. They aren't. They're driven by voters who want businesses to have more parking than business owners would pay for, given the choice.

It's an important distinction because of the way arguments over parking play out. If parking requirements are engineered to match the needs of businesses and business owners, then as the article states, they aren't "needed," but also it can be argued that there's little harm in mandating what conscientious business owners do anyway, and preventing outliers from causing problems.

The article does that in its own way by attacking the research behind parking requirements, but it fails to take the next step and point out the obvious: the research would be a lot more solid if anyone believed that it mattered. Even if it started out weak by necessity, it would have been improved and updated over the decades if anybody cared. But there's literally no connection and nobody who cares about a connection.

>They're driven by voters who want businesses to have more parking than business owners would pay for, given the choice.

And even then it's only the vocal minority. Nobody who doesn't have an axe to grind shows up to the zoning committee meeting on such an item.

A huge amount of specific policy winds up being driven by Karens and NIMBYs who will vote for anything that drives up cost because it tends to drive out everything that isn't Startbucks or similar.

You'll have some policy and the number everyone thinks is fine is X but the Karens get to screeching and the number goes up to 12 because the people who were ok with 8 are also ok with Y but the Karens wouldn't settle for less.

Not quite, because parking requirements is one of the few issues that is high profile enough that voters remember it when it comes time to vote for city council. The people who vote in city council elections are a small minority, but they're a much bigger group than the dedicated and/or crazy folks who show up at meetings.

> from voters who fear a lack of parking at the businesses they frequent

IOW they want a handout from the city (free parking) to support their lifestyles.

To a cheesy jingle tune: public services paid by taxes aren't handouts.

I don't know why this has caught on so strongly online that like water and gas hookups, electric, roads, and trash/yard waste pickups to single-family homes aren't supporting a specific lifestyle but public parking? Those evil suburbanites ruining everything. My hometown Columbus and the policy of mandatory parking is still working out great. New developments are building more parking than required of them and they're the hip trendy areas. The only places in the city where it's an issue is in and around "The Short North" where you can't fit any more parking and they moved to an app based pay system everyone hates. Whenever I'm home and want to go out with friends it's much easier to hit up Bridge Park or Franklinton because they have massive garages.

Free public parking is a handout. I use it myself, I love it, I circle the block multiple times for a free space than pay for parking. But it is a handout.

Forcing private businesses to have parking, even if they make a business decision to not have it, is a tax on those businesses. And on all the businesses that would have been viable without that tax.

I have no issue with paid public parking. It needs to exist.

Or if we love free public services so much, we can talk about why public transport isn't free.

Does attaching a cost really make a meaningful difference? I'm paying for my trash pickup even though I'm not directly billed for it. The point if charging for public parking is more a rationing mechanism than a moral imperative. I think it's annoying to shoulder the cost on businesses which is why it's in practice being shouldered on the developers who get money from the state so large-scale I think it evens out.

I think public transport should be free, keeping on the Columbus track I have no idea why COTA even bothers to charge. They instituted a monthly price-cap that's at most $62/mo and (or at most $31 plus 50% reduction on the per-fare cost if you're broke). And while not an insignificant amount of money to the riders it's bottom-of-the-bag chip dust to COTA itself. Oh no, more people might use the nearly empty busses, the horror.

Yes, because people respond to incentives. A few dollars a month for parking is enough for people to junk their broken cars instead of leaving them on the street. A few dollars a day is enough to make people reconsider getting a second car. A few dollars an hour is enough to make people carpool and limit their stay.

The point of charging for parking is not just to collect funds, it's to make sure parking is available.

You need water and heat to survive; you can have a functional city without everyone having three SUVs. Thanks for coming to my talk.

Around me the public comment is often from business owners who want to drive to work and park for free.

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I agree with you, but just to play devils advocate: use the property you are permitted to use and build parking on your own property. If you can't fit a garage or parking space on your land, you didn't think through the purchase for your needs.

If I live in single family housing that is adjacent to a business district and I have no driveway then street parking can be pretty efficient. I can leave my car in front of my house all night long and in the daytime when I go to work people can come from other neighborhoods and park there while they take their lunch and do their shopping. If someone builds a multistory apartment building at the end of my street and doesn't provide adequate parking then now I am competing for the space in front of my house every night. Okay, so I install a driveway, now only I can park in my driveway and no one can park in front of my house (because there's a driveway there).

