
Free Parking Comes at a Price - rafaelc
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/business/economy/15view.html
======
jdietrich
There is a much steeper cost to parking - the effects on public space. The
provision of surface-level parking reduces urban density, making cities less
walkable, bringing with it an array of other social problems.

In the parts of Europe where people walk and cycle, there has necessarily been
an aggressively anti-car policy. In London there is a daily charge of $12 just
to drive into the city. This congestion charge has strong public support due
to the obvious and substantial quality-of-life improvements it has brought. A
well-located car park can easily charge $70 a day. In denser parts of London,
residents are charged fees by the local government for the right to park in
front of their own houses, many people lease out driveway space and a single
car garage in the most prestigious areas can sell for as much as $300,000.
Many towns and cities in Italy have completely banned non-essential motor
vehicles from the city centre - often the old city walls form a natural
division. Of course, gasoline in most of Europe has cost in excess of $6 a
gallon for years.

I'm not arguing that this is a superior way of running things, it is simply a
difference in priorities, but the costs of car use are far greater than I
think most Americans would recognise. To many of you, our high gas prices,
expensive parking and restrictive regulations must be quite shocking. Our
small towns must seem almost unreal in their quaintness, in the age of their
infrastructure, in their density. Most of us drive vehicles of comically small
proportions. By the same token, many of us find cities like LA and Houston to
be frightening, Ballardian places. We are shocked at the priority given to
cars, at the lack of sidewalks and the sheer sprawl of such cities. By the
standards of most European governments, the average American city is
practically uninhabitable and would be torn down and started anew. We both pay
a steep price for our cars; The price we pay is more obvious to you, but the
price you pay is more obvious to us.

~~~
Silhouette
It seems there is at least one good point in the article, if US regulations
require that property developers also provide certain minimum levels of
parking whether they want to or not. On the other hand, as someone who comes
from England, where some of our local authorities very much have that
"aggressively anti-car policy" you mentioned and it's more likely that local
regulations will prohibit a property developer from providing the expected (by
customers) level of parking at a new property, I would like to give some other
perspectives.

For one thing, there _is_ an entitlement culture here, because motorists are
arguably the most over-taxed group in our population. The bottom line is that
motorists pay around £50B/year in direct motoring-related taxation, while only
around £10B/year is spent on maintaining and developing our road network.
Slapping obviously punitive charges for parking on roads we've already paid
for five times over is, understandably enough, politically unpopular.

You mentioned London several times, but London is something of a special case
because of its population density and the viability of providing a
comprehensive public transport system as an alternative. Most cities in the UK
do not have the level of bus service that London does, or any alternatives at
all like the London Underground.

In the end, people drive because it is useful. It saves time compared to other
modes of transport, other than walking or cycling over relatively short
distances. It allows you to take plenty of physical goods with you if you need
to. And of course it is much more pleasant to ride in your own vehicle than to
sit in an uncomfortable seat, next to someone stinking of whatever they just
ate or drank, in a cabin that is so humid the windows have all steamed up, in
the middle of winter when several other passengers have kindly brought colds
and other bugs with them to share in the fertile breeding environment that
public transportation typically provides.

If you think you can reduce the amount of driving we do without taking this
usefulness into account, you're crazy. This was summed up neatly in a post on
another forum I saw recently, which observed that in one small town centre, a
key retail site went through this transition once the local council decided to
make money off parking:

Waitrose -> Safeway -> Kwiksave -> empty -> Poundland

