What this article is positing is that the conditions you describe are emergent, not determining. Change the policies and the conditions will adjust after a brief, albeit painful period.
This is an unproven assertion, which in my view is most likely political dogma rather than analysis.
Take a look at parking and alternative transportation in Philadelphia, for instance. It's nothing but pain for everyone and has been for at least 30 years.
City zoning codes requiring off-street parking on a per-dwelling or per-sq foot basis at least has the aspect of not letting the situation deteriorate into unlivable squalor, with no good alternatives. It may be that this pushes the problem to the transportation network, true, but that's a different problem to solve.
If you want to take away, or let developer profit-driven markets take away a major quality of life issue then you'd better provide a better, cheaper, more individually useful alternative first.
So cities should remove all parking minimum laws, and let apartments and businesses decide how much parking to build. That's exactly what the article is saying.
Instead of investing money in parking, they could have spent that money on private buses, public bus passes for employees, bike parking, bike subsidies, Uber subsidies, sponsored carpools, bike paths, or nearby high density corporate housing.
As for freeway capacity, if we reduce free parking, that will cause less people to drive, making the freeways more clear.
So the natural response to that is to force businesses to have greater value? Is this not exactly what market forces would do naturally? A business with insufficient parking would have less value than one with, and would therefore compete less effectively.
If you need to go downtown, Seattle buses are great. Anything else (especially east/West corridors to the north) is a huge joke.
Needless to say, I take BART, because ~$4 in fares beats spending ~$25-30 in parking and tolls for the privilege of sitting in traffic half the trip.
Of course those places you don't just pay for parking, you pay congestion charges, high gas prices and steep registration prices (HK) as well. Oh and toll roads.
It's quite stunning the amount of things that are under costed in the US to enable our car economy.
Is it 90 minutes inside of rush hour?
If I go in my preferred slot it's 45 minutes max, usually 33 minutes. If I go 10am, 6:45 pm, it's 22 and 20 minutes. Fastest I've ever made it is 19 minutes and that was doing well over the speed limit the whole time on a motorcycle.
If anything its drivers that do stupid stuff like block bus lanes, don't know how to merge, etc... that are a bigger problem to public transit.
Please consider people living in other circumstances and with other responsibilities before making blanket statements for all based on the experience of yourself and your close social group. It's entirely possibly that you and your group do not encompass all the situations that may be found. For example, having a child makes not having a car extremely problematic. Being 30-60 minutes late to pick up you child is often unacceptable, and in many circumstances (such as childcare) may net you quite large fees if it happens often.
And how does that compare to average income around you ?
This is the argument everyone in SF makes. "Just move into the city. Use an (electrical) bike. Yes there's the homeless but you learn to steer around them quickly". And then you look at the rent, and the average income. Needless to say, this is not a reasonable suggestion.
And for those that don't like living in that kind of population density, it's surprisingly easy to live in other cities. The public transportation system there is amazing...far better than even Europe can offer. The Tokyo Metro goes everywhere in the city and the transfers between the Metro and the high-speed rail lines are timed, so you don't waste time waiting. When we took the bullet train, I saw people commuting in excess of 100 mi to/from work. That may sound like a lot to an American, but it was around an hour of commute time with their infrastructure. And since they don't drive during their commutes, they can spend the time on the train doing something entertaining/productive.
It's really eye opening what can happen when you don't prioritize cars in a city. If San Francisco were similarly prioritized and we invested in transportation infrastructure the way the Japanese do, you wouldn't have to live there to work there. You could live in the Stockton area, where the median home price is under $300k, and you'd only have to dodge the homeless people on your way between the metro and your work. And you and your spouse could share a car instead of each needing one since you'd only need it for local trips around your home city rather than commuting.
Only when you make up some argument for me...
> A car is necessary under current driving conditions is not the same thing as a car being necessary under any driving conditions.
That wasn't my argument at all. I was simple stating that when making an argument using personal experience as the basis for what is and isn't "necessary" is likely to leave out a lot of people with valid concerns. My example wasn't to push an agenda for or against cards, but to show how some people may come to an entirely different conclusion about what is and isn't necessary, currently.