> If I live in single family housing that is adjacent to a business district and I have no driveway then street parking can be pretty efficient.

You are the one who chose the house. if you have a single family house with no driveway you self selected to not having a car. its not the other citizens in the city who forced you to buy that house and then buy a car where you had nowhere to park it. Even if there was adequate parking before and now there isn't, what gives you perpetual rights to a shared resource?

Why should other people in the city suffer for your lack of foresight?

> You are the one who chose the house.

Sure. They chose a house which at the time had shared on-street parking available, a situation which was not guaranteed to persist forever.

But if they had shown "foresight" and insisted on a suburban house with a drive and a garage, resulting in more yardage of road for the taxpayer to maintain and low density reducing walkability increasing car traffic - has society been improved by their "responsible" decision not to depend on the shared resource?

Yes.

The person who wanted a single family house with easy parking moves out of the way for other people who don't have those requirements and frees up more space for businesses and apartments who prioritize being in the center as opposed to living in inefficient single housing with a car.

I don't get the argument that its some type of right to have a single family house in an urban center with a place to park your car in front. Thats a luxury.

I can't speak for other posters but I'm personally not trying to make the argument that any one is entitled to the street parking in front of their house.

I lived in a single family house in this sort of scenario for about 15 years in a neighborhood that was experiencing rapid commercial development. (The street one away from mine went from a sparse arterial-through-light commercial zone whose most prominent offerings were a plumbing supply store, a pet hospital and a dental clinic to a bustling thoroughfare of dense resturaunts, shopping, and bars).

When I moved in only 3 houses on my block had driveways and off street parking. It was easy to find parking on the street any time. As the area developed it became as I described above, with mostly residents parked on my street at night and ample turnover during the day for the neighboring businesses.

When the properties behind my house became four story apartments the parking situation began to change on my street and, like you suggest, people started moving out and selling their houses.

But the buyers didn't immediately tear them down and put up 6-story apartments, instead they all got individually replaced or bones-down remodeled into more massive and luxurious single family residences. And they all got driveways.

After that it was impossible to park on my street without a motorcycle or a smart car. All day long people would try to cram in between adjacent driveways where they didn't quite fit and my rich neighbors would come out and leave passive aggressive notes on their windshields.

I was the last house on that street without a driveway, but I worked nights so the spot was pretty much defacto mine. Eventually I sold that house and the next owners scraped it and built a > $1m residence with a driveway. Over ten years later and the situation there remains the same.

It's possible that eventually all those houses will give way to multifamily then high rises, but for the current investment I imagine it will be a while. For how many generations will the parking in that neighborhood be dysfunctional?

Maybe it could've been avoided if developers and planners just ponied up for more underground parking and transit connections, who knows?

Part of what Shoup talks about that gets less attention is actually managing parking when it gets scarce. Your reasoning about creating your own parking spot on your own property is correct. In terms of the street parking, there are various ways of managing it to ensure there are some spots free most of the time.

One of the more insidious ways to ensure street parking is by permitting - only residents can park in a neighborhood. Public costs, private benefits.

And it's a great way to extract money from people who don't vote in your jurisdiction.

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Correct you only own your house, not the street. If you want to own the street too, a gated community is where you want to live.

What are your opinions on zoning and re-zoning? Some areas around me are being re-zoned from single-family-only properties to allowing apartment buildings. The extra housing is needed, but I can’t blame the people getting mad at the change when they spent millions of dollars on a property under the existing rules having the rules changed around them.

I'm torn on this one.

On one hand, you don't own the street in front of your house. It's public and anyone can park there. And that's very fair.

On the other hand, I've lived in suburban neighborhoods without enough parking, and they look so run down and shitty--every street looks like Fast Eddie's Used Car Lot. If I was looking for a suburban home to move into, I would probably skip a neighborhood with streets blighted with parked cars everywhere. And definitely taking a lot that used to be zoned for a single family home and dumping a 14 family apartment on it will quickly turn a neighborhood into that street parking blight.

