[Gobd]

I used to live in Sandpoint, and the large city parking is full very often forcing people to park on the street where it's a 3 hour or so limit. I always rode my bike (yes even in the winter) but it's challenging for tourists visiting the beach or shopping in the summer to find parking. Also very few people ride their bike in the winter with all the snow & ice, and that's when there are the fewest parking spots since the snow piled up cuts the size of the city lot in half.

I always thought a park and ride would do well there so tourists could park out of downtown and take a bus to downtown or the beach.

It's not a big problem, but I couldn't imagine the city having less parking.

[CalRobert]

Just charge for it. That encourages efficient allocation of the resource (land).

If the government mandated free ice cream for everyone there would likely be an ice cream shortage. The solution would be to charge more for ice cream, not just try to increase the supply to meet demand (which is basically infinity when the cost is 0)

[ars]

It also encourages people to go elsewhere.

I needed glasses recently, with my insurance I had a choice of 4 stores. I went to the one with free parking. (Google maps streetview is great for checking that.)

Requiring paid parking in a tourist town encourages people to visit a different town.

[graeme]

Choosing a store within a town is different from choosing a different town.

All the old style tourist towns with limited parking seem to be doing more than fine. I live in such a neighbourhood, with no parking minimums and paid parking. People still visit.

[ars]

Think about it like this: Why is there paid parking? It's because demand exceeds supply, so they require a fee in order to encourage people not to come.

But that means you could have more visitors.

Now, if you are maxed out, then good, paid parking makes sense - send those tourists elsewhere.

But if more visitors = more money, and that is something the town wants, then adding more parking, and reducing fees is what the town should do.

Which is what I said: "It also encourages people to go elsewhere."

It boils down to this: When choosing paid parking make sure this is what you want, that you want people not to come.

(And I acknowledge that in certain situations it makes sense to want that.)

And I know what you are thinking: You'd rather they take the bus or whatever. But think about this: Why do they chose to drive anyway, forcing you have to encourage them not to?

Clearly there is something lacking with the bus, to the point that you have to deliberately make driving worse just to induce them to use it.

[graeme]

Have you ever been to Europe? People just don't use cars when visiting most cities there. They walk, take a bus, use an Uber.

I live in Montreal, and it's the same when tourists come here. They may drive to the city, but they leave their car parked the whole time. (Side streets out of the center have some free parking. Commercial arteries and downtown core is paid)

Sure, you could have more parking for cars, but you might not have more people. And with too much parking you destroy the city you want to visit. Edmonton and Calgary have plentiful parking, and no ones goes to visit them, except as a stopping point to see the wilderness around the city.

[graeme]

Oh, when I said "not have more people", I meant it in the sense that cars take a lot of space in the environment, blocking people. They also transport fewer people in a given space than bikes, buses, subways, sidewalks, etc. In a dense urban car that is.

[TeMPOraL]

> And I know what you are thinking: You'd rather they take the bus or whatever. But think about this: Why do they chose to drive anyway, forcing you have to encourage them not to?

It doesn't work like this.

Imagine a person considering visiting the town. They have a threshold of pain/effort in their mind, say V, above which they'll just go sightseeing elsewhere. Let C be the pain/effort of visiting our town by car, and B the pain/effort of visiting by bus. If C < B < V, they'll visit by car. If you can arrange to have C > B, while still keeping B < V, they'll still visit, but via a bus.

So the goal for a town is to make it so that for most interested people, B < C && B < V.

[coraltime]

What is your definition of "the supply of parking" for a given area? I don't think the number of available parking spots in that area is a good measure, since people can always park just outside the area and walk in.

Instead, I think a good measure of parking supply for a given destination point could be the sum of available spots, weighed by their distance to the destination.

[adrianN]

Perhaps they don't take the bus because car-centric cities with lots of free parking usually have crappy public transport.

[safepants]

If all your tourist town has going for it is free parking, I don't think it's worth visiting anyways.

[saint_fiasco]

The whole point of encouraging tourism is that tourists are less price sensitive.

A local would take the time to research the cheapest store taking into account list price, quality, parking costs and so on. But a tourist probably won't. That's why tourist traps exist.

[TeMPOraL]

Another cooperation problem, sadly. It'd be best if all the towns started to reduce parking and make it more expensive, so that going elsewhere wouldn't even be a consideration.