For those not in the UK, that starts with one of the nicer general stores with
a reputation for selling good quality food and so on, then moves through
progressively cheaper stores selling products that aren't as good, finally
reaching a store where they basically sell everything at £1 to people without
the money to shop anywhere else. Apparently two other big name supermarkets
moved out of town to where they could still offer free parking, so those who
drive could still go there but anyone living locally in the town centre who
didn't have a car lost out.

Public transport can be a sensible alternative where a critical mass of
passengers exists, triggering economies of scale in financial cost,
environmental impact and land use. However, apart from in really big cities
like London, that is rarely the case outside a fairly narrow window of time
around the average working day. Running a bus service in the evening is
madness in environmental and financial terms, but if you advocate a modal
shift from car use to bus use it becomes a political necessity. Did I mention
that a lot of the pro-bus propaganda is outright lies in environmental terms,
since it typically assumes far higher than average bus passenger numbers vs.
single occupany car journeys, and it tends to focus on specific carbon-based
pollutants (where buses are better per passenger-mile than cars) while
ignoring much nastier things like particulates and sulphur-based pollutants
(where buses are typically much worse, as anyone living in the centre of bus-
friendly cities here in the UK is now learning to their cost). Public
transport advocacy also typically talks about effects "per passenger-mile",
while conveniently ignoring the indirect nature of public transport that means
a passenger travelling between the same origin and destination might go a lot
further along the way.

As for trains, they have their advantages, but economics isn't one of them:
I'm not sure there is any heavy rail network in the world that would actually
be profitable without massive government subsidies that directly or indirectly
support it. It's already far cheaper to drive or to fly(!) than to get the
train to most places here in the UK, regular rail passengers are always
complaining about high fares, yet they aren't even close to paying the true
cost of their journey on the ticket price. If you want to make a serious
argument about market forces driving transport provisions, start by abolishing
trains entirely (and then discover that these things do not operate in a
vacuum and there are consequences to that decision beyond the direct operating
budget of the railway network).

Do we drive too much today? Yes, we do. Many people lose a huge amount of time
they could be spending being productive or enjoying themselves, just sitting
in a car instead. Lots of land is devoted to road space, even in densely
populated areas like big cities, that could have been put to other uses. There
is a significant amount of environmental damage any way you look at it.

But why do we drive too much? That is the real question. It's all very well
having critics claiming that building new roads only results in higher traffic
demand, but cars don't appear from nowhere and people mostly don't drive for
no reason. The extra traffic appears when new roads are built because people
want to make a journey, and the latent demand was not adequately served by the
existing transport options before the new road.

The solution to all of these problems is "simply" to reduce the number of
journeys we need to make. In a modern world, we have communication options
that were not available even a few years ago. If you work in a customer-facing
role or doing any sort of manual labour, then of course you need to be
physically present where the work is. However, how many people are getting
into their cars and driving for an hour or more every day just to be in the
same office as their colleagues, to whom they will only speak on a few
occasions during the day while otherwise keeping to themselves and getting on
with their work anyway? There is obviously a need for both communication and
socialising even in these jobs, but there are many other arrangements that
could provide time to do these things -- and probably in much more efficient
or satisfying ways -- than the daily drive to work at a central office with
fixed or near-fixed hours.

Maybe, instead of trying to artificially reduce demand for car journeys, we
should be looking at the lifestyles we lead today and why people need to make
all those journeys in the first place?