That's pretty crazy, almost the opposite of my own experience. The very desirable neighborhoods where I live are the streetcar suburbs near downtown that were built before the prominence of the car. A lot of on-street parking because the lots weren't sized for driveways, but because the neighborhood is actually walkable and mixed-use it's where everyone wants to be.

Street parking doesn't have to be horrible. Look at some of dense super expensive inner suburbs of London for examples - pretty little flower baskets hanging from beautifully painted Victorian wrought iron street lights, hewn stone gutters etc. Charming++

Poorly _maintained_ (cleaned, resurfaced, policed) streets are ugly. Streets are poorly maintained when the property tax base is insufficient.

Increasing density can amortize the cost of maintaining the streetscape over more households.

Ban free street parking. Then the developer of the apartment building has to build parking. Or carfree people self-select themselves into that building.

So? Pay up to move somewhere where everyone else is rich enough to share your tase if you don't like it. Or move more rural and deal with those tradeoffs.

That's exactly what I did! I would prefer to not have to up and move away from blight, but if residents vote for it, who am I to object? It's a free country.

At least you put your money where your mouth is.

I think you are owed two things when you buy a house:

1. The right to live in it as long as you pay your property taxes.

2. Not have its use as a residence ruined by allowing industrial or farm activity near enough that sounds or smells would affect you.

Housing is housing. If someone buys up all the lots around you and builds apartments, they should have that right. The willingness to invest that much money is a signal that people need to live there.

Homelessness in my town is also detrimental to my experience of living in my house.

>What are your opinions on zoning and re-zoning?

Burn it all!

Anything that matters is already regulated at the state level if not permitted there too. Basically nothing even slightly controversial isn't permitted locally. We could just get rid of basically all zoning and it would be mostly fine. Nobody wants to put a toxic waste processing plant or strip club in a classy neighborhood anyway because those people make poor neighbors for such an operation.

Nothing about zoning is supposed to be set in stone.

And "change" is like squeezing a balloon. If you stop it in one way, it bulges out in other ways: unaffordable housing for instance. Change still happened, just different from allowing the physical form of buildings to change.

You don't get it. Prices are going up because developers are building apartments that no one lives in. They just write it off. Or something. Supply and demand be damned.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. Well done.

Thanks! IMO people just don't like change and a lot of motivated reasoning comes from that. We can't just decide our cities are full and stop building.

People parking on the public street in front of your house has nothing to do with the enjoyment of it. If you personally find it abhorrent, move outside the city to somewhere with fewer people.

Exactly, we paid for our house, the sidewalk in front of it, and the street beyond that sidewalk! And our enjoyment will be ruined by... seeing people on our street who don't live here!

That's the part I don't understand at all, and I've had people try to explain it to me in person. The anger, anxiety, and affrontedness of seeing somebody parked at the curb in front of one's house... the neighborhood ruined... I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voice, but can you explain it? For context, people frequently park on our street because of the proximity of a couple of commercial streets a few minutes' walk away, and we get completely parked up for events at a church down the block. The worst thing that has ever happened as a result is that our dogs have woken us up barking at someone retrieving their car. I blame that on our dogs, but I guess I could blame the people instead?

> Exactly, we paid for our house, the sidewalk in front of it, and the street beyond that sidewalk! And our enjoyment will be ruined by... seeing people on our street who don't live here!

I actually did. When I bought a house, we had parking minimums around here. And I'm also legally responsible for maintaining the PUBLIC sidewalk in front of my house.

Now the minimums are gone, and density went up. We have a couple of new slum boxes that are supposed to be "transit enabled", and of course most of people there have cars. Without parking. And so now the street parking is gone.

So you bought a place with no parking spot, now there are a bunch of other people in a place without a parking spot, but you were here first?

> We have a couple of new slum boxes

It's good to see how you honestly view apartment buildings: with condescension.

Oh, absolutely. I grew up in one, after all. I'm fully fed up with all the urbanist nonsense because I _experienced_ it.

There's nothing in urbanism but misery.

> now the street parking is gone

By "gone," I think you mean "used."

Part of it is _gone_, as in "replaced by unused bike lanes".