[CalRobert]

Everyone who walks, cycles, or takes public transport to that store subsidized your parking. I prefer things that are convenient for me, so being located nearby. Given that I live where land is expensive, that means no parking. When I lived in a place where land is expensive and parking is forced on people whether they want it or not (Santa Monica) I just got shafted.

[lsc]

I know people like that, who would drive for a long time to avoid paying a dollar and it always seemed like such weird behavior to me. I remember going to get pastrami in LA with a friend; I mean, twenty dollar sandwiches, and he didn't want to pay three bucks for parking, instead wanted to drive more. So weird.

[burfog]

I drove around San Francisco for 3 hours looking for a free parking spot. I eventually found one, in an absurdly wealthy neighborhood. We stopped just to stop and rest for a bit, but obviously by that point we were not going to walk all the way to the restaurant I had intended to visit. They lost my business. I ate some old snacks out of the trunk of the car.

No wonder there are traffic problems. Lots more parking is needed.

BTW, self-driving will make this far worse for traffic, although better for the businesses. The car can just drive around while I visit the business.

[CalRobert]

That's... absurd. Did you spend that time looking for a free hotel as well? Or a free restaurant?

And if you think more parking fixes traffic I suggest you visit Los Angeles. Or even just San Jose.

[ars]

I think he means free as in available, not free as in no cost.

[arctangos]

When I have a problem getting a framework or library to do the thing it’s meant to do, my first instinct isn’t to debug it and submit a PR, but to look at my strategy and figure out where I’m going wrong.

In this case, maybe SF is trying to send you a signal: you probably shouldn’t be driving in it.

If you can’t change you strategy, then consider changing frameworks: LA historically has had extremely high parking minimums, though that does present its own challenges.

[burfog]

I almost didn't drive. It's a good thing I got the rental car though. The BART that I would have taken from the airport was down due to a strike. One of the days of my visit I tried to get around without the car, and that was a disaster:

MUNI stop locations above ground are not announced or lighted, and you can't just count because the vehicle only halts if a person asks it to do so. The bus routes are confusing; I went the wrong way and ended up in a terrifying neighborhood. When things got busy, there was no way to board the cable car. Due to holiday crowds (people who might want service!) most of the system (MUNI, buses, cable cars... everything in the northern half of the city) got shut down for the evening. Later I missed a bus because it stopped on the other corner instead of at the bus stop, and that was the last one so I had to walk several miles in a rather scary city.

I suppose SF is sending a signal: you probably shouldn't go there.

[lsc]

What's interesting here is that I won't drive in SF. I will drive in LA (I'll try to avoid it, but I can be talked into it.) so you are partly right... I mean, the traffic is equivalently bad. (well, LA traffic is much worse at night. SF traffic only compares during the day) but in LA, I can usually count on a parking spot, in SF, it's much harder (even if you are willing to pay, my experience is that just getting off the street and onto the place where the valet can get into your car is a bit of an adventure in SF.)

But I won't walk in LA; I mean, I'll show up without a car and uber everywhere, or I'll rent a car, but you need a car to get around in LA.

But... that's the thing; In SF, it doesn't matter that the traffic is terrible, because I won't drive. In LA, you always feel how terrible the traffic is because you can't really avoid driving.

That's the thing; you need a car in LA but not in SF; I mean, sure, the transit sucks in SF, the transit might even be better in LA, but the city really isn't that big; you can walk most everywhere. In LA, that's hard. LA is big. A lot of that big is parking; LA has a big office tower, then like a city block of parking right there. It's crazy. (I once visited a friend without a car in the days before uber; We went from his place near LAX to Langers deli (that's the other reason why I need to move to new york, I love pastrami) It took us like four hours to just get there using public transit. (It was worth it. Oh my that Pastrami was good) - really from then until he moved I'd rent a car when I went.

Personally, this is one of the things I like more about SF than LA. I like walking a lot more than I like driving, and really, I think driving is a low-density transport medium; what are cars good for? cars are good for getting people to different places. When you are in low density areas, each person is going to a very different destination. In high density areas? a lot of people are going to essentially the same place, so shared vehicles, trains or the like, are a much better answer.

It's a choice. If you build your cities to be comfortable for cars, they won't be comfortable for pedestrians, and vis a vis.