~~~
elai
You can start by getting rid of or significantly reducing zoning! A lot of
municipal zoning designs end up with people having to live in one area and
then commute to another. If offices could also be mixed with apartments
without having to get permission from a politician or 'pay extra' for the
privilege, you would find a lot more city designs that are friendly to living
close to where you work and shop.

~~~
Vivtek
I have to second that one. Zoning was well-intentioned and everybody likes a
leafy green suburb, but it's killing us.

------
DanielBMarkham
I hate to rain on anybody's parade, but this is awful tripe. (I hope I couched
that diplomatically enough)

Most of America is rural. Having an open space for your mode of travel has
been de rigeur since the days people rode horses around. Most poor people,
really poor people, can barely afford a car and the mandatory insurance now.
Jacking up gas and parking taxes has terrible consequences to theses folks. No
matter how precious the goal you are trying to accomplish.

Look, I'd love a world without gasoline-powered cars, but when it's an hour to
town, I'm going to be going in _something_. And that something is going to
need to park somewhere.

I increasingly see a vast difference between urbanites and suburbanites/rural
America. It's a shame they seem at cross-purposes so much. The United States
is simply nowhere near as dense as Europe is, where things like this ___might_
__make more sense.

EDIT: Just to be clear that I am directly addressing the author's point: The
fact that the cost of land (and to society) for free parking has risen over
the last few decades is not germane. Everything has risen in cost. Providing
parking for others has always been a cost of having a residence or doing
business in the city. I see nothing new in this article except a new look at
those costs. The reason for them hasn't changed at all. Nor their
justification.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Most Americans do not live in rural areas.

<http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.htm>

Land is cheap in rural areas, so parking would not be very pricey there.

Lastly, the edit to your post is nothing more than the implied claim "is ==
ought". You never actually give a reason why people living in rural areas
deserve to be subsidized at the expense of city people. We may have
historically forced city folk to subsidize rural folk, but that is not a
reason to continue doing so.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
_Land is cheap in rural areas, so parking would not be very pricey there._

Pricey is a relative term.

Subsidized? I would think that cheap or free parking would be the cost of
doing business in a city. That was my argument, not that it has been going on
for a long time. Yes, it has been going on for a long time, and for a good
reason. Folks need a place to park, even in their solar-powered hovercraft.

You are asking if cities can be re-engineered by fiat -- let's pick parking
and make it more expensive, thereby driving cars out of the urban area. The
internet is full of folks saying a lot more than they know -- hell I am one of
them. But even by this standard that position is pretty far out there.

But why argue? I think cities should try all of these things. I will refrain
from living or working there. I suspect many others will do the same. Perhaps
I am wrong. Don't know. It appears on the surface that this "tax commuters"
"tax parking" and "tax tourist" idea is counter-productive to the entire idea
of a city. There's only so much of it you can get away with.

But that's just me.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_Subsidized? I would think that cheap or free parking would be the cost of
doing business in a city._

Paying for cheap/free parking for other people _currently_ is part of the cost
of doing business in the city due to regulations which demand it. The question
is, why _should_ it be the cost of doing business in the city?

Also, I'm not proposing any re-engineering. If the current level of parking is
optimal, then it would persist persist (but with people paying for their own
parking). I don't claim to know the optimal level of parking, I just want to
adopt a system with incentives to get the level right.

Incidentally, Manhattan comes pretty close to having market-priced parking.
There is some free parking, particularly at low-demand times, but a big chunk
of people pay market rates for parking. There seem to be plenty of people who
want to live/work there.

------
bd_at_rivenhill
After living in New York for a while, I came to the conclusion that one good
way to improve quality of life would be to simply ban on-street parking
everywhere in Manhattan and in the denser areas of the boroughs. The only
people allowed to stand or park should be certain official vehicles (police,
ambulance, etc) and vehicles with a valid delivery permit that would need to
be purchased. Anybody else would be ticketed and towed. This would free up
extra space for traffic on most roads, reduce the number of vehicles in
circulation in the city, and eliminate economically stupid outcomes like UPS
trucks constantly getting tickets from fleet-footed traffic officers while
they are making deliveries.