My local government _brags_ about the number of parking spaces eliminated in favor of bike lanes.

Sometimes the street out front of my house will get crowded with parking. I don't mind a few cars here and there on the street, but it gets annoying when its completely slammed. It's not very comfortable driving down a street where there's only a few inches of clearance overall for a long stretch and I'm not even driving a giant truck.

I wouldn't want to live on a street where the street parking is always crowded. Some cars parking some of the time is fine; having people storing stuff on the street or being overcrowded is annoying.

Do you own the street outside your house and the street outside your neighbor's houses?

Of course not.

People think they own the entire neighborhood, and should be able to block any development that affects them, including businesses moving in or those poor people who live in apartments/condos taking up their parking spaces.

Sorry but you are wrong here, at least where I live (San Francisco), so this should not be stated as an absolute. See San Francisco Public Works Code article 15 section 706: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

“It shall be the duty of the owners of lots or portions of lots immediately adjacent to any portion of a public street, avenue, alley, lane, court, or place to maintain the sidewalks and sidewalk area, including any parking strip, parkway, automobile runway, and curb, fronting or adjacent to their property in good repair and condition. This duty shall include removal of any unpermitted structure, including but not limited to unpermitted public pay telephones installed in the sidewalk adjacent to the property. Any person who suffers injury or property damage as a legal result of the failure of the owner to so maintain the sidewalks and sidewalk areas shall have a cause of action for such injury or property damage against such property owner. The City and County of San Francisco shall have a cause of action for indemnity against such property owner for any damages it may be required to pay as satisfaction of any judgment or settlement of any claim that results from injury to persons or property as a legal result of the failure of the owner to maintain the sidewalks and sidewalk areas in accordance with this subsection (a). Failure of the owner to maintain the sidewalks and sidewalk areas as set forth in this subsection (a) also shall constitute a public nuisance.”

This thread about who "owns the streets/parking". The sidewalk thread is another one.

For folks who don't want to read a tome like The High Cost of Free Parking, give Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar a shot. It's a lot of the same content, but punchier with a lot fewer facts and figures making much the same point.

America is a bit strange with its excessive reliance on on-street parking. If you really want to reduce car traffic in a city, getting rid of on-street parking (or adding metered on street parking) would be the way to do that after getting rid parking requirements, cities could do it gradually, replacing a line of street parking with bike lanes or better pedestrian access.

There are also large swaths of America where not paying for parking is done on principle. I live in SoCal, and the paid public parking lots were (until recently) free for an hour, then $1.50 per hour after that. I would see things like a BMW 7-series circling the blocks looking for a free spot on the street.

I ran the math and the lease on a 7-series at the time was nearly $1.50/hour!

If I go into a city I try not to drive/use Uber.

On the other side of that doing driving gigs (delivery) I avoid driving in a city because can't find a place to park/don't want to get towed.

What is crazy about socal is that it's also price insensitive to that sort of behavioral shifting one might expect from more expensive parking. These days, good luck parking around weho without just throwing your hands in the air and paying a valet $40 thanks to the byzantine web of local permit zones that has emerged in recent years, mostly in mid city and the west side for now. It hasn't lessened the amount of people going down santa monica blvd or anything, and people certainly aren't taking a bus to a $40 plate dinner. Just hurts the subset of people who have to get out there for whatever reason and can't easily stomach a valet hit in stride.

The city I live in (Ostrava) still has some gaps in downtown blocks caused by WWII bombing.

One of the problems with filling them in? Burdensome parking regulations. Super-absurd, given that the public transport in Ostrava is considered one of the Czechia's best, and Czechia has, globally taken, very good public transport overall.

In December 2024, parking regulations were significantly drawn down (to 16 per cent of the original), and there is hope that developers will finally start to build in the gaps. There are already some projects on paper.

> One survey of the literature suggests that drivers in the typical American city spend an average of eight minutes looking for parking at the end of each trip.

Maybe it's just me, but this doesn't sound realistic at all. If there is a place where I would spend eight minutes looking for parking, I would rather not go. And that's average, meaning some people spending twice as much? 16 minutes to look for parking? Who would do that?

> If there is a place where I would spend eight minutes looking for parking, I would rather not go.

What happens when that place is your own home?

