If you tried that your politicians would get tossed out of office the next election.
Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.
I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.
> Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.
> Such a change would have a significant impact.
What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?
There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.
It's not like you have to get waivers to park your cars in front of your house in Japan. Your car MUST have a designated lot, with proofs(more or less a set of simple declaration forms than anything detailed and concrete), to be registered under your name. Otherwise it cannot be registered. A full waiver for parking violations technically exist, but they are reserved for official and/or actually special vehicles only(like actual fire trucks). The vast majority of cars stay in an off-of-road parking lot of some sort, be it a fancy mechanical one or a crude gravel lot next to apartment complex.
I reckon that not many other country do that kind of legal setup. But Japan is among those very few.
But permission to park in front of your own house is trivial to obtain in the US (as the thread has noted, generally not even necessary to obtain, but in some cases it is necessary to get permission) and would satisfy the requirement.
You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice, but that's completely different from a regime where you need to document that you have permission to park somewhere at night. The nighttime parking requirement doesn't make it any harder to own a car, because you're "gatekeeping" ownership with a gate that can't bar anyone.
> You can imagine a regime where parking in front of your own house is banned as a policy choice
Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.
Of course there would be little to no point to such an exercise in a nation where the majority of the streets have wide shoulders specifically intended for parking. What's happening here is that people with a vested interest in a given political outcome aren't making a rational comparison of the differences between the infrastructure in the two places.
My take is that the anti-car movement broadly engages in a disingenuous tactic where they actively attempt to make the experience of using cars worse in order to drive political change while misrepresenting the nature of their actions. It's an underhanded tactic employed by a vocal minority with the intent of fooling the silent majority.
> Yes, I believe that's exactly what's being referred to. A blanket ban on street parking and requiring documentation of a dedicated off street parking space to register a vehicle.
Not at all. I agree with you that that's what they're hoping to express. But it's not what they said. The proposal is just "a reserved nighttime space on private land".
Street parking in front of your house is not necessarily banned by that requirement. The edge of the street can easily be part of the house lot. It can also easily be owned by a private company that owns the whole edge of the street and leases that space to homeowners.
But note that that company wouldn't be worth much, because residential street parking is not in short supply. Which is what I've been pointing out above.
IANAL anywhere, but the actual law[1] is a blanket ban on roadside parking as means of storage. The blurbs around overnight and proofs are just implementation details. Both the spirit and the reality is no one shall leave cars on curbs. I believe this includes privately owned access roads due to technicality combos with building codes that require roads adjoining properties for fire safety reasons(but sort of inexplicably not driveways).
Anyways, the point is, it actually is a nationwide prohibition of curbside parking as a car ownership strategy, and vast majority do comply with it.
Not the person you're replying to, but I see the same thing happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Dense neighborhood with a lot of nightlife, but many of its residents exclusively use free street parking to park overnight. There is a lot of contention for spots after about 7pm.
Neither LA nor NYC are even vaguely similar to the rest of the nation, so invoking their names when talking about national effects is pretty useless. They're insanely, unbelievably dense locations. The extreme majority of Americans do not live in anything near that dense.
The idea that LA is an unbelievably dense location is puzzling. My Spanish hometown is significantly denser than Los Angeles. Even large parts of NYC are not in any way dense by global urban standards.
As for people parking in the street in the US, you will find them in many smaller cities. Look at random pictures of south St Louis: Plenty of neighborhoods built before every house had a 2 car garage, and therefore with a lot of on-street parking used every day. And that's with single family homes. Hell, you find this in deep suburbs too, where someone decides they want 4 cars, and have the garage full of crap. I could take pictures of at least ten cars parked on the curb, and at least 40 outdoors in driveways if I went for a one mile loop around my 4th ring suburb.
Now, not that this is the main reason Americans still use cars to go anywhere right now, as the rest of the infrastructure around me also makes car mandatory. Suburbs with houses 3 miles from the nearest business, shops inaccessible on foot, streets that, while supposedly crossable, are extremely unsafe to pedestrians... In a world where, say, we limit each household to one car, my entire suburb becomes abandoned, and most businesses collapse, kind of like a place like Madrid collapses if one didn't run any public transit for 4 months.
Over 1/20 Americans live in LA or NYC. Cities in LA county don't show up in a density ranking until 15th with Maywood. WEHO is 20th and its gets less dense from there. Like 80% of Americans live in metro areas.
Right, 19/20 people do not need the same solution as the highly specific ones you would need for some place as dense as Manhattan or LA. You can do things in Seattle that you cannot do in Manhattan - MUCH cheaper things.
I totally agree about LA county. I don't think many people comprehend its size. It is fuckin' enormous, like the size of a small nation (it is one third the size of Belgium)!
Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.
I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.