> That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added.

You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after. Otherwise people will never accept your proposal (and nor should they tbh, as there's no guarantee that the promised supply will arrive). Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo. In a democratic system of government, that means you need to convince them to change, and that won't happen unless you address their objections in advance.

People parking cars on the street are simply freeloading off the taxes of people who don't do that. They should pay for what they are using, so they can make better choices.

And people living without parking, but who still expect the services of plumbers, carpenters, pizza delivery, amazon vans, taxis, home care workers, not to mention emergency services, are also freeloaders. When such vehicles have to park on the street they block roads and pedestrian traffic.

Some communities are starting to enforce against amazon trucks that park inappropriately on the street. They often force traffic into dangerous situations as everyone must skirt around them.

People often say this when parking spots are being taken away, but when they try to placate it with having short time parking spots or paid parking (which would increase the likelihood of a pizza driver or handyman finding a free spot) they somehow aren't happy. As it turns out, it was never about those services, only about having free storage for their own car.

To add, somehow in Europe you can have pedestrian zones with no street parking, and still people live there and everyone has functioning plumbing.

None of us are freeloaders. We all pay taxes and consume our own unique constellation of public resources. It's good that we're all different, concentration rarely ends well.

Well, there’s a lot of people in this thread not content with the status quo.

The whole urbanism movement of the past decade is evidence of that I think.

Moreover, even if a community is happy with free parking and expensive housing within that community, it doesn’t mean that people outside that community are happy with it.

I think it’s a bit more complicated than people are happy with the status quo.

This same logic applies for every single other proposal (charge money for on-street parking, etc.). Many people would not be able to afford to live where they already do if that change was done overnight.

> You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after.

Isn't pricing street parking the solution the parent comment proposed? It increases parking availability in the short term, while increasing demand for public transport.

> You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after.

If you can't change anything then you can't change anything. Replacing parking spaces with bus lanes can be a huge improvement, but obviously you have to take the parking space away before you can put the bus lane in.

> Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo.

Boomers might be. Young people who have no hope of ever owning a home anywhere where the jobs are aren't.

Im not talking about taking away parking per se, im talking about taking away free parking.

Try working in care. Try doing home care for maybe five or six different elderly clients every day, each at a random location. If we want to support elderly people we need to provide for the poorly-paid care providers who must bounce around doing that support. Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

This is a great example of a specific problem with a specific solution that people use as an excuse to try and impose blanket, one-size-fits-all city-wide rules for automobile storage.

Giving viable alternatives to driving (be that cycleways or public transport) reduces traffic, and reducing traffic makes it easier for people that actually DO need to drive motor vehicles.

>Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.

Ironic that you bring this up as an absurd example, when this is exactly what happens in dense cities with good cycling infrastructure (Holland, Denmark, etc).

This edge case that you came up with warrants a car, but is that really the reality of most cars parking in any given community?

And honestly, it’s questionable whether it warrants a car too. In Tokyo it would be perfectly fine to do those trips by public transport. My biweekly cleaner gets around by train to all the places she works at. And local delivery companies all use bicycles for last mile delivery.

Maybe that’s not viable right now, but I think that’s the point of Donald’s advocacy. By not pricing parking correctly we provide perverse incentives as a society that lead us down a vicious cycle. Free parking means more cars means less transit ridership means we need more free parking, and repeat.

This shapes our cities into places that prioritize cars over humans. High housing costs, air pollution, less mobility, less freedom.

If you price parking appropriately, you get a virtuous cycle instead. Expensive parking means less driving means more transit ridership means more free parking slots means more room for other development, etc.

It is not an "edge case" in a development for 55+s. And, with the shifting economic, we will soon see a great many more seniors growing old in condos rather than detached houses.

To be fair I don’t know how often elderly care workers are going to 6 different locations in a single day, but it’s hard to imagine it’s a very common thing. If there’s a large condo with lots of residents wouldn’t it be more efficient to hire a permanent employee?

This must be why Europe just kills everyone over age 75, since it is impossible to support the elderly without 12-lane highways and subsidized gasoline.

> “But the bus service isn’t good!” That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added. The biggest determinant of transit use is the availability of parking.

Public transport is not some enterprise, but rather public service. It's literally in the name. You flip the chicken and egg problem around with corporate bs: make public transport usable and use will skyrocket.

I work in public transportation, at the end of the day there is a finite supply of resources and you have to decide where and how to deploy them.

The biggest determinants of quality of service are geographic coverage and frequency. Good luck getting political will to increase frequency or extend geographic coverage on routes that no one is riding.