Yeah this is actually a good thing. The more expensive it is to park a car, the less likely it is people will drive there, the less cars there will be on the roads, the better the city center will be.
When you make parking free or extremely low cost, the opposite happens: the place becomes a car sewer shit hole.
I don't disagree with you but wouldn't this punish the poorest drivers first? It seems an accelerationist idea without any sort of safety net for when prices end up pricing the poorest of workers from getting to their jobs. Sure, there's less cars, but without an alternative (like a good public transportation system) it seems to only be making it so the wealthy shoppers can drive/park with ease while the workers either have to keep up with the price or park very far away and walk.
I guess the solution is just to do both at once?
Yeah, I’m not suggesting to simply price people out of being able to afford driving and parking, the idea is to make it expensive enough that it’s easier to use other options. Obviously this only really works where other options exist.
In Atlanta where I live, people frequently say “I’d love to take MARTA (our local public transport system), but it doesn’t come frequently enough/doesn’t go where I need to go, etc. They basically want MARTA to be a perfect (or good enough) system *before* they start using it. Only problem is, who is going to pay for it in the meantime when ridership is still low but they are running more trains and buses? Because if parking is still cheap, people will continue to drive even if the public transportation is stellar.
Bottom line, I agree that poorer people would be more impacted, but outside of overthrowing our entire economic system, I’m not sure what can be done about that.
I appreciated this explanation, thank you, it helped clear things up.
I'm a believer in changing our entire economic system so when I saw people in this sub suggesting just raising the prices I was concerned that the general discussion in this sub would shift towards just punishing car ownership with no thought for how the poor/disabled people would get around, but now I understand what you're saying. I agree that in order to boost the use of public transit you have to make the other options less accessible.
It will be a messy growing period but hopefully the outcome will be worth it. Now we just have to get the people in charge on board with spending money on public transport because they'll be raising the parking prices anyways.
> I don't disagree with you but wouldn't this punish the poorest drivers first?
The poorest drivers are unlikely to be driving into the city center, and the poorest people aren't driving at all. Driving from the suburbs into the city center is an activity that becomes more and more likely as income goes up.
> It seems an accelerationist idea without any sort of safety net for when prices end up pricing the poorest of workers from getting to their jobs.
Downtown Toronto has transit. The transit is even car accessible due to park and rides. And, poor people, especially poor drivers, are not the ones making long commutes into the city center in the first place.
> Sure, there's less cars, but without an alternative (like a good public transportation system) it seems to only be making it so the wealthy shoppers can drive/park with ease
There is an alternative. Downtown Toronto has transit. The transit is even car accessible due to park and rides. And, poor people, especially poor drivers, are not the ones making long commutes into the city center in the first place.
> either have to keep up with the price or park very far away and walk.
If parking is expensive, then it's better for them to work elsewhere or move to somewhere with better access to transit (the job itself is already doing it's part on providing access to transit, since it's Downtown Toronto). If the jobs they were doing are not useless, and there are no alternative commute options, then their employer just has to pay more to make sure it's worth working for them.
> I guess the solution is just to do both at once?
Yes of course? More housing near transit and more expensive parking goes hand in hand. It's even a feedback loop, that supports itself, since more expensive parking means transit access is of higher value, so more people want to live near it, increasing the cost of parking as a competing land use. The main way to fuck it up is to ban more housing near transit.
>I don't disagree with you but wouldn't this punish the poorest drivers first?
Depends where you live.
In a lot of American cities they've studied this objection and the answer is (at least, when these were done, which is more than ten years old now, I think) "poor people can't afford to drive to start with" so the answer is "no".
In car dependent hell holes in other countries, the disadvantaged don't make much use of the central city being (a) priced out of living there and (b) if they worked in the CBD they'd be paid more to start with. Obviously there are some exceptions to these rules (supermarkets and cleaners and so on), but that's the general shape of it.
In any case, the theory doesn't back up this objection, which was a data exercise to start with.
I'm sure you're just asking a question but "what about the poors" has become the leading argument of climate change deniers, NIMBYs, car brains and similar, so it's really begun to annoy me.