I've been thinking about this lately. I mean, I live in silicon valley; essentially in dense suburbs. I want it to be much denser; I want it to be dense enough to be walkable. But my neighbors don't; Maybe that means I should move to new york? I mean, why is my opinion any more right than theirs? It's cheaper there, too. Though, I hear they get up earlier than I'd like.

[craftyguy]

I'm not sure that your comparison between getting eyeglasses and visiting a town for what most people would consider a vacation are even remotely the same thing.

[Gobd]

I agree with this idea, amusingly the parking lot used to be pay to park then the town made it free. I don't see a problem with charging a minimum, then hourly up to a max, just make sure it's cheap enough, maybe max $8 a day. This would give the town money to use to help the problem, either more parking or better public transit options.

[jnty]

Without wishing to sound flippant, as a society we've developed a mechanism to control the allocation of scarce resources - pricing. It sounds a lot like the parking you're describing is extremely underpriced, both in the demand/supply sense (demand is outstripping supply) and in the externalities sense (impacts to tourism, issues like air quality caused by traffic hunting for a space, walkability death spiral etc.)

For such a capitalist country as the US, the die-hard attachment to free or overcheap parking is really odd.

[maxsilver]

> For such a capitalist country as the US, the die-hard attachment to free or overcheap parking is really odd.

The US is also a country defined by an extreme attention to individual freedom and personal liberty. It's practically a meme that "Americans love Freedom" (using the American definition of 'Freedom'). Limiting parking in any way is, in practice, a very real limitation on a person's freedom to exist and/or move about.

This is why parking is given such high attention. Obviously not every single American drives (and I'm not justifying this response, just attempting to explain it) but when you limit roads/parking, you are effectively telling the vast majority of Americans that they should never be allowed somewhere, and they react accordingly.

You can think of this as like the American version of how France has major protests/riots whenever their leadership does something really bad/unpopular against the citizens.

[oftenwrong]

That is how many Americans view it. They do not see that freedom to drive everywhere and park for free is at odds with other freedoms, such as the freedom of not needing to spend a large amount of money on a car and fuel.

[maxsilver]

> Freedom to drive everywhere and park for free is at odds with other freedoms

It's not. People want to create a narrative that there is a tension between them, one or the other. (Urbanists hate cars because they hate cars, so they want to define every argument as requiring a hatred of cars to make any progress on anything else, to suit their religious beliefs. Every blog post on StrongTowns is a good example of this).

But you can always do both well, we just choose not to.

Chicago Loop, while not perfect or ideal, is a great example of how an urban environment could look that serves all well. It is dense, highly walkable, highly transit oriented. But it also still has a strong network of freeways and has an entire underground network of roads and tunnels for cars to pour into/out of (where they can peacefully exist just a few feet above/below walkability and transit, without ever hurting any of it). As those cars electrify, all noise and pollution problems are slowly but steadily disappearing.

In many ways, it is the closest to an American city ideal. Which I would define as a place where it is 100% convenient to use any transportation method you wish, at any time you wish, with as few-to-no restrictions as possible.

[candu]

> Urbanists hate cars because they hate cars

There's a great 99% Invisible episode that's relevant here:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern...

That's right - before cars became the de facto way to get around, they were compared to Moloch. Any "hate" modern urbanists might have for the car has nothing on early 20th-century posters featuring death, cape billowing, riding a demonic-looking car as it mows down hapless children.

I'd say, more accurately, that urbanists are investigating out what the balance of harm vs. benefit is here so they can propose ways to bring back some user-friendliness to our rights-of-way. They're revisiting the assumption that cars, rather than people, should be the primary focus in designing cities.

Put another way: IMHO, cars represent a local maximum in transportation outcomes. There's a lot that's great about them: independence, mobility, ease of use supported by robust infrastructure. There's a lot that isn't so great: long commute times, pollution, noise, sedentary lifestyles, urban sprawl, collisions causing death or injury. I fully expect humanity will outlive the car, just like it's outlived any number of other transportation methods, and it's in our collective best interest to start thinking about what that means.

[burfog]

Cars make commutes shorter. Long commute times are caused by two things. One is the insistence on working in megacities. The other is the impediments to people moving closer to where they work: zoning, property tax resets, two-income families.