~~~
araneae
What about the handicapped?

~~~
jules
Wheelchair?

~~~
araneae
Not all handicapped have wheelchairs. I have a friend who has to drive for
long distances, but they use a cane for short distances.

------
Empact
A number of the comments confuse removing artificial subsidies of driving with
applying artificial fees to driving. These are existing artificial subsidies,
which force non-drivers and marginal drivers to pay heavy costs on behalf of
drivers:

    
    
      * Drivers don't directly pay for the full cost of roads, e.g. through a gas tax
      * Minimum parking mandates force non-drivers to include parking for their home
      * On-street parking is often far cheaper than the market would demand
    

You could ask, what's the problem with these subsidies? They change behavior
in a systematic way which leads to bad results (sprawl & congestion). For
example, for someone who has access to public transit, the mandatory
construction of a personal garage via minimum parking requirements becomes a
sunk cost, which I don't have to consider between the two options, whereas a
market decision would include that substantial cost in the calculation.

You could address the bulk of Cowen & Shoup's points by simply:

    
    
      * Raising the gas tax to cover the cost of road construction and maintenance
      * Removing the mandatory minimums on parking spaces for new developments
      * Charging closer to market value for existing meter parking
    

These measures aren't social engineering - they're in support of the idea that
the real costs of driving ought to be borne by the driver themselves, and that
non-drivers should be unburdened by the imposition of driving costs.

~~~
hugh3
_Drivers don't directly pay for the full cost of roads, e.g. through a gas
tax_

We already pay gas taxes, and car registration fees, and license fees. I'd be
interested to hear how the road construction budget compares to the amount of
money brought in by these.

 _they're in support of the idea that the real costs of driving ought to be
borne by the driver themselves, and that non-drivers should be unburdened by
the imposition of driving costs_

I'm okay with that, as long as we also support the idea that the cost of
public schools should be supported entirely by those who send their children
to public schools, and the cost of Medicaid is supported entirely by those who
benefit from Medicaid.

But it seems that social engineers only ever want to implement user-pays
solutions for things that rich people use. They think that the costs of
services used by rich people should be borne by rich people, and the costs of
services used by poor people should _also_ be borne by rich people.

~~~
Empact
> I'd be interested to hear how the road construction budget compares to the
> amount of money brought in by these.

The best I can do to answer that is to point you to a study by the Texas DOT
(the original page is down, but it's cited widely, e.g.:
<http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/Home/17093>):

> Applying this methodology, revealed that no road pays for itself in gas
> taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to
> US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while
> only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of
> .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this
> segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon.

> This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for
> itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their
> true cost, but most roads we have analyzed pay for considerably less.

\---

> I'm okay with that, as long as we also support the idea that the cost of
> public schools should be supported entirely by those who send their children
> to public schools, and the cost of Medicaid is supported entirely by those
> who benefit from Medicaid.

Is the dividing line between drivers and non-drivers really the rich vs. the
poor? I bought my first car at 17 for $4k. Plenty of folks of all income
levels drive.

The problem doesn't have to do with who uses the roads but the fact that the
subsidies distort their decision-making such that they use the roads even
which it doesn't make economic sense to use them.

In a regular, market-based transportation system, you'd use whichever mode fit
the circumstances. For example, rather than driving your single-occupant
vehicle 3 hours down a crowded (but free!) highway to a neighboring city, you
might instead take an inter-city bus or train and then rent a car or use
transit at your destination. But only if the actual cost of your share of the
roads' cost (collected via electronic tolls and gas taxes) led you to do so.

By using markets to inform decisions, like in the case above, we can make more
efficient use of our available space & infrastructure and reduce time and fuel
wasted in traffic, for example.

I want drivers to bear the cost of their infrastructure, just as I want riders
of buses, trains and airplanes to do the same. Because when we subsidize any
of these, we distort decisions and lead people to over-invest, over-allocate
in that direction.

------
gamble
There are two problems with charging people to park: one is enforcement, which
isn't free, and the other is that customers strongly prefer to shop where free
parking is available. Even if prices are lower at the shop that charges for
parking, people will prefer the shop with free parking. If you restrict
parking availability in an area, you'd have to be prepared for customers to go
elsewhere unless there are no other options.

~~~
w00pla
> which isn't free, and the other is that customers strongly prefer to shop
> where free parking is available.

It is not just that. The mere act of shopping at most stores requires a car.

In Japan for example all fairly big items (such as chairs, etc...) gets
delivered. You do not buy 24 cans of coke and a liter of mayonnaise and take
it on the train with you. You buy one ridiculously small can of coke at a
small (and expensive) convenience store near you.

So, I wouldn't be as quick as to require all people shopping to not come with
a car.

Living in the suburbs has its advantages - cheap storage space, etc... So you
can actually buy in bulk.

