I've become very skeptical of any plan to just get rid of something that people need and use, in the hope that that will magically force the issue and usher credible alternatives into existence years down the line. It's sort of like a government trying to reduce government spending by cutting taxes (i.e., the "don't feed the beast" approach). Such efforts never end up reducing spending, rather they just create an environment in which debt and chaos are constantly increasing.

I get the idea behind it- "let's just start doing everything according to our desired outcome, and the parts that don't fit will somehow come into line on their own". It's very seductive but I've learned to avoid the temptation to think that hard problems can be solved in this way.

I feel like this is a problem-solving antipattern that I see over and over again and it just never works- not just in government, but in software engineering, in management, even in interpersonal relationships. People get frustrated that they can't change other people, so they decide to simply move everyone to some new way of doing things without any sort of plan for how to deal with the fallout. They think it will create an environment where the people who are negatively affected will spontaneously start conforming to the desired behavior due to some invisible hand of incentivization, but I've never seen this strategy applied in any context where it worked out. It's always just a rat's nest of unintended consequences and misery.

It's not really the same at all to your tax analog. The difference is that Congress has the ability to reduce spending and to cut taxes.

With the car problem, no one entity has the power to devise nor enforce a holistic solution. Of course, with the exception of a fascist overthrow of the state that tears down cities and rebuilds with central planning. The government can't just come and take people's cars away – you have a right to own a car (more or less). You don't, however, have a right to a parking spot, and it takes just a small city committee meeting to affect change.

That's not to say people won't get hurt by this, but it needs to happen for the good of everyone. Suburbia is bad for the earth and everyone on it. We need to start making some tough decisions... 30 years ago.

>no one entity has the power to devise nor enforce a holistic solution

Yes there is - the city government that controls the parking spaces, also controls the transit system.

And it controls infinite amounts of money? As I've said in other comments, I'm all for investing heavily in transit infrastructure. If you want a solution that totally ignores the fiscal reality of the world, then yes, I agree, dumping massive amounts of money into public transit would be part of it.

Where is the fiscal reality in grinding a city's economic activity to a halt because people can't get anywhere?

Cities can, have, and do function with fewer cars than most American cities. Reducing parking is the fairest way to reduce the usage and eventually necessity of cars.

And again, it's far more realistic than hoping that a transit authority is going to find a buried treasure chest to invest in infrastructure while the public is investing more and more into cars.

Let's eliminate cars. How does one transport a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on public transport? Transportation is more than moving a person from A to B.

If you want a real solution, provide tax incentives for companies to work remotely. If you eliminate commuters in those types of jobs that can work remotely, you solve almost all traffic problems.

Does an insurance salesman really need to travel to an office? 90% of that work is on the phone already and the other 10% could be replaced with video conferencing. I don't need to touch my salesman, I just need to hear what he's saying and read contracts. Unless your job involves handling physical objects, there is zero reason for a commute.

Why would you transport a week's worth of groceries in the first place? In cities designed not for cars, most people generally don't "transport" groceries at all, since everybody generally buys groceries very close to home (often on the same block), and the natural time to do it is on the way back from work/studies/whatever, so instead of having an explicit weekly trip, you just buy whatever you need now or for tomorrow, not a week's supply - and that is easily carried (not transported) for that short distance even for a family of 6+.

If you buy something that can't be carried, like a refrigerator, well, then you get it delivered.

How wacky that so many other countries have already figured this out. And that humans somehow fed themselves for literally thousands of years before cars but suddenly we won't figure out how to purchase food.

> How does one transport a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on public transport?

Carsharing. Or a delivery service, which some supermarkets now offer already.

A family of 5 could have one car for that, instead of two like most American 5 person families

Strap backpacks onto the kids and spouse?

Start charging for privilege of driving / parking / owning a car and you can invest the money in better infrastructure. Not that it's a popular solution with the voters, but it is fiscally sound.

Well, I'm a hardcore anti-car person, and I'm coming by just fine. I need a car about once or twice per year, when I'm moving furniture or something. Everything else can be had by public transit.

I'm well aware that other people need cars, but I'm concerned that there is one group of people that get the benefits of cars (people enjoying the calmness of their suburb which then commute into the city for work) and another group of people which gets all the costs dumped on them (people living in cities who have to live with the noise and air pollution and missing space for pedestrians).

