The focus today, as it has been in past reviews, is the craziness involved in cities which give away free parking or set parking rates at the same low rate regardless of the demand- with a prominent example from Los Angeles compared with the more enlightened planners and traffic engineers in San Francisco which has migrated to dynamic parking prices and high tech aids to manage their traffic and parking.
The problem is not just in California, however, as you see the same thing in huge mandated parking lots and set parking fees in the downtown areas of Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto (and probably others too) - which adds to the congested misery of these air polluted, car-addicted cities.
Key Quotes:
“That prized garage space or curbside spot you’ve been yearning for may be costing you—and the city—in ways you never realized. A journey into the world of parking, where meter maids are under siege, everybody’s on the take, and the tickets keep on coming”
“Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space”
“The garage—designed to serve the public good—instantly made the Metro immaterial to concertgoers, placed several thousand cars on the road every week, and pumped a few hundred tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year”
““After a concert in San Francisco, the streets are full of people walking to their cars, eating in restaurants, stopping into bars and bookstores. In L.A.? The bar next door at Patina is a ghost town.”
“What if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities?”
“I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain…How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.”
Related articles
- Sensor Networks Could End Parking Rage (technologyreview.com)
- Why Do Cities Require So Many Offstreet Parking Spaces? (pollutionfree.wordpress.com)
- Vancouver parking rates could vary by block, month with new project (vancouversun.com)
- Privitized, Dynamically Priced Parking- a good deal for cash strapped cities? (pollutionfree.wordpress.com)
- Too Entitled to Pay for the Externalities: (brothersjuddblog.com)
- The Cost of Parking Regulation (seattletransitblog.com)
- God is in the Parking Spaces (everydaylifeinrecovery.com)
- Hefty parking fee recommended for on-street parking (thehindu.com)
- DOT Testing New Technology Aimed At Making Parking Easier In NYC (newyork.cbslocal.com)
- Banff to consider parking fees (calgaryherald.com)
- On parking... (shannonturlington.com)
- Bikers take on parking fee in court (autonetinsurance.co.uk)
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