>Parking and road access isn't about individuals, it's about making an entire metropolitan area functional.
You don't need cars for a metro to be functional. This is purely a 1st world construct that we've burdened ourselves with. It can and should be undone.
>where do they get their groceries and other goods?
From stores in the neighborhood. There is typically truck access and back alley ways for things to get unloaded. If there is not, most roads have some wiggle room to them where the truck can pull over.
>how do they expect medical services to reach them in an emergency?
Via the road. But you don't need parking for emergency vehicles. Not sure what world you're in, but emergency services don't just throw their hands up in the air if all the parking spaces are taken. Not sure why you think they'd act any different with less parking. It's a really funny example, to be honest.
>How do they expect commerce to occur within an arms reach but at reasonable prices?
Not having a car free's up a lot of money. Assuming you think the cost of goods would rise to some absurd amount, it'd still be way, way cheaper to pay for those goods in comparison to getting cheap goods because you own a car, and forcing the entire community to pay for miles and miles and miles of road.
>We all pay for the roads because we all use them
Roads aren't going away. We just probably need less of them, and we need to not construct our cities and metro's with a "car's first" attitude. Because it just shifts the costs elsewhere, for absolutely no gain and quite a few negatives.
You know what's great? Not having to drive 30 minutes somewhere. That's 30 minutes I can spend walking out in the sunshine. Not dealing with traffic while risking life and limb, and not paying a boat load of money to go buy $20 worth of goods.
> where the people are FINALLY going to have to pay for those roads the government’s been giving away for free for so long.
The article also makes the annoying case that there are those who live in apartments and dwellings that have to pay for parking by code, but don't use that parking because they don't drive; however, this entirely fails to take into account the effect on the city as a whole. Parking and road access isn't about individuals, it's about making an entire metropolitan area functional.
While these people may not drive and thus are seemingly cheated out of tax money, I have to ask, where do they get their groceries and other goods? How do they expect medical services to reach them in an emergency? How do they expect commerce to occur within an arms reach but at reasonable prices?
We all pay for the roads because we all use them, whether we as individuals own a vehicle or not.
> One could prevent less parking to be built but that would put more pressure on public roads.
Yes, and if demand on public parking exceeds supply, you just do the obvious: charge for it until you hit equilibrium.
> If you've ever been to an area with insufficient parking, it's pretty horrible.
It's actually not, you're just thinking with a very American mindset, assuming that everyone will drive everywhere, all the time. I recently moved to Munich, a place that, by American standards, has relatively little parking. It's fantastic, because you can actually walk and bike and take transit places, and it's comfortable and convenient.
Now I know what you're thinking: what does that have to do with offering parking? But the thing is, land use is mostly zero sum. Forcing everywhere to have huge streets and parking lots means that everything is spaced further out; not a big deal when you're in a car, but a very big deal for walking, biking, and transit. Requiring parking helps cars at the expense of other modes.
> If they have no place to put them, they won't have them
That's not how it works. Have you ever lived in an area developed without any parking planning? I have, it's miserable.
People will still have the cars because they are necessary for every aspect of life. Making parking difficult does not change that, so they'll still have the car, now it just becomes a neighborhood warzone on where to park and everyone suffers.
The way you change this is not by removing parking, but by removing the need to have a car. Build excellent and affordable public transit first and then.. well there is no step two.
Most people don't really like to drive and don't like car expenses, so if you build excellent public transit a lot of people will give up their cars and the parking problem disappears as a side-effect.
> You aren’t paying the full price for the roads you use
The large majority of the cost of roads is a sunk cost, because regardless of whether cars are used for individual transportation, roads would still be needed for delivery trucks, buses and emergency vehicles. The incremental cost of an additional car is generally not going to be more than what the car owner is paying in fuel taxes and property taxes on it.
> or the parking, or the zoning requirements which force almost every property owner to subsidize your transportation choice.
These are both the same thing. If you live in the suburbs, you paid for the space where you park your car. The actual problem is minimum parking requirements in cities, which are stupid and should be gotten rid of, but even if you did there would still be many people who want cars and choose housing that provides parking.
> You aren’t paying for the additional healthcare required for the people who live around where you drive
Modern cars are pretty clean in terms of particulate emissions, to the point that the exhaust is actually cleaner than the air that went into the engine in some of the cities with dirtier air.
> or compensating them for the lowered quality of life
This isn't math. Are you proposing to compensate them for the lowered qualify of life of not having a car? If someone else has kids, do I get to bill them for the cost of having to compete with their kids for scarce resources? Or should I bill them for not having kids and depriving society of their contributions?
Everything everybody does affects the whole of society. At some point you either have to accept that they'll make choices you don't like and in exchange you get to make choices they don't like, or you have to embrace totalitarianism, in which one person gets to make decisions they like and if anybody else doesn't like it they can go to prison.
