[mktmkr]

Yeah, except no. This is just one of those tropes that motorists use to force cities to subsidize them. Every study on this topic has conclusively shown that parking causes traffic. The construction of parking precedes the worsening of traffic, the amount of parking built is proportional to the amount of traffic observed, and the reverse process is also observed to correct the problem: removing parking alleviates traffic congestion. The case that parking causes traffic congestion is as strong as the case that smoking causes lung cancer.

[scarejunba]

Hey, do you have anything handy to support this? I can totally do my own research if it's hard for you to recall your sources. Just hoping for a quick lead or two. If you roughly remember the title of the papers or the names of authors or the regions studied, anything at all, it'll help me search faster and I'd be mega grateful.

[cosmie]

Construction of parking preceding the worsening of traffic is not the same as parking construction causing traffic congestion. Adding more servers behind a load balancer will also precede congestion on your network. Because you've increased your capacity to service additional throughput, but did not increase your network link to handle that higher throughput. So at some point, it'll start thrashing.

Same with parking. You build parking in areas where you anticipate increased demand or already have unmet demand. By building parking, you increase your capacity to meet that demand.

If you have unmet demand (i.e. not enough spaces for the volume of vehicles that wish to park in an area), you're limiting the economic throughput of that area. Yes, you're reducing traffic congestion in the process, but at a very real economic cost for those whom were being patronized by that now-gone traffic.

Same with anticipating new demand. If you're building in an area, you want to be sure the area has enough parking capacity to absorb the intended volume of people traffic your building will have. If you're building a new skyscraper or mall or big box store, that's likely not true. So you incorporate parking into your project. Once your building (and parking) come online, you'll start attracting a higher volume of individuals to an area. Which, except for the most underutilized or mature transportation networks, will have a corresponding impact on congestion due to the greater throughput of individuals to the area.

If you have mature public transportation, then your transportation network likely has the bandwidth to absorb this throughput increase with a lesser impact on congestion than if you're in an area with immature public transportation options. But mature public transportation tends to be very expensive to build and maintain. Which is only likely to happen after growing to the point of having heavy enough congestion to make such expensive and regionally disruptive changes both politically palatable and economically feasible.

I do not envy urban and transportation planners.