~~~
jrockway
I buy in bulk (from Amazon) and live in the city center. Food does not take up
that much space.

------
akgerber
As blogger Matthew Yglesias is fond of pointing out, one of the most insane
things about minimum parking requirements is that bars have them.

------
dillydally
I'm really excited about SFPark. It's mentioned briefly in the article, but
the idea is this: parking meters that can sense when a car is present and
dynamically set its rate.

The meters will be set so that parking is (almost) always available anywhere
in the city -- at a price. This will include parking garages and other pay-to-
park places.

If they do it right it will remove all the guesswork out of determining where
to park. Should I go for that garage, or drive around the block five more
time?

I could have an iPhone app that can show me the cheapest parking spot within 2
blocks.

This solves the problem someone else here brought up, which is that people
prefer to shop where parking is free. In this model parking is only expensive
where the demand is high to begin with!

------
tptacek
Worth reading Tyler Cowan's take on this:

[http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08...](http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08/the-
economics-of-free-parking.html)

* It's going to be hard to properly price all that parking, and if you do it wrong, you wind up shifting the problem around (from K-Mart's parking lot to neighborhood streets).

* The same externality might be addressed better with a lump-sum tax (Tyler Cowan is not exactly a tax fanatic, by the way).

* If urban congestion and land use are the problems, you can address them with satellite lots on the outskirts and mass transit.

* The effect on "poor people" is probably salubrious: many of them don't own cars to begin with, and without parking lots vying for land, land prices will go down).

~~~
lunchbox
Tyler Cowen is the author of the article :)

~~~
tptacek
Go me!

------
nzmsv
Trying to make the world better by banning things often has the opposite of
the intended effect. Look at how well prohibition worked out, time after time,
in various places around the world.

To see a possible outcome of restricting the availability of parking, look at
modern-day Russia. The streets and parking there were designed for a very
small number of cars, since most people were expected to use transit. Then
public transit failed, and cars became affordable for a lot of people. But
there is still no parking, so people must not use cars, right? No, now there
are major traffic jams and problems with illegal parking in every city.

There has to be a viable alternative to cars (good public transit, walkable
cities).

~~~
lunchbox
The author is not proposing a ban. Just the opposite, he is proposing that we
deregulate parking by having people pay for the parking spots they use, rather
than forcing someone else to subsidize them.

~~~
nzmsv
Not a ban, but an attempt to reduce driving by changing regulations. It's not
necessarily bad, it's just that there will be unforeseen consequences, and
it's nowhere near as straightforward as "raise the price of parking -> driving
decreases".

As far as I know, Russia has no requirements on parking for new construction
either. So developers building shopping centres in expensive areas opt to
minimize parking space. The result is not clean pedestrian-friendly cities,
it's traffic jams and stores going out of business, because as someone else
commented here, people will prefer the store with parking, even if it is an
extra half an hour away.

I think this problem is better solved by offering functional transit, but it's
somewhat chicken and egg. How do you justify spending on transit when everyone
drives? How do you not drive when taking the bus multiplies the trip time by a
factor of 5?

~~~
lunchbox
Why would a developer minimize parking space if it will put his building's
stores out of business?

------
adriand
The book "The High Cost of Free Parking" has been out for a few years now.
Here's a good review from around when it was published:
<http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/072>

------
Zak
I was expecting pedestrian-utopian drivel here, but the author actually makes
a good point.

Why should there be zoning laws mandating parking at houses[0], apartment
buildings or stores? In every case, there are market incentives for the
developers and owners of these properties to have parking. Stores with too
little parking won't get as much business. Houses and apartments with too
little parking are harder to sell and/or rent.

It does seem that there's a subsidy being mandated by local governments and
paid by property owners, and I can't think of much justification for that.

[0]In the case of houses, overuse of street parking might be a good argument.