.. or more willing to see the big picture, rather then their own comfort. There are places when common should come first not individualism.

Or I'm just not completely ignoring the problems that cars cause, you know, in reality.

In which reality do you live, wherein cars are totally fine?

> You don't, however, have a right to a parking spot

This is debatable. In some countries there is an old tax for all car owners. They take the money specifically "for your right to have a parking spot for your car". But after you pay the tax, surprise, you realize that there is not a single remaining place with free parking in the entire city... by design. So of course, you are obliged to pay again. The car owner is taxed two times for the same service. Cling, mo' fresh money.

The planned scarcity of park spots is also a source of power and a weapon of mass destruction of high quality employments. If you restrict the access and monopolize the park spots, you can force easily the small bussiness in this areas to flee and make the whole neighborhood into recession. A handful of big bussiness that can build its own private parkings (or, even better, are strong enough to convince the local government to build a big parking for them) will quickly take all.

It takes a LONG time to build out serious transit infrastructure. Like 30 years (see Seattle's recent ballot initiative). You're asking basically an entire generation to have shitty mobility for most of their working lives, so that they will vote to build trains for their children.

More likely they will just leave the cities.

Cities do adapt to poor mobility: local businesses get to charge huge markup because they don't have to compete with the rest of the city. I don't think that's particularly good for consumers.

You're asking basically every generation after us to have shitty environmental health and shitty cities for the entirety of their lives. Also, if you need a car to be mobile enough to live your life, you already have shitty mobility. You should have the ability to live your life without having to pay the tens of thousands of dollars that owning a car demands [0].

You could get rid of cars and with all that newly available street space add a bunch of electric buses for the interim. You could even up taxi availability and efficacy, seeing as there would be minimal traffic from non-public sources, further reducing the costs of using them. This would also make the city significantly more bike friendly, even before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods.

There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is. In NYC on August 2nd 2016 alone, the NYPD tended to at least 357 accidents [1]. Reducing this would free up valuable police and medical resources.

Oh, and it will also help to save our species from impending environmental doom.

0. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/loans/total-cost-owning-car/

1. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/NYPD-Motor-Vehic...

>shitty environmental health

People would lose essentially nothing by stepping down from SUVs/crossovers to compact sedans/hatchbacks. We could start there. There's also the issue of average age: driving an older car is a classic case of negative externality. Driver saves money, everyone else suffers for their worse emissions and fuel efficiency. These are both excellent targets for tighter regulation.

My argument here is that policy should be at least net-neutral on quality of life.

If you "simply wip[e] out parking" and don't do anything else, I claim that's bad policy because it reduces quality of life.

If you wipe out parking AND deploy electric buses or whatever such that people's lives at least don't get worse, then I'm with you.

>There would also be a significantly reduced strain on pretty much every social institution there is.

Except, of course, the transit agency, which has to actually have the funding and the competence to step up its game to not only stay neutral under increased demand, but also improve enough that drivers' quality-of-life is flat.

Local services are also funded by local economic activity, which generally requires that people have viable transportation.

> before the cultural reorganization into self-sufficient neighborhoods.

Which do you think is better for consumers: a whole bunch of hyper-local monopolies, or citywide competition and economies of scale? Economics provides very little support for the former.

Sure. Now go ahead and try to regulate those, like many have been trying for literally decades. We've gotten better, but it's still not enough and our cities/suburbs still suffer from the non-environmental side effects of designing cities around cars. Such as, you know, having to purchase a car to be mobile.

I would really like a large scale holistic solution, but again, we've been having this debate for decades and we haven't moved fast enough. If we continue to build our cities for cars, then we will continue to need cars.

Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute.

And yes, higher prices hurt consumers, as in they damage the one facet of an entire human being that's responsible for purchasing things. But there are many other facets of a human being that would be much better off with fewer cars around them, and I dare say that many of those facets are more important to preserve than ease of consumption. The human race survived for many thousands of years with nothing even resembling an automobile, and now after 100 years you're positing that we simply cannot go on without them?

>Reducing parking in cities is one decision that could have large scale effects and that doesn't require a dictatorship or nationwide collective epiphany to institute.

Making cities worse is likely to have the effect of driving people out of them. You do in fact need a collective epiphany (or a Constitutional amendment to shut down freedom of movement) to get people to accept that they simply need to live worse lives in the short and medium terms so that their children can live better ones. If you make that happen, then maybe we can pay off the national debt too.