Do you routinely cancel necessary appointments or meetings with friends because you cannot find parking?

Eight minutes sounds excessive, but I don't think it's as uncommon as people think. Sitting at a traffic light or circling a single city block can take five minutes. There are paid parking structures which take ten minutes to enter, find a space, park, and then exit the structure.

I've lived in places where I wouldn't be able to park if I drove home late at night. In that case, I wouldn't drive to events where I would arrive home late at night. And since public transportation tends to be poor late at night, that would mean either I'd carpool or not go.

This is why I love having my moped. Easy, abundant parking. Door to door travel.

I virtually always have a more convenient parking spot than the best car parking spot, and it's always available, always free, bc my scooter takes 6 square feet to park, or less, and is freakishly maneuverable.

Ppl think it's a strange choice, but I think that sentiment says more about them than me.

I bought a truck and now I just park on the grass in those situations. Terrible solution, but functional in this city :/

Yeah, lots of people underestimate that part of the trip. Google says the trip takes 5 minutes, so in the heads of many that means it's 5 minutes total. But door to door it's probably the double.

I have a mall 10 minutes biking away. "Why bike when it's only a 5 minute drive?", well, because I've locked my bike at the entrance while you're still circling for parking, and then you have a walk to get inside. And my biking is consistent, but driving at the wrong time suddenly takes 20 minutes home due to rush.

Consider how many people wait in line or drive a few miles further for "cheaper gas" without ever thinking of the value of their time, or the cost of gas and wear and tear on their vehicles they spend doing so, and that may make this theory more plausible for you.

EDIT: An even better comparison is the number of people who will sit in a parking lot waiting for someone to vacate a spot rather than parking in plentiful available spots another 50-100 meters away

My wife would do that to avoid having our baby sit in a freezing cold shopping cart for a long time while she wheeled him into the store. He’s 25 lbs now and he will be getting heavier so it’s not easy to just carry him anymore. She usually parks next to cart corrals to grab a cart right as she gets out of the car.

I don’t agree with your edit.

In my area it’s freezing cold most of the year. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wait a minute or two for a spot instead of literally walking an extra two football fields in harsh weather. Increased fall risk, etc.

No such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. Seriously, 10,000 years of human history without cars and you're complaining about a little wind. Get a decent hat; most of the country would be absolutely fine.

Not complaining. Just other people might have other needs that or they might be in a rush or maybe they would rather be warm at home enjoying their hobbies opposed to trudging 200 meters through through feet of snow. For why? To not wait for two minutes? Are we really so impatient that waiting for 2 minutes is somehow seen as a waste?

Waiting for 2 minutes, idling an engine pumping hydrocarbons into the air, because you won't walk a few minutes (often a shorter walk in time than the time you're waiting) is absolutely lazy and a waste.

People with legitimate handicaps are the minority of cases (and are eligible for handicap placards entitling them to spaces closer to the entrance), and winter is a strawman. The majority are fully mobile people on summer days in a Walmart or Costco parking lot waiting minutes in a car to save fewer minutes on foot.

I grew up in the midwest when it snowed every winter and the number of times there was actually enough ice on the ground to be significantly more risky walking than on the dryest summer day was at most a few times a year. The areas that get snow know how to plan for snow and ice - especially businesses who don't want to get sued by litigious people.

Yet the Edge I drive turns off if you idle for more than 5 seconds. How is your first sentence relevant?

Sometimes people are in a rush or have somewhere to be. It’s okay to not walk everywhere. You might cal it lazy, I might cal it efficient.

>It’s okay to not walk everywhere.

The cardiovascular health of Americans strongly suggests this is not true.

I just straight up refuse to drive into the nearest big city. I will happily take public transit[0] rather than spend 10 minutes looking for a place to pay $20/hr to park. And I'm the only one in my social circle like this. Everyone else will just spend the time in the money, even if they could have, for example, parked for free at a commuter rail lot and ridden in for $5.

[0] which I acknowledge I'm lucky to have

I believe it. I have seen people circle parking lots multiple times or sit parked in the middle of the road waiting for a spot to open up rather than just drive another 5 minutes farther away and then walk.