> or compensating for the impact your much greater carbon emissions profile has on the entire planet.
This isn't really a cars thing, it's a burning fossil fuels thing. You can perfectly well charge an electric car entirely from solar panels.
> Everybody is paying for your 'free parking' don't pretend that we're not.
I never asked for free parking. Private residential and office buildings provide proper parking. Only excessive regulations inside the city prevent private owners from making adequate parking available.
> In any major city it's physically impossible to transport the majority of people to their work places in cars and impossible to store those cars for the work day.
Yes, because the cities are poorly designed, by designers starting with the dehumanizing mindset of "moving" people efficiently. Remove the regulations and watch as people solve the parking problem.
> Studies have shown that people are happy to use what ever transport is available as long as it's fast, frequent and cheap.
LOL! People will use whatever best is available to them! Cause rents to soar so they don't have money to buy a car. Put excessive taxes on cars so they don't have money to buy a car. Design cities in a way that excludes parking, has narrow streets, so people don't feel comfortable driving and owning a car. And you get the current outcome. I'd be willing to bet that a large proportion of the people taking the bus or train would drive or be driven in a car, if their city were properly designed for human living and transportation.
> Everybody pays the car tax.
It's not a tax if you can choose. The problem with public transport is that I can't choose. You can find another apartment building without car parks. Or if you feel there is enough of a market you can make one yourself and earn big bucks by offering apartments without car parking (I have a feeling this business would fail miserably). What's the option for me who prefers driving? Will you give me a tax break equivalent to the amount that would have gone to public transportation?
Cars are expensive, inefficient, and use a huge amount of resources relative to their transportation capability.
> Need to make enough parking available for a building.
Disagree. And we can agree to disagree on this one, but I am a big fan of urban areas not having mandatory minimum parking. Space spent on cars means space not spent on housing, which most urban areas need much more.
> This is a solved problem in private residential apartments and office buildings.
It's not a solved problem - offices do not have enough parking for everyone to drive in, and most residential towers spend a huge amount of space housing cars rather than people.
> pollution is always produced. Do you think trains and busses do not produce large amount of pollution?
Per person/cargo transported? Much, much less pollution. Like an order of magnitude less.
> We have flexibility of time, space, luggage, comfort, temperature, health, music, speed, privacy, basically everything.
You've never lived in a place with good public transport? Speed, time, and comfort are pretty normal for well funded transport. Yes, you lose some privacy.
But also, I'm not advocating for you to get rid of all your cars. There are plenty of models where a family does well with zero or one cars, relying on transit for most trips, and borrowing/renting a car or taxi when they can't make transit work.
> If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation, then you are receiving a subsidy in the form of the infrastructure that enables car dependent city planning.
It costs more to build a road that supports a bus than it does to build a road that only supports cars. OTOH, the roads also need to support fire engines, so there's that. Certainly stores devote more real estate to parking than they would if I didn't live in a car dependent infrastructure, but I'm paying for that in some way or another.
Otherwise, what infrastructure do you think I'm getting subsidized? I don't have muni water or sewer, and the power and telco utilities certainly pass along their costs to me.
> Perhaps you can refute the existence billions of people on the planet who live without commuting via car, or the dense networks of public transit which they often rely on?
You have to remember that the infrastructure they depend on to have drinkable water, stores with food on shelves, power and other media, itself is built around cars and trucks, and depends on them being available and able to drive everywhere. Cars are intertwined with everything else in modern civilization - you can't just rip them out. Even if everyone other than critical infrastructure operators suddenly got rid of their cars, this still wouldn't let you eliminate roads from the city, as the trucks and construction equipment and ambulances etc. need to be able to go everywhere.
>Cars aren't individual choices. They are a societal choice that costs a trillion dollars a year to make work. The issue is cars. No matter which way you slice it, we need to remove cars, and that will necessarily mean making driving a car worse.
Where is the better option? Most of what I ever hear proposed or implemented are fair weather or inflexible solutions that don't replace my need for a car[0], and thereby only serve to make my transit experience worse.
[0]And this is having lived in a variety of minor to major urban centers in the States.
> Point being, there is a reason people don't walk everywhere, which is that there is a space/time trade off.
While this is right at a surface level, I think it’s more accurate to say that people don’t walk everywhere because in most cases, they cannot. In every North American city, if you step just a bit out of the urban core, or even across the urban core, it will be very difficult to walk to where you need to go. This means that nearly every North American is dependent on a car by default. There is an ingrained car culture that makes change difficult. I would say that car dependency is a result of our city design, rather than the result of cars being good.