What are you talking about? Removing, say, 10% of parking spots per year for 8 years wouldn't require any of that. It would result in the same frustration that people already have and already cope with: "it sucks to park in the city."

It's clear this isn't going anywhere, have a good weekend!

People would vote out politicians that put in place such obvious frustration-increasing measures.

IMO the "solution" is necessarily holistic and incremental. Create a fast intra-city link, and you've effectively increased the density of the two areas joined by the link. If you think about space in terms of time required to go from point A to point B using a given subset of transport methods[1], fast point-to-point links warp space and cause it to overlap. Density is the lifeblood of cities, just as lack of density is what hollows out cities. Increased density means employees and consumers can live closer to businesses and entertainment. Increase the density enough, and private transport isn't required as much.

Anti-car policies aren't going to increase this time-to-destination-as-a-measure-of-space density much. In fact, without something to replace them, they will decrease effective density.

[1] See e.g. https://petertrotman.com/special/london-underground-travel-t...

I appreciate your interesting stance on this, but you're missing my point. I am not saying "ban cars and everything is fixed." I am saying "we will not fix our cities as long as we continue to invest in cars."

The best way I can think of to get people to divest from cars in a fair, gradual, legal, cheap, and realistic way is to eliminate parking over time.

Did you even read what I said? I directly refuted your argument! Your suggestion is both politically difficult and would damage cities by decreasing the very thing that makes them cities: the time proximity between people!

You don't have to eliminate parking at all to achieve this. All you have to do is shift city taxation towards taxing parking more in relative terms. Encourage people to use existing public transportation more

>> All you have to do is shift city taxation towards taxing parking more

And that's exactly what's wrong with this idea: in a democratic society such taxation changes would be temoporary at best - people would just vote for politicians that would change it back during the next elections.

On the other hand, gradualy increasing quality of public transportation by investing more money in it would be something that noone would protest against, and once public transportation is equaly or more convenient than car travel people would switch on their own.

People are not stupid, they are often uninformed. Politicians' job is to advocate for good policies in a way that people understand and support

Ah so just magically make money appear. Not by tax policy nor by fare hikes (which people certainly do protest against, wildly).

I suspect that the driver of a new car will never recover in gas savings the negative impact of harvesting resources and building an additional vehicle.

How are people going to leave cities if that's where the jobs are and you can't drive there from outside because there's nowhere to park?

We've already had shitty mobility for multiple generations. We can and should build transit much more quickly than we are today, and we could if we were actually willing to commit to redesigning our cities.

People want to live in walkable towns and cities. People have done so, happily, for much, much longer than cars have existed. Set aside the environmental and economic concerns: studies of show that walkable communities are much more conducive to human happiness. The world of freeways and suburbs that we live in isn't a natural human pattern of development; it's a futuristic dream from the 1950's that turned into a nightmarish reality. Half a century of irrational exuberance over the invention of the automobile is a mistake that can and should be rectified.

Indeed it can and should. Leaving people stranded in places where things are far apart with neither parking nor adequate transit is not a viable way to do it, though.

In Chicago it is actually faster to commute by public transit from the suburbs ~20 miles away then from the neighborhoods ~8 miles away because the commuter rail service (Metra) is so much better than the urban transit service (CTA).

I live in a small town in France and in the villages, there is often zero parking. The effect on the village? Less economic activity than the ones that have parking. Just eliminating parking does solve a problem, but it creates another problem as people seek convenient alternatives. Taking 3 toddlers with strollers on public transport to go grocery shopping isn't as easy as some single guy jumping on the train to go get a beer. How does one transport things back to their house? Using only public transport means that you can only buy what you can easily carry.

Public transport makes it really difficult to carry any amount of cargo. Ever tried to bring grocery bags into the subway in NYC during rush hour? It's impossible. Now do that with a kid. Now do all that and end up at one of the majority of stations without elevators. No matter how 'good' NYC's public transport it, it still sucks if you are in a wheelchair, with small children, carrying any amount of cargo and traveling at anytime other than 12am.

Public transport has its place, but to suggest a car-free world is madness -- unless we have cargo carrying robots bringing stuff to our doors.

I will say Zurich does a good job -- their trains are super easy to board, they are spacious and uncrowded. The platforms are wide and easy to navigate and have no stairs. Still, even that doesn't solve the problem of cargo. One could use Amazon, but that requires a truck to deliver things, which requires roads and unloading zones.