I lived in a neighborhood ~5 years ago where I didn't have a dedicated parking space. I generally had to park a 10-15 minute walk away from where I lived. Many people would rather just circle for 15 minutes instead.

If you parked 15 minutes away, and they circled for 15 minutes, they came out ahead - because they would have a short walk back to their car, you'd have a 15 minute one.

People like convenience, they don't like being reminded they often have to pay for it.

For example, people are willing to pay more for a dedicated parking space than they are to pay per use - even if they're basically the same.

And this is why so many Americans are obese with mobility problems. Instead of walking an extra quarter mile, they'll circle the block for an hour.

This gets pushed to a ridiculous degree at costco. They actually cause congestion waiting three deep in the rows for one spot to open up. Meanwhile I will skirt around them, park immediately in the ample available parking around the back where the employees take their smoke breaks, and walk right into the store probably while they still wait and stew.

I remember my vacation in Spain, 20-30 minutes circling around for parking spot each time. Total madness, I'd rather pick different place, had I known that.

If you spend any time driving in a vacation to Spain, something went wrong.

I spend 6 weeks there last summer. I never drove, and our only cab was to the airport

It's not. It's obviously BS. You'd have to be traveling somewhere pretty specific at high demand times, fairly frequently spending 15+min or occasionally spending an hour or more to get an 8min AVERAGE. That such a situation applies to a statistically relevant amount of people simply doesn't pass the sniff test.

That said, the inclusion of such BS doesn't really affect the overall point of the article.

Unfortunately some cities forget to provide alternatives:

If you drop parking lot requirements you need to provide people with access to a mode of transportation.

Removing parking requirements doesn't ban parking, it just lets the market / builder / business owner decide how much parking to provide, instead of wildly over-estimated minimums.

No you don't.

Parking can exist just fine. The only ask is that the person parking their car pays for it (instead of everyone else paying).

Nope. The article is much more like "if you drop parking lot requirements, you need to demand price parking so there are always a couple of spots available, drivers have incentives to leave, etc."

That holds for shopping and recreational areas.

In residential areas it does not work so well.

The backbone of society is provided by moderately paid people: Health workers, construction workers, police officers, factory workers.

We must enable these people to get to work. The solution so far was: enable them to own a car.

We can choose to let the market handle that: people probably will negotiate for higher salaries if cost of living goes up, higher salaries will drive prices and the spiral continues.

The High Cost of Free Parking is a wonderful book and I would recommend it to anyone. Parking - and car-centric development - shapes our day to day lives in tremendously powerful ways.

I really liked Shoup's book. It contains a lot of practical advice what causes issues with parking, lays out bad designs that promote parking issues, talks through how to resolve these issues, and even covers how to sell it in a way that encourages people to buy into it.

> San Francisco formally adopted demand-based pricing for curb parking in 2017.

> The result was a rare win for San Francisco governance: We know from pilot areas that implementing demand-based pricing reduced congestion and parking citations while speeding up transit and increasing overall sales tax revenue. The program is now widely regarded as a model for parking management.

The SFpark program was by all accounts a huge success, and the areas where it was implemented feel a lot better off - you can actually find parking when you need it, and traffic isn't as bad there. I would love to see it put in place in the Sunset and Richmond - those areas are almost entirely free parking, and have the worst parking in the city.

Shoup passed away on February 6:

* https://parkingreform.org/donald-shoup/

* https://cal.streetsblog.org/2025/02/08/streetsblog-mourns-th...

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004881

His book:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking

* EconTalk podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sgmw3jQcyc

In the UK, councils often raise parking costs for high street on-street parking and car parks they own. Customers then vote with their feet (or wheels) and shop at out of town mega-supermarkets where the parking is free.

The councils then complain that their high street is dying.

How many customers does a street parking outside a business really provide? 1 customer an hour? And how many will park there and go somewhere else not even visiting the store with the curb parking?

Cars don't visit shops, people do. From the amount of visitors a store in a street sees, vanishingly little of them comes from the few parking spots outside. Metro, buses, cycling however brings loads.

Personally I avoid the shopping streets with car traffic. Feels hostile and noisy. I go to the shops in pedestrian areas.

