Luckily the Boston area is relatively (very, by US standards) easy to get around without a car :)

Why should parking be easy or cheap in urban Cambridge? (For those unaware, MIT is just a short bridge across a river from Boston.) You should take the subway (metro) or bus. There are many non-driving options for the able-bodied.

I was driving from outside of Boston. Parking near subway was atrocious as well.

Alewife parking and the T in?

> I paid over $50 USD for parking a bit over two hours in Cambridge Massachusetts when visiting MIT. Parking in the Boston area is atrocious.

The two are related. The whole point of charging for parking is to leverage scarcity to convince people to not make the problem worse and just find alternatives to driving to the doorstop that work well for them.

No, the pojnt of charging for parking, is for a company somewhere to make a fat, juicy profit. The company would prefer more people drive, and therefore, need to park.

Wow. Look at the downvotes. Yet almost every parking lot is privately owned, and many cities have even sold management of street parking to private companies.

Do people seriously think that these companies want to charge more, for environmental reasons? Of course not. They care only for profit.

https://news.wttw.com/2025/05/21/final-tally-chicago-taxpaye...

The parent says that the reason the price is high, is because someone is trying to up the price for environmental reasons. What proof have they for this? I'd really like a citation, because instead I see almost all parking being profit based.

If someone is saying it's for environmental reasons, likely they're lying to make more profit.

It’s expensive to provide parking and in a place like Cambridge. They’ve already stuffed cars in every available nook and cranny.

Did you think they should just let you park in Cambridge Common, Harvard Yard or the Charles River park? Why park at all— just stop your car in the middle of the street.

The T is atrocious. Parking is simply expensive.

the city decides things like street parking, minimum parking space requirements, or if you can put up a parking lot, thus deciding the total amount of available space. actual operation of the parking spaces can be offloaded to private entities.

if less space is allocated, it becomes more expensive (scarcity), driving down car use. this is an easy case of pricing in environment and external impacts.

Yes, that can happen. Then another city council gets in, and wants more parking.

The post I replied to said "The whole point of charging for parking" was to force people to, essentially, drive less. This is saying it's the only reason people charge for parking. Clearly not so.

And there is artificial scarcity too. I've seen cities where one company owned almost all the parking lots. In that situation, they controlled pricing entirely.

I've seen a lot more of "doing it for profit", including the city doing it for profit, than for environmental reasons.

That's doesn't mean I support this position or not. Describing reality as it stands is important, one cannot effect change one way or the other, without understanding what is.

They probably use the profits to pay PR firms to tell us all that high parking charges are saving the planet

> If someone is saying it's for environmental reasons, likely they're lying to make more profit.

And they lie because they get vilified otherwise by people who can't stand the idea that they make a profit.

BTW, whenever someone gives you a reason why they do something, odds are pretty good that you're given the palatable plausible reason, not the actual unflattering one.

"The answer is always 'It's the money.'" — Tony Kornheiser

Most of the time, sure. But sometimes it's to save face.

It can be both, though. People who own land and build parking lots and structures on it will charge however much they can, based on what people will actually pay. If parking is more scarce, and the demand is there (as in, it's a popular place to visit), they'll be able to charge more.

And sometimes city councils restrict the amount of parking that can be built because they want to create that scarcity to encourage people to take transit instead of driving, because they know that the owners of the (fewer) parking areas will charge more, making it less desirable to drive and park.

Don't forget the opportunity cost. Urban land is extremely valuable, so if you're using it for car parking instead of shop, restaurants, homes, or offices you're missing out on a lot of potential income.

This goes doubly so for all the additional roads you need to get the cars to their parking spots.

> Don't forget the opportunity cost. Urban land is extremely valuable, so if you're using it for car parking instead of shop, restaurants, homes, or offices you're missing out on a lot of potential income.

Indeed, and to build upon your comment, how entitled can some people be to expect they can just take over random ~10m² spots in a property you do not own and expect that to be ok? It isn't. Those spots ain't yours, and I would love to not have to come across your car.

Take over as in rent for a fee? Nobody mentioned free.

Are you against renting homes, hotel rooms etc too? Do you object to the vast spaces that hotels occupy?

And if it's public property, well, we all pay taxes and could argue it's collectively owned. Why would it be entitlement?

I could say public transport advocates are entitled expecting taxes to pay for vastly expensive public transport infrastructure projects

They are against free or very cheap parking in an urban environment.

If you talk of taxes, then yes, you can argue against tax payers subsiding free parking for people living outside that city

In Tokyo there are parking garages that are a multistory cylinder. The car is driven onto a platform in the center, which is an elevator that goes up, and turns like a railroad turntable so the car lines up with a parking spot arranged like spokes on a wheel.

It's one way to put a lot of cars in a small space. Much of the space in a conventional parking garage is lost to the driveways.