~~~
dennisgorelik
If cities force neither "free parking" nor "mandatory paid parking" on
businesses then it would probably work just fine. To answer your question,
here are possible reasons why city might want to demand free parking from
businesses: 1) If there are two neighboring businesses, one with parking and
one without, then customers of business without free parking may start parking
on free parking of neighboring business. Then business that provides free
parking would suffer. 2) With no parking available drivers start parking on
the streets, which causes traffic jams.

~~~
Zak
These both sound like business opportunities for a towing company.

------
will_critchlow
I didn't realise that zoning and regulations governed parking spaces attached
to houses in the US.

I always assumed that would be something perfectly well decided by the market.

Does anyone know the failure that requires regulation there?

~~~
sokoloff
Living in Cambridge, MA and having read the zoning by-laws here, I believe the
_intent_ is two-fold:

1\. To control density of housing to preserve the character of the various
neighborhoods. We have very high-density housing areas (small triple-deckers
with minimal yards) as well as other neighborhoods with large single family
detached housing and large (for a city) yards. The former has much lower off-
street parking requirements than the latter, and I think for good reason. A
city should ideally have housing stock suitable for a range of income and
wealth levels, and putting the onus of providing off-street parking onto the
inexpensive housing drives up the cost. Let that stock optimize for less
convenient but more affordable and "force" the more expensive housing stock to
provide some or all of its own parking demand on-site.

Absent this regulation, you might find less expensive housing projects without
on-site parking being proposed next to expensive SFH sites and you'd start to
lose the appeal [and value] of the old neighborhoods with their single-family
homes. (Think of a restaurant with every other table as the smoking section.)

2\. Indirectly, this regulation slows the growth rate of demand for on-street
parking, which can be tremendous in some of our neighborhoods. Suppose that
you were a long-time resident of an established neighborhood with moderately
tight parking. Would you prefer that the new condo high-rise a block away be
required to provide on-site/off-street parking, or would you happily back the
project knowing that an extra 100 cars would be coming to your neighborhood
once completed?

The regulations are largely a codification of the above, as the voters are the
incumbent residential property owners and not the land developers.

(As a libertarian, I will also observe that there doesn't need to be a market
failure to create regulation, but in this case even I have to admit that some
good comes from the regulation, even though I now have to waste time reading
the by-laws to determine what type of garage structure I'm permitted to build
on my own property.)

~~~
cabalamat
> _Suppose that you were a long-time resident of an established neighborhood
> with moderately tight parking. Would you prefer that the new condo high-rise
> a block away be required to provide on-site/off-street parking, or would you
> happily back the project knowing that an extra 100 cars would be coming to
> your neighborhood once completed?_

I'd prefer a third option: that people who live there not be allowed to park a
car within $X meters of their residence. This only works in high-density areas
where there is good public transport, of course.

------
Ras_
<http://www.islandia.is/lhm/images/parking-houston.jpg> (from 1980s)

More here (eg. aerial pictures of Hartford pre and post Interstate):
[http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.com/2010/02/parking-
bombs.ht...](http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.com/2010/02/parking-bombs.html)

------
flatulent1
Silence is valuable. People take for granted not paying for that audio-
frequency near-field modulated air pressure bandwidth.

Why shouldn't that spectrum be sold? Shouldn't we be paid to have people talk
to us or make noise? It's time to buy audio pollution credits. And if you're
poor, don't even think about farting.

------
EricButler
Two great resources about urban livability for HNers in Seattle:

Seattle Transit Blog (<http://seattletransitblog.com/>)

HugeAssCity (<http://www.publicola.net/category/column/hugeasscity/>)

------
dotcoma
wonderful article, thanks for sharing!

------
teilo
This entire article is predicated on the premises that 1) Cars are bad, and 2)
social engineering (as distinct from punishing crime) is a legitimate function
of government.

I deny both and have two other premises: 1) Cars = freedom. 2) The more
governments intervene with regulation and taxation, the more they impose upon
our freedoms.

Let the market determine how much parking there is. Holding up New York as a
virtuous example because parking there is expensive ignores the fact that New
York has the highest cost of living of any city in the US, and is also the
most heavily taxed and regulated.