It all comes down to local demographics. In many car centric areas, car drivers make up maybe 85% or higher of the workforce. And of that 15% of the workforce that doesn't get around via a car, they might be making something close to the federal poverty line. In other words, for some of these downtown businesses if you make it unattractive for drivers, you really do dry them out and force them out of business. The guy making $15k a year riding the bus isn't interested in your $15 sandwich for lunch. You are gone and whats going to appear in your wake is probably a place where someone making $15k a year could afford for a couple dollar lunch, probably something like a 7/11 or a mcdonalds.

In other places, people who use transit or bike around on average might be much higher income and could support different sort of businesses.

In my UK village, which has plenty of free off street parking 2 minutes walk from the high street, people will park on the street outside the shops even if it means interfering with traffic or parking on the pavement. People really hate to walk.

Are the parking lots at the high street full or empty? That's the easiest way to understand if they've got the price right.

Councils do tend to be pretty conservative at raising prices and seem to get it right in my experience

My village is just about to introduce paid parking and I don't predict it'll lead to empty car parks. It just means those who don't want to pay will park further out and walk. Plenty of people willing to pay. Similar story all over the UK

People like to blame car parking on the death of the high street but to me it seems online shopping, rents and business rates are far more contributors to it

That's just a roundabout wealth transfer from local business owners to the government.

Kinda funny how the council is behaving like a medieval lord raising taxes but without the ability to tie people to the land it doesn't work all that well.

In the town where I sometimes live, Harpenden, England, which has had free parking since cars were invented, there is currently a battle going on between the council that wants to introduce parking charges and the residents who don't want it. It's almost entirely about more money for the council.

Ending minimum parking requirements and paying for parking seem sound after reading this.

However...

I'm skeptical of demand-based parking pricing after a local entertainment company started using it. $5-$100 for parking depending on how close the lot is to the venue moderated by big TV screens on each lot.

Proper demand measurement requires data and insight. Closeness to venue is a reasonable proxy for demand. But what if we could price the lot based on who's playing at the venue? An artist with wealthier clientele requires it's patrons pay more for parking? What if it could use your personal music tastes to upcharge? Or perhaps you used the cheap $5 lot for a different destination, should there be an upcharge then? The end game of demand-based parking, or any demand-based pricing results in more data extraction, for better insights, to extract exactly the highest amount of money each person is willing to pay. It gives power to those with the best data and puts more effort (labor/money) into figuring out better ways to get that data.

> I'm skeptical of demand-based parking pricing after a local entertainment company started using it. $5-$100 for parking depending on how close the lot is to the venue moderated by big TV screens on each lot.

So what's wrong with this? I think most people would opt for the $5. If that's the case, that's where people would park. As incentivized by the parking structure. I don't see a problem. The lot operator can change their algorithm, and parking consumers will respond according to their value curve.

There are only so many lots within a few blocks of this venue. Most are owned by the single company. Parking price is not known ahead of time. The full price (including parking) of attending the event isn't know until you arrive, after a long drive into the city. Sure $5 is fine, but it's demand-based. There's nothing that prevents them from making the price floor $50 for a large name artist, and attendees would be caught in a lurch. The whole operation rubs me the wrong way.

And the demand pricing always skews one way: to the parking operator. The old daily price is now the new baseline and it only moves up from there. You know your lot will be full during the big game, so might as well extort them I guess is what they are teaching in business schools these days. Disturbing times ahead.

If your parking lot is full, then that still means that all the people who came later won't be able to park. Raising the price excludes a different set, but it's not immediately obvious to me which one is better.

Probably part of it is increasing wealth inequality playing a role. Now that there are more rich people around prices affordable to this group can be charged and still fill out events. Decades ago there were fewer of this sort of potential customer when more people made closer to median wages. In the end the median worker suffers from fewer affordable entertainment options as these are binned to higher incomes. The most obvious model of this is the ski or resort town where this sort of demographic crisis can play out in mere years after a resort opening in a formal rural township with highly uneven economic demographic growth. New housing supply is almost always exclusively made for higher income people due to the cost of construction and land demanding certain margins, so median wage workers are further hurt as they wait for this new housing to depreciate over decades and only if new housing continues to be built unhindered (not a sure thing unlike the yearly new to used car market).