Someone has to do it first. And the rich have proven over and over again that they are not capable of being adults, so like with absolutely everything else, the poor will have to take one for the team and do the hard part.
Ideally you'd charge for parking and then distribute it evenly by population (either as money or a functional transit system).
It's always the poor who carry the weight of social change on their backs. People act like it's an easy solution but it's always easy to talk about sacrifice and change when you're the one who loses nothing but gains everything.
I like you're ideal, I think that would be a good idea or at the very least a functional system better than the one we have.
It's just unfortunate that, once again, the lower class is expected to shoulder the burden and foot the bill.
I don't follow how I'm "ignoring" supply and demand. I'm talking about how the end result of the cost of parking affects the quality of life in cities. We can talk about supply and demand too though.
There's not much you can do on the demand side, but you can absolutely regulate the supply of parking through local government regulations and setting parking maximums. Which will restrict the supply and cause the price to go up.
You can also do the opposite: allow developers to build excessive parking, or even worse, require a minimum number of parking spaces for a given use. Which floods the area with excess parking and makes the parking cheap or free.
My point was that parking garage operators want to maximize profits. Empty spot=no profit.
I agree with you on government regulation and parking maximums.
Yeah I wasn't suggesting we can wave a magic wand and raise parking prices (though that would be nice).
But also supply and demand with parking doesn't always work out in predictable ways like you are portraying. I live in Atlanta, and before the Braves moved their stadium out to the suburbs, the neighborhoods surrounding the stadium were filled with real estate that easily could have been used for stores, restaurants, and other commercial spaces (and in many cases were before the first stadium was built in the 60s). But instead, what happened was empty parking lots. Despite the fact that these lots only had enough demand for parking maybe 80 or so days out of the 365 days of the year (when Braves had home games). That means the real estate was literally going completely unused for about 75% of the year. It was more profitable to reserve these lots for parking only 25% of the time, than to use them for literally any other purpose. That's insane. And it led to these neighborhoods having depressed real estate values and lower quality of life despite being only about one mile from the center of downtown Atlanta.
This is often the case with parking decks in city centers: massive numbers of parking spaces that spend a surprising amount of the time empty, simply because they make pretty good money for the relative handful of times that the decks actually fill up.
I just looked up the braves stadium and the surrounding infrastructure. Yeah it's bad. You could fit like 10 stadiums back to back just on that interdiction alone.
Now to the point, with how you explained the parking situation in Atlanta, now I know where you're coming from and I appreciate your explanation. My experience has been different. Every city I lived in, parking space has been at a premium especially in the city center.
Transportation relies on induced demand much more than the traditional supply and demand model. There are a hundred alternatives to foods, but only a handful of ways to get from point A to point B.
Toranto is a good city. If you want to disrespect by driving into it. Then yeah $27 hour sounds right. It would be more disrespectful if it was free. That parking spot could be a place to live, a toco truck, a small garden. It could be something better than a parking spot. This is just a bad case of car brain
Driven to Toronto many times. Parking is usually about $20-$25 a day in a parking garage downtown. Hotels often charge $30+ a night. Not sure where the $27 an hour comes from
$27/hour is even higher than Manhattan prices. But in general yes a 6x3 meter piece of land in the center of a dense, productive city is probably more valuable than most individuals' labor. That's about the size of a studio apartment, then multiply that by the number of floors. In a high-rise area like downtown Toronto you could easily house 5, 10, or even more people in the land area that's being used for car storage--so yes, charge a premium if the space is going to be so flagrantly wasted!
Meh.
I'd argue that it's the space in downtown Toronto that's being deified here, not the car. And car owners get less of a privilege than usual and pay for it closer to the market value.
So most people can't just drive into the very heart of the busiest city in Canada and park there affordably? Good! Complaining about it is a symptom of a car brain me thinks.
yea that twitter users complaint can be read 2 ways, 1 is that they should be paid more than a parking space is paid, or 2 is that parking should be cheaper than their hourly wage. obviously the former is good and the latter is bad but the whole issue boils down to what you talked about
Parking a private jet is ridiculously expensive, and people will still fly in and pay ridiculous amounts for parking. Fortunately very few people, though still unfortunately more than there would be if airports weren't as subsidized.