~~~
philwelch
As the article points out, local governments already engage in social
engineering, in the form of requiring public businesses to provide parking
spaces. In fact, the article didn't advocate any government action at all,
other than perhaps deregulating how private businesses are allowed to use
their real estate. I don't think you understand Tyler Cowen's background, much
less the article itself, if you think he takes social engineering by the
government as a premise.

Also, I dare say your premises themselves are contradictory. Cars are only
useful, and only provide freedom, where there are copious paved streets and
freeways; there are only copious paved streets and freeways where governments
in the 20th century redesigned the landscape around the automobile, all but
requiring its use for most Americans whether they want it or not. The amount
of regulation and taxation required to keep the infrastructure functional for
motorists and all but useless for everyone else gets in the way of our freedom
and safety, to say nothing of the other negative externalities.

Your right to operate a vehicle ends at your property line. Past that, it's a
privilege--and in my opinion, one which has been abused.

~~~
ergo98
>local governments already engage in social engineering, in the form of
requiring public businesses to provide parking spaces.

That's reflective rather than manipulative. Most municipalities have long
knowledge of transportation patterns, and they know that when an establishment
has insufficient parking, it causes grief for neighbours.

People end up circling the area indefinitely, or they park illegally on
neighbouring grounds, etc.

The real social engineering are articles like this that are, as someone else
mentioned, essentially propaganda pieces.

There are places where vehicles aren't appropriate or as usable -- dense urban
centres -- and in those places most people _don't_ drive. Most New Yorkers
don't own a car. People living in downtown TO condos don't own a car. That is
great, but that density and very expensive mass transit system doesn't carry
forth to the suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas, so save the rhetoric.

~~~
philwelch
Of course cars are necessary in the suburbs--suburbs were designed around
freeways exactly to enable automobile usage in the first place! Refusing to
see the post-WWII changes in urban design, land use, and zoning laws as the
social engineering they were and continue to be is shortsighted.

~~~
ergo98
I hear this a lot -- this notion that suburbs are some sort of artificially
propped up and sustained artifact of automobile life -- and I wonder how
people can ignore the overwhelming historical evidence to the contrary.

Virtually every large pre-automobile city had a very similar population
density distribution to modern cities, albeit with a gentler distribution
curve. Usually the poor clustered densely together in the center, the wealthy
layered out in decreased density patterns (essentially suburbs), and then the
rural areas surrounded.

The desire for a bit of space and not to be around quite as many people --
aside from being simply more hygienic and less fragile -- goes back through
time, just as it exists today.

I don't want to live in a 500 sq. ft condo and like it. I don't want to
cluster in crowds everything I do.

And if you do find yourself living in some shady little inner-city apartment,
don't fall to the classic justification pattern of suddenly pretending that
you're doing the world a favour. You aren't.

~~~
philwelch
We all want different things. For instance, I would like to have a way to get
around that didn't involve a non-negligible risk of death, the stress of
spending an hour or two trapped in a metal box on a congested freeway, the
complete isolation from the surrounding environment, or the desolate,
isolating distance between various places I may want to go. I would also like
having shops near where I live instead of across town. It would be a nice
bonus if I could get along without spending thousands of dollars of borrowed
money on a depreciating asset, or spending hundreds of dollars a month to
maintain, insure, and operate it.