The point is: what are you going to do about it? Because clearly city populations are growing and people are exceedingly unhappy with vastly subsidizing a shrinking minority that expects to drive door-to-door, or better yet, lives in a cheap suburb but expects city dwellers to sacrifice money and space for their daily commute.
I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus. Though likely they won't notice, because there are simply more buses and transit options around, so your delay won't be an hour. It seems getting rid of free parking, as suggested by the OP, is a good start, no?
As long as we're humoring city dwellers being tired of things, we will never have housing construction (they've got ownership or rent control already, and they're tired of tall buildings). As long as we're humoring what they want to pay for, we'll never have decent transit (they can walk or bike, why should they pay taxes for your bus?).
There are reasonable positions to be in which don't require parking downtown. Cheap housing in the center. Cheap housing near train stations and a quick ride in. Abundant parking at train stations and a quick ride in. Decouple cities from employment so that they really are luxuries and not crucial access to opportunity. Keep job growth in balance with walkable housing growth and don't allow development of suburbs.
Any one of those is a great thing to strive for. Eliminating parking by itself just makes the city less livable.
Honest question: is there really "paying for transit" hate? The only "transit hate" I've seen ranges around various forms of "it sucks" e.g. "never a bus when I need one" punctuated by "5 of the same bus at the same time" and "always late". I'm happy to pay for transit, just as I am up for sidewalks and bike lanes.
Also: how does one "decouple cities from employment"? And how does a surge of oasis-style job centers divorce an employee from needing a car to get there?
It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times, because there is no solution to car transportation at scale without traffic jams. The "solutions" (congestion pricing, less parking, etc) are to reduce the scale. It is necessary to divorce employees from competing with each other for such tiny slices of the city where the commute is reasonable, because paying an extra $2000/mo just for land value is such a soul-crushing waste of effort and resources. It is necessary to aggressively migrate the fleet of cars to electrics.
Rush hour traffic in small town or city is still going 60mph, and living "downtown" isn't nearly so expensive because there's less competition, and little drastically wealthier competition. (Good look competing with tech workers for nicely located apartments in SF, or bankers for nicely located apartments in Manhattan, if you aren't one).
See: SF opposition to tech shuttles, Muni expansion, Caltrain extension. I guess those aren't really about cost, but there's a common thread of "I don't like the noise" and "I don't like the kind of people that transportation brings in to my quiet neighborhood" and "we shouldn't be making it more attractive for gentrifiers to live here."
I see this on NextDoor whenever VTA LiteRail improvements are discussed. Possibility of a Los Gatos [or Netflix] stop? "Criminal Homeless will invade our city". Maybe, but I won't see you complaining when you go to a 49rs game in person at the stadium and take VTA so you don't get stuck in car traffic.
> It is necessary to divorce employees from trying to drive (mostly) the same routes at the same times
How is this possible without massive and awesome public transit? Rush hour traffic exists because "every employer" wants "every employee" at their desk at 6-9am.
Use cars where they're the best option. Use public transit where it's the best option. Take 5 minutes to transfer in between.
If you find the Spartan lifestyle compelling, sure, bike to the train station. From a planning perspective, it's a no-brainer to put the infrastructure there to facilitate it.
Just don't force it on the rest of us. (My mornings would go from pleasant and relaxing to miserable, getting in an overcrowded train car while sweaty fucking sucks, and I would have to stop running - if I'm capable of cycling the next morning, I didn't run hard enough the night before. If only my area were a little flatter).
Also, you often don't need a whole car. Scooters and low-displacement motorcycles are cheap and fun. E-bikes are getting cheaper. I mostly ride my little Honda motorcycle to the train now, when the weather cooperates. BART's ample motorcycle parking is pleasantly surprising, and a very good idea.
Just yesterday I learned of the NYC hate against e-bikes. I hope that whatever red tape there is surrounding e-bikes gets cleared up and understood.
I suppose it would be nice to build tall, dense housing around the station, but people living in the suburbs are expressing their preference for more, cheaper space per person and lower building heights, and would be extremely unlikely to authorize a microcosm of the city inside their suburb.