It doesn’t have to be this way, it didn’t used to be this way, and it isn’t this way in many parts of the world. Just because cars are a very convenient mode of transportation doesn’t mean that the changes required to support have been positive. There are some very extreme negative externalities:
- Extreme land use requirements. Not only do you need huge roads, but you need huge parking lots everywhere. Nearly half of all land in an American city is dedicated to the car. A lot of that land cannot generate economic value very efficiently. For example, a massive mall will have an even bigger parking lot. But if that area was a walkable neighborhood, it could support many more local businesses and generate more tax income and economic activity.
- Destruction of neighborhoods. Thousands of neighborhoods destroyed and people displaced to build highways right through downtown.
- Acceptance of bad air quality. Cars make air quality pretty bad in cities. Air would be fresher in cities without cars.
- Acceptance of terrible noise pollution. Cars (or any motor vehicle) are very loud, especially at scale. Cities would feel much quieter without cars. And constant exposure to this noise makes people less happy.
And look, I don’t believe cars are the root of evil. My point is that we are dependent on cars because we designed our cities around cars. Yes, of course our economy is stronger because we have an excellent interstate highway system. But that highway didn’t need to cut a city in half and bring noise and pollution right downtown. And yes, trucks and fright and deliveries make lives better. But we didn’t need to abandon local, walkable businesses to get that.
If cities were designed to optimize people’s happiness, we should absolutely see far fewer cars in cities. Because it’s possible to design a city such that you don’t <em>need</em> to drive a car everywhere. And when that happens, people don’t gravitate towards the car nearly as often as they do today. Because driving a car in a city is really not that nice. In fact, it is usually very stressful and involves a lot of waiting.
That is why alternatives work when they are well-supported. And that’s really the point here: people want there to be a reasonable choice <em>besides>/em> cars in cities. There should be options! Cars are just the only viable option for way too many trips because cities are designed only for cars. Providing options is very difficult to accomplish when you dedicate almost half of a cities land and 95% of the public right of way to cars.
> Over a few decades the availability of cars naturally destroys the usefulness of other modes of transportation unless there is active effort to prevent these effects.
That is simply not true. The car isn't some inherently superior mode of transportation. People will use whatever infrastructure a city invests into most. If you build a city where all the infrastructure budget is spent on cars, then is it any surprise people will use their car to get everywhere?
Once you force people to use cars to get anywhere, then of course that kills local shops, but that didn't happen simply because of the availability of cars. It happened because the city stopped investing into any infrastructure that's not designed for the car.
> The economic impact of pulling people OUT OF A CAR and INTO THEIR environment is perhaps under-appreciated.
All you have to do is stop and take a look at pictures where you see lots of people riding bikes or walking near businesses and then contrast that with a 4-lane road to get an idea of how much more economic activity is generated locally for a business.
If you don't have an automobile industry (and even if you do) you are pillaging your own economic well-being by taking thousands of dollars from families and forcing them to send it to far away places that make cars and oil and gas when they could be spending it in their own neighborhoods and towns.
It's fucking crazy that we do this. I don't know how much more emphasis I can put on it. Requiring people to drive a car 20 miles, 40 minutes, whatever to just live their lives is so stupid it defies belief. That's not to say you can't have a car (or two). It's to say that we shouldn't design all of our towns and cities around moving cars around instead of people. We're literally making ourselves poor trying to do this.
Car-dependency is a city planning issue, first and foremost. We destroyed the cores of our cities, demolishing block after block of buildings to raise interstates and parking lots.
You will never eliminate car-dependency in rural areas, and you can at best remove the need for it in suburbs with mixed-use zoning (i.e. corner stores and cafes), better funded public transit, and sidewalks.
Cities should first stop expanding interstates and look to remove them entirely. There is absolutely no need to have an interstate through urban cores. Next, you need to redesign streets to make the car part narrower and the sidewalks wider. And you need to repeal zoning ordinances that ban anything but single family homes on 80% of urban residential land. It's ridiculous that there exist single family homes within walking distance of the downtown of cities with a population in the millions when under a properly zoned system, there would be mid-rises.
Rural areas will never be free from car-dependency. Suburbs need light modifications to mixed-use zoning policies and transit, as well as infeasibly high taxes. Urban areas, where walkability should be most feasible, have to remove highways through cores, repeal oppressive zoning laws, and prioritize walkability.
The actual policies are rather straightforward. There are plenty of countries that planned around the automobile and later reverted this mistake, so there exist many playbooks for achieving this worthy goal. Unfortunately, the problem is political rather than technical: too many people are invested in the automobile for a lot of good reasons, and too many people are invested in the current land use regime which make automobiles necessary.
> The distance from a car door to a shop is a good ten minutes, so she simply doesn't go there. She goes to out-of-town supermarkets with disabled bays right near the entrance.