Because it leads to quieting other forms of entertainment in the form of overall higher parking fees sapping up limited disposable income. Turns out, people go to fewer concerts when their outlay is $300, and then there are fewer concerts scheduled, and fewer local venues, and then fewer concerts that aren't $300 ticket arena fillers because that is all that is left of the market after its been hollowed out through perverse incentives.

If your thesis is true, then there are also fewer people paying for parking. When the parking lot owners notice this, they will probably lower prices.

The issue is parking is not the impetus for this demand. It is an anchor on the demand due to its effect on prices but not an impetus to trigger demand. No one says "hey wait, lets go to the $300 concert now, I just saw this parking lot three blocks away slashed their daily rate from $25 down to $2 because they didn't fill it up!" In fact most parking people pay is obligate. In other words they are paying whatever is asked because they have no choice if they want to seek the event or whatever point of interest out, not the other way around. If that were the case the other way around the most interesting places in town would be surrounded by miles of free surface parking lots, when really that mainly represents places like walmart and not places like concert venues or bar districts or museum districts.

My favorite excerpt, where rationale overcomes ideology:

> Indeed, Shoup worked hard to make his ideas palatable across the political spectrum. Are you a conservative? People should pay for the services they consume. Are you a progressive? All this unnecessary driving can’t be good for the environment. Are you a libertarian? Clearly, the solution to scarcity is prices and markets. Are you a socialist? Let’s stop privatizing the public realm by turning it into a free parking lot. As a result, the typical shoupista gathering is an oasis of peaceful coexistence.

Shoup did point out that we often don't charge enough for parking, which impedes the construction of things like parking lots and garages, because the free space is distorting the market. However, blindly advocating for less parking is not always the right answer either. There is often some sense in requiring parking to be built in cases where people want to free ride on parking created by others.

> In another city, nunneries must provide one parking space for every 10 nuns. What happened to church vans?

Mocking this doesn't make sense. Ten nuns can fit into one van which takes up one parking spot. The van has to go somewhere.

This one's hilarious because it's such a non-issue. I refuse to believe there are American cities with enough nunnery construction that parking regulations to address overcrowding has become a priority for local planners. It's probably just the result of someone picking a number for every structure covered in some regulatory definition that happened to include nunneries.

Both that one and the gym one are obvious "exceptions with a rough analogue" - the nunnery is allowed less parking than would normally be required because of the assumption of communal living (the same reason one vehicle per household makes more sense than one vehicle per driver when dealing with residential units).

And gyms are unlikely to make deeper pools, but longer/wider ones, which would support more customers.

And when the regulations were written down, you'd only need one nunnery in development or existing or foreseen to make the exception appear.

Ah, well if it was humor it was lost on me. Oh well.

Imagine an eleven-nun nunnery. One nun gets to stay home, or else the nunnery makes special arrangements for the day. Point of the article is that the nunnery should decide for themselves whether to have one parking space or two.

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we've had to ask you this already.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Every publication in America is lionizing Shoup except here on HN a lot of confident Dunnings and Krugers are sure that they know more about the economics of parking, and they are ready to inform us.

Between "ride -share", delivery services (including Amazon), and self-driving vehicles, we're likely to experience a glut of parking space in the next 10 years.

So this is the guy I have to swear at for the very regression tax of paid parking. I would say some strong words against him, but then he's already dead, and the damage he has caused is already done. At least the gentrifying middle-classes are happy.

Every aspect of owning and driving a car is regressive on the poor. https://cityobservatory.org/ten-things-more-inequitable-that...

> When a good is unpriced, we naturally overconsume it. In pure economics terms, the demand for a good at a price of zero nearly always exceeds the supply

No.

In this case we are talking cars. They are expensive items and there are many incentives not to have more than you need.

I get annoyed at mindless application of Econ 101 nostrums.

His basic idea is correct, especially as density in cities gets higher, but it is not because of the "tragedy of the commons"

Cars are expensive. And they're even more expensive when you have to pay for parking.

The total cost of ownership of a car includes the cost to operate it, including parking if that costs anything. If the parking cost component is "artificially" reduced or eliminated, the rest of the argument states.