If we can solve the "people don't want tall buildings" problem, why not put them inside the city where their occupants are in walking/biking distance, rather than relying on expensive trains?
I'm thinking that if we look at the numbers we might actually find it makes the problem worse, but in other areas. We have very heavy traffic areas currently, but spread over at least a few square miles, which allows that traffic to route to the available spaces through all the available roads. Giant parking structures at specific points along rail would move a large chunk of that traffic to those structures, but those structures are also much more condensed points for traffic
Simply put, if you think urban traffic is bad, imagine trying to get to a specific parking structure along with a couple thousand other people all at the same time. Instead of a thousand different businesses over a hundred or more roads, it's a few structures, each with limited ingress and egress routes, and limited entrances and exits. Worse than navigating the parking structure at the mall at Christmas, but every weekday as the new normal.
Much better, in my opinion, would be a fleet of autonomous buses and vans with ad-hoc ride-sharing. Since they use the normal road system, they can reach much closer to peoples homes. I actually ran the numbers on this in a comment a few months back (although not very thoroughly)[1].
Fair enough. I also like the walk//bike suggestion also made here for this consideration.
> I think you will find in places that cater much less to cars people are very understanding if you miss a bus.
I think you'll find daycares, which are businesses which employ people that they pay, are less inclined to keep one or two people on staff and extra thirty minutes for you because you're running late than you think they are. Most daycares I know of have it clearly outlined in the terms and conditions you sign, if you are more than 15 minutes or so late, they'll charge you anywhere from $10-$20.
They’re terrible for school-age children, the disabled, the drunk, the elderly, the poor; terrible for commuting solo to-and-from work in rush-hour traffic (causes huge anxiety for commuters vs. other types of commute); and terrible anywhere with high enough density that air pollution and traffic get concentrated.
Additionally they are a hugely inefficient use of a society’s capital and energy/carbon budget vs. other modes of transportation, tend to lead to municipal planning which is hugely inefficient and environmentally destructive, and crowd out other modes of transportation leading to horribly slow and indirect bus routes, etc.
Finally, they are tremendously dangerous, one of the leading causes of death among young healthy people.
On what grounds?
Often elderly people’s driving skill deteriorates before they realize it or they are unwilling to accept the loss of mobility, putting themselves and other people on the road at risk.
When elderly people do accept that they won’t drive anymore, in a car centric society they are suddenly dramatically hindered in their ability to lead a normal life. They become much more dependent on constant care and attention, and are often forced to move into a dedicated retirement home, further alienating them from their life-long communities of institutions and friends.
Places where it is possible to walk to the store, walk to visit friends, walk to the subway station, walk to coffeeshops and restaurants, walk to concerts and museums, etc. are much better for the elderly than suburban sprawl. People can remain independent much longer, because there is more available community infrastructure nearby.
Additionally, maintaining a routine with a decent amount of daily walking is very beneficial to people’s health.
Where are the urban populations growing? In reality, you have a meager recovery of urban populations that have been in a tailspin since 1960. Capital is cheaper than ever, and the bargains to be had in the urban core are bringing in the cool kids and pushing out the poor folk.
That growth is almost entirely at the expense of people less able and less vocal.
As a weirdo who has lived in the city since before it was cool, I'll always bet against the cool kids colonizing the cities. Once they have kids who have to go to school, they leave.
to some extend the 80 mile commute is being subsidized (roads, artificially lower gas prices, cost of congestion, pollution, sufficient space for parking at dense destinations, etc)
I'm not saying there aren't tradeoffs, but you can't really assert that as a group we just have to accommodate 80 mile daily commutes for everyone and solve backwards from that.
Also, jobs come and go. Sometimes I'm working close to home, sometimes 40 miles East, sometimes 50 miles north. I guess this is the same for most people. Why move when you're just going to get laid off in a years time?
more broadly i think the US (whatever combination of govt and industry) has failed to provide well for the guy with a job that wants to invest in property and possibly to raise a family. even with two incomes.
as you say, the promise of job stability is looking increasingly illusory
the job market putting you in a position where you are killing time in traffic for 2+ hours a day is a pretty clear sign of that failure