...which is rather ironic, considering "ten-minute walk from parking lot to shop entrance" is an almost unique American suburban problem: we need huge parking lots because everybody's driving.
Construct a city so that 95% of the people take public transportation, and you can keep parking space for the rest 5% who really need it, and they will be practically at the front door when they get off.
> But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that.
So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?
>Screw cars in cities. In busy areas like lower Manhattan, you shouldn't be able to drive at all unless you have a documented need (commercial vehicle, physical disability, etc).
Unfortunately, this attitude is one of the contributing factors to the impossibility of sensible discussion on this topic.
I live in Lower Manhattan, and I own a car. I garage park, which costs a small fortune but means I don't take up space on a sidewalk; not that there's really a meaningful amount of street parking in Lower Manhattan anyway - which is why parking garages cost $70 per day.
I contribute next-to-nothing in terms of street crowding based on the times when the car is in use and the places where I travel.
And yet still this isn't good enough for the car abolitionists.
>But we need to understand. There are cases where the car is a must. Unavoidable. Imagine having toddlers, having to do heavy groceries, and living in a place with difficult landscape or challenging weather. Imagine having a neurological disease or some other disability.
Bud, nobody is taking the car away from those kinds of use cases. It's very clear for most people that cars are necessary in those situations, and that's fine. What we're demonising is the car as the only way to go about getting from A to B. If you watch some of the urban planning videos on the topic, or lurk the r/f*cars subreddit you'll quickly see that most people also* want to make the driving experience better! And by better they don't mean to build one more lane, but sensible infrastructure that makes sense for everybody, not just the cars. The whole point is about inclusion: why isn't using a car unavoidable?
> charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people)
Housed people need parking lots though. Tons of places are not, and never will be accessible with public transports. I live in a city with a great public transport network but I still need a car, as much as I'd love not needing one: I need to visit friends or family outside the city, I have to make bulk grocery shopping sometimes and bags are not enough, I sometimes buy big housing furniture, I even had to retrieve parcels outside of the city sometimes... Heck, even to go to work, sometimes I'm late, or I missed my bus, or public transports are on strike, or anything can happen that I need my car to save 1 hour.
> My point is people want to drive to work, run errands, and conduct business
Driving is not a precursor to running errands and conducting business (unless your business is dealing with cars) in any established nation with a robust public transportation network. I have heard the argument that cars are necessary mainly from people who have lived their entire life driving from place to place and cannot fathom using public transit. Either because it is woefully underfunded in their area or it has the perceived notion of only being for the poor folk who cannot afford a vehicle.
> It is the same problem that presents with pushing everyone to electric vehicles, electric cooking, and electric heat. We can barely meet the demand now ... NYC has 4.4MM cars moving through it each day.
This is a strange argument. It doesn't take a genius intellect to see that the energy cost to move a person per unit distance travelled is far greater driving solo than it would be taking a tram, bus, or even cycling.
As a plus, we wouldn't need to use so much space for parking these vehicles and we could use the land for other projects that 1. generate more tax revenue and 2. serve a more useful purpose for the general public; i.e. shops, living quarters, third places[1], etc.
All in all, it would be nice to have the ability to go some place without needing the car. The removal of parking lots and reclaiming that space is the cherry on top. You can thank early automotive lobbyists for shaping the current state of affairs[2][3][4][5]
You don't need cars for a metro to be functional. This is purely a 1st world construct that we've burdened ourselves with. It can and should be undone.
>where do they get their groceries and other goods?
From stores in the neighborhood. There is typically truck access and back alley ways for things to get unloaded. If there is not, most roads have some wiggle room to them where the truck can pull over.
>how do they expect medical services to reach them in an emergency?
Via the road. But you don't need parking for emergency vehicles. Not sure what world you're in, but emergency services don't just throw their hands up in the air if all the parking spaces are taken. Not sure why you think they'd act any different with less parking. It's a really funny example, to be honest.
>How do they expect commerce to occur within an arms reach but at reasonable prices?
Not having a car free's up a lot of money. Assuming you think the cost of goods would rise to some absurd amount, it'd still be way, way cheaper to pay for those goods in comparison to getting cheap goods because you own a car, and forcing the entire community to pay for miles and miles and miles of road.
>We all pay for the roads because we all use them
Roads aren't going away. We just probably need less of them, and we need to not construct our cities and metro's with a "car's first" attitude. Because it just shifts the costs elsewhere, for absolutely no gain and quite a few negatives.
You know what's great? Not having to drive 30 minutes somewhere. That's 30 minutes I can spend walking out in the sunshine. Not dealing with traffic while risking life and limb, and not paying a boat load of money to go buy $20 worth of goods.
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