Cars reduce noise compared to subways squealing and rattling, compared to commuter rail horns blasting, and compared to the big engines of diesel buses.

[cozzyd]

Yes and parking in the loop is blissfully expensive, encouraging suburbanites to take the train in.

[bigpicture]

> Yes and parking in the loop is blissfully expensive, encouraging suburbanites to take the train in.

At least they have the option of using a functioning train system!

You can see the locations in which street parking is meter-based and how much it costs [1]. It is very much a demand-based scheme and I think that many people see it as ideal.

The map doesn't show how parking is handled in residential areas though [2]. If demand exceeds supply, a numbered residential parking zone is implemented and only those who prove that the live inside the zone can buy the number sticker that goes in the window of your car and allows you to park on the street in that zone ($25 per year). Those residents are also the only people that can buy 24-hour visitor parking passes for guests ($0.53 per pass).

[1] http://map.chicagometers.com/

[2] http://smartchicago.github.io/zone-parking/

[CalRobert]

By this logic I should get free hotel rooms when I visit places.

[maxsilver]

You effectively do, in that we pay for lots of private spaces for the general public to use. This is the same logic that makes Public Libraries free to all, even if you aren't a resident of that city or state. Public Restrooms, too, and so on.

If your argument is that we should have stronger public housing, to mimic public parking and/or for consistency sake -- I agree 100%.

[EpicEng]

Please tell me where to find these free hotels. What a sucker I've been paying for rooms my entire life.

[lazerpants]

Most Wal-Marts will allow you to park a vehicle overnight and sleep in it, so, essentially a free hotel room. Alternatively, most cities have shelters, you could look into staying in one of them.

[coraltime]

maxsilver was not claiming that cities currently offer free hotel rooms as you're implying, but rather that cities already provide adjacent services---suggesting that free hotel rooms might not be a totally crazy idea---and that in general we ought to have stronger public housing. Do you disagree? Why?

[barrow-rider]

Everyone notices the pay parking in the US because everyone drives.

[CalRobert]

1) Not everyone drives.

2) They notice it because they're used to getting it for free. Do people notice pay-renting in the US because everyone needs to sleep somewhere? Or do we just understand that using land comes with a cost?

It shouldn't cost less to give a place to sleep to a car than to a person.

[EpicEng]

>It shouldn't cost less to give a place to sleep to a car than to a person

Really? It shouldn't? Beyond the obvious fact that people in the US _need_ cars (it's not an option for most), parking space costs far less to build and maintain than does a home.

[CalRobert]

Why do they need cars?

because you can't walk to things.

Why can't you walk to things?

Because they're so far apart.

Why are they so far apart?

Because a) parking minimums mean more land is given to parking than the actual amenity, and b) zoning forces single-use and density maximums

Why do people want parking minimums and zoning restrictions like that?

Because it's annoying to drive through high density.

Why do they need cars?

on and on and on

It's not an option because we built an entire country for 2 ton beings that need 30 feet to move in a circle, rather than humans. Can ants walk across Manhattan?

Seriously, look at your standard US "shopping center" and it's almost entirely parking. The lots dwarf the actual buildings.

[EpicEng]

If I accept your entire premise (I don't, I think there are a lot of cases you're missing here), I still don't see how you come up with a solution. You're going into the history of how we got here, but it doesn't matter to the person who just needs a parking space. They're already here and they cannot afford a parking spot that costs as much as their mortgage.

I agree that we have done a putiful job in providing public transportation and designing cities around the notion that reducing cars is a good thing, but to argue that a parking spot should cost as much as rent is ludicrous. It is completely impractical and will never happen.

[cozzyd]

I don't own a car (like the majority of people who live in my apartment building). A parking spot (including alley space required for egress) takes up 50% of the space of my apartment.

[eherot]

Arguably people need a home more than they need a car even in the most extreme cases.

[lazerpants]

> even in the most extreme cases

Not true. A car can function as a home, but not vice versa, so in extreme cases this is almost unilaterally untrue.

[coraltime]

I'm not familiar with Sandpoint, but rather than a park and ride, why not a park and walk? Tourists who want to hang out downtown all day could park a half mile or so away and walk. While it's not the expectation in some places, prominent signs and way finding could alleviate any confusion about their being "no parking".

This would bring additional foot traffic to downtown adjacent neighborhoods, and encourage people to stay longer.