Too many people fail to realize that the parking we have now is largely due to developers being forced to add it by law, and not because the market demanded it. Your parking spot can add 30-50k to the cost of a unit. That really stings if you're told you have to have "free" parking in your apartment, when it really just means higher rents.

Some good reading on the matter: http://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062

There is a reasonable other side to this: when developers don't build parking but people still feel a need to have cars, tenants end up parking on the street. At any reasonable level of density there are more cars associated with a building than the curb space it occupies, so parking spills over all around the neighborhood.

Removing minimum parking requirements is reasonable, but it should be done in such a way that developers can't offload their tenant parking to public property, i.e. by also making the surrounding streets no-parking.

In this event, there's clearly a demand, so developers can build parking garages. What we do now is make the costs of parking invisible by putting it in everyone's rent (even those who don't own cars), instead of letting people show how much they want parking via their willingness to pay for it.

I live in an apartment with no parking. However, some people in my neighborhood like having cars. Fortunately, the solution is simple - they pay for monthly parking at the garage around the corner, and I don't subsidize people's parking in my rent.

In addition to making surrounding streets no-parking perhaps there should be some assurance of public transit nearby? If not, no one is going to rent or buy in that location -- if they can't have cars and they can't use transit easily, then the location becomes unattractive. Question is -- can the local government ensure that?

I think one thing everyone is missing is that having the freedom to have cars has an economic benefit that is not easily factored in otherwise. Like in this example, if the location makes in more difficult to have cars, then it's likely that the rents here will have to be lower to attract people. Or in the other example where someone was car-less in Chicago's Hyde Park area -- over a period of time he seems to have optimized to reduce going out because it was a chore. Maybe that is a good thing in the long run :-), but it sort of indicates depressed economic benefits for everyone.

Street parking is not a necessity, parking garages exist. When people are willing to pay the market rate for land to house their car then there will be a motive for people to build garages. Otherwise it's just parking welfare paid by those unable to afford cars to those who are.

There are cities where the main differences in housing price (the three main factors usually being location, location and location) is not as "expensive districts" vs "cheap districts" but according to "minutes to subway" metric, with a 10-minute-walk home in an otherwise more expensive district is cheaper than a 3-minute-walk home somewhere else.

This problem can be solved by granting parking permits, and rationing them based on address.

> It's a serious issue of sunk cost, but eventually we need to bite the bullet and start moving in the other direction.

This might have been true sometime in the seventies - but its entirely a moot point now. Public transportation has nearly no future in the US since self-driving cars will pretty much solve this with 10-15 years and so much better than public transport has or would have.

Bullshit: http://cdn.torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Transi...

This is very manipulative picture, although not as bad as the famous Munster photo (this: https://headwatersolver.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/64408578... notice how each photo has different perspective and zoom to make cars appear the biggest and bicycles the smallest).

When I need to get to the work, pick up groceries, transport two 30-inch displays across the town, etc., I simply do not walk out to the street, pose for a photo, smile, camera flash and go back to the building.

Transporting somewhere in terms of congestion is 'space integrated over time'.

First and obvious nitpick - there is single person in each car and absolutely no cargo.

Then, if it really worked like the picture suggest, the tram would need to: a) transport each person directly between their endpoints, b) do it in the same time as a car would do, c) be full to its capacity all the time.

Given all these conditions, the cars in the picture (disregarding the single person occupancy and cargo) would really equal to the single tram.

But that is not the case:

a),b) In a car one can drive the shortest/fastest route between his desired endpoints, in the tram/bus one needs to follow the lines. There simply cannot be a complete graph of public transport lines going from every possible start to every possible destination, so you need to run up some extra distance to a 'hub' and switch lines, adding time. And even if there is a direct line, it typically goes as it can serve more people. One example, suppose you have a city with predominantly commercial and industrial parts in the centre with majority of the jobs and predominantly living parts in a star shaped pattern on the outskirts. If you happen to travel from one living neighbourhood to another (e.g. you work there, you are visiting a girlfriend, sport venue), the public transport will take you through many many stops around the centre, while in individual transport you can go between the quarters directly skipping the center completely and getting there a lot faster. There simply isn't enough people to fill a tram/bus between non-major stops in a reasonable intervals.