But only one of us has had their desires subsidized by various levels of
government for decades. That's you, so I guess you already win. You even get
the right add insult to injury by calling it "social engineering" when someone
asks them to stop.

~~~
ergo98
You've pretty much covered the gamut of ridiculous urbanism hyperbole, so
there's that.

>But only one of us has had their desires subsidized by various levels of
government for decades.

This is almost comically wrong, but given the ridiculous hyperbole you engage
in, you won't be convinced otherwise.

~~~
philwelch
Ridicule isn't very convincing. What exactly are you disagreeing with? Did you
only spend hundreds of dollars on your car and maybe a few dozen a month for
gas, insurance, and (amortized) repairs and maintenance? Have you never lived
anywhere with chronic traffic jams? Have you never noticed the statistics on
traffic accidents? Or do you think roads are paid for by pixie dust and good
wishes?

Also, why are my personal desires "urbanist hyperbole" while yours are,
evidently, something I should be forced to not only pay for, but live in
myself?

~~~
ergo98
It isn't ridicule. It's a simple statement of fact that you're so far down the
justify-my-life hyperbole well (you sound like any early-20 year old living in
a tiny dump downtown) that you won't be convinced to the contrary.

And I don't want to live in a dirty, squalid, crime-filled ghetto of
overcrowding and limited accommodation that is the city. Of course that's
hyperbole, but given that I'm responding to a guy who referred to suburbs as
"the desolate, isolating distance between various places", it sounds like it's
the colour of the argument.

Of course, I like driving in my comfortable, air-conditioned, very safe
vehicle (without the risks of dangers and olfactory offenses of public transit
-- again, just borrowing some of your style) while listening to music of my
own choice.

>something I should be forced to not only pay for

Yes, you've covered this again and again. It turns out that in a modern
society all of us pay for a lot of things that we don't personally benefit
from. I pay towards mass transit that I don't use. I pay towards welfare that
I don't use. I pay towards police that aren't policing me, and doctors that
aren't tending to me. I pay for arts facilities that I don't use, and sports
facilities that I don't play at. That's aggregate living for you. Of course
cities simply can't exist without the transportation networks around them (the
products and foods that you exist on most certainly weren't made locally), so
your argument smells a little more ripe.

Let me make it totally clear that I engaged in this discussion with a full
expectation of being downvoted (even for absolute statements of fact such as
the reason for parking space regulations). People who live in the suburbs
generally just enjoy life. People who live in the city sit online justifying
why living in the city is the ideal form of existence.

~~~
philwelch
Actually, I've lived in small towns all my life and usually drive an SUV to
get around. I've grown to hate and resent it, especially when I have to drive
through cities and suburbs because, as convenient as it may be carrying around
a traveling, air-conditioned cage with me, it's a lot less fun when you're on
an interstate freeway which has spontaneously turned into a parking lot.

I just came into this to say teilo misread the article and that there's more
regulations and taxations required to prop up car usage than some people are
willing to acknowledge. You're the one started justifying why living in the
suburbs is the ideal form of existence.

Incidentally, I'd be happier living in a suburb or small town that allowed for
a car-free lifestyle than I would be living in a city like Houston or LA where
you still need a car.

------
bugsy
These sorts of articles are transparently engineered propaganda.

Someone sat around "How can we increase taxes and wealth for ourselves?" "What
about a parking tax! $1 each time you park anywhere nationwide, that would be
billions each year!" "No one would accept that." "Oh yes they will, I know a
guy at the NYT we have worked with before. I will have him write an article.
He can spin anything into gold." "Do it."

~~~
philwelch
Don't attack someone's reputation without basis. Tyler Cowen's an economist
with if anything an excessively libertarian bias. If you have evidence he's
been paid off by someone hoping a New York Times column arguing for more paid
parking and less government-mandated free parking requirements for private
business will generate public support for a parking tax scheme that wasn't
even mentioned in the column to begin with, present it. (You'll need a lot of
evidence, because it's a pretty ridiculous claim.)

~~~
bugsy
What a tool.