c) Unless you have 100 % mixed jobs, industry, commerce, leisure, education, everything on each stop and unless you have this with perfectly balanced population density end-to-end, you won't have fully occupied vehicle. In order for that picture to be true, the tram would need to fill itself on its very first stop and on each stop, equal pax would need to enter/leave. Fiction. I live at the end of the tram line and in order to get my seat in the happy photo of a full tram in the picture, then the tram must first arrive almost completely empty (in the morning, everyone goes from this living neighbourhood to the jobs in the centre and back in the afternoon, reverse flows are minimal) to pick me up. Then, the tram continues quarter- to half-full for several stops until it really have at least [# of seats] pax onboard.

To sum up: I) tram takes twice the time because I have to route around with the majority of the flow instead of going direct route, II) it has to arrive almost empty to pick me up, III) it isn't full to [# of seats] for significant part of the journey.

So for me as a single person, count not one, but 4 to 6 seats to achieve the same 'space over time' density. If I pick up my colleague on the go or drop him of, count approx. 8 seats. Two colleagues, 10 seats.

Suddenly if all the cars in the picture doesn't conveniently fit into a single tram, but in several of them spaced apart, it isn't so nice propaganda...

PS: I lived in a socialistic east-bloc non-SSSR country. In order to have a car, you had to be privileged/bribe/camp on the waiting list (literally camp in front of the state-owned car dealership). The public transport was wonderful, there were railway tracks going to every forgotten small village, bus lines everywhere, intracity transport roared through empty streets. The catch? Be any small fraction different that the 'major' flow - morning shift, evening shift, night shift interchanges between industrial jobs/housing areas/villages and you are out of luck, you either got blackmarketed a car in any possible way (e.g. train drivers), drive bike through the harshest freezing conditions or go with the flow and forgo anything else than 'buy groceries at corner store' (with regulated flat prices regardless whether it is 500-ish person village or capital city), 'go to job early morning', 'return from job in the evening' (nevermind that job was compulsory). Think Venezuela in recent HN.

Making using a car more and more miserable without improving public transport is, in reality, beating everybody into the averageness of 'you need to go from this stop to this stop at this time', otherwise sit at home or in walking distance. I been there, seen the carless variant and the free carsupported variant and it is a lot better even if you have to sit out through a traffic jam.

TL;DR: The public transport excels at only one thing - very major traffic flows in peak hours. Sucks very much at everything else. Self-driving car can be a nice hybrid - offering full occupancy of vehicles traveling at minimal distances between them (coordinated braking) in peak times, while still functioning nicely outside of major flows and allowing complete freedom outside of the peak hours.

I don't think anyone denies that taxi services (which is what self-driving cars will eventually replace) are an important part of a city's transportation network. But owned-and-operated cars don't have to be, and using owned-and-operated cars as the backbone of an urban transportation network doesn't scale. And neither do taxis, and for the same reason.

> But owned-and-operated cars don't have to be, and using owned-and-operated cars as the backbone of an urban transportation network doesn't scale

This needs a citation. There are lots of cities in the US where public transport accounts for a minority of transit.

You have so far failed to make any argument and only made a provocative comment linking a totally non-informative picture. Have you ever ran errands by bus in a city like GP was mentioning? It's a huge and ineffective waste of time. Suppose GP makes $100 an hour and produces $400 an hour of economic output but you are arguing rather than pay $15 and save a 50 minute trip, he should 'bite the bullet' and be forced to take public transport (by regulating cars off the roads); for what purpose is that again?

> Have you ever ran errands by bus in a city like GP was mentioning?

I do, on a weekly basis. Not a big deal. Nor are owned and operated cars necessary or cost-effective for weekly errands.

Great if you live in a large city. How about a small town of 10,000 people? How about rural? How about people who commute? Vacationers? Those wanting to leave on vacation? It's easy to think in a bubble when you have relatively infinite resources at your disposal. However, the majority of people in the U.S do not.

> the majority of people in the US do not

Actually, the most populous 48 urbanized areas in the country constitute over 50% of people. Let's continue to design our cities such that you can't live in them without a $8000/year recurring cost (average cost of car ownership). That will certainly help the people who don't have relatively infinite resources at their disposal.

My comment was also specifically referring to cities. I guess people in less car friendly countries are just totally incapable of vacation or employment eh? Who'd've thunk.