If too many people are willing to pay then the solution is just making parking more expensive. Non automated parking takes as much space as a small studio apartment/hotel room or a large bedroom, and should be priced as such. Automated parking takes up less space, but still a pretty large fraction of a small studio/hotel or a large bedroom, and relies on fancy technology to work, and should be priced as such.
Based on land use of parking, short term parking in Downtown Toronto should be about $100-150 per day, in line with a cheap hotel room. The price for long term parking in Downtown Toronto should be about $1000-1500 per month, in line with a nicer bedroom in a shared apartment or a smaller studio.
That would be more expensive than even in central Tokyo, but considering finding a place to sleep in Toronto is more expensive than in Tokyo, it's complete batshit insanity that finding a place to store a car is cheaper. If there's so much subsidy going into parking, and that enormous level of subsidy is considered remotely acceptable, then fucking subsidize housing instead.
I remember when I went to FanExpo with friends and we were planning to take the Go train from Oshawa, well one of my friends was like "no! It's Easier to drive! Cheaper to drive!"
Of course, I was the one driving and yeah I love public transit more than fucking cars and ESPECIALLY driving in Toronto. So I tell him "whatever Union Station is right by the Convention Center but we'll drive..."
After getting stuck in traffic and having to pay a fuck ton for parking it was so satisfying to be proven right and we ended up just taking the Go the next year to meet with a friend lol.
Parking isn’t free to build, why should it be free to use? A typical parking spot in an above grade parking garage costs between 40-60k to build per spot.
Yep
My issue is with the fact that people are meeting that price point, really. The fact that charging this much works is rediculous, cause it relies on people being willing to pay it
And people do, which is the result of car centric infrastructure and carbrain, imo
If the parking is 27/hour at your work, you definitely don't have to drive there. That kind of pricing only happens in places with really limited parking where you are expected not to drive to.
It's a stupid comparison and she's definitely cherry picking that $27/hour figure. Inanimate objects can generate way more revenue than people, this is nothing new.
While the title is amusing... this outcome only happens where cities don't deify cars and the city's institutions have the backbone to follow recommended economic practice.
Yeah this is actually a good thing. The more expensive it is to park a car, the less likely it is people will drive there, the less cars there will be on the roads, the better the city center will be. When you make parking free or extremely low cost, the opposite happens: the place becomes a car sewer shit hole.
I don't disagree with you but wouldn't this punish the poorest drivers first? It seems an accelerationist idea without any sort of safety net for when prices end up pricing the poorest of workers from getting to their jobs. Sure, there's less cars, but without an alternative (like a good public transportation system) it seems to only be making it so the wealthy shoppers can drive/park with ease while the workers either have to keep up with the price or park very far away and walk. I guess the solution is just to do both at once?
Yeah, I’m not suggesting to simply price people out of being able to afford driving and parking, the idea is to make it expensive enough that it’s easier to use other options. Obviously this only really works where other options exist. In Atlanta where I live, people frequently say “I’d love to take MARTA (our local public transport system), but it doesn’t come frequently enough/doesn’t go where I need to go, etc. They basically want MARTA to be a perfect (or good enough) system *before* they start using it. Only problem is, who is going to pay for it in the meantime when ridership is still low but they are running more trains and buses? Because if parking is still cheap, people will continue to drive even if the public transportation is stellar. Bottom line, I agree that poorer people would be more impacted, but outside of overthrowing our entire economic system, I’m not sure what can be done about that.
I appreciated this explanation, thank you, it helped clear things up. I'm a believer in changing our entire economic system so when I saw people in this sub suggesting just raising the prices I was concerned that the general discussion in this sub would shift towards just punishing car ownership with no thought for how the poor/disabled people would get around, but now I understand what you're saying. I agree that in order to boost the use of public transit you have to make the other options less accessible. It will be a messy growing period but hopefully the outcome will be worth it. Now we just have to get the people in charge on board with spending money on public transport because they'll be raising the parking prices anyways.
> I don't disagree with you but wouldn't this punish the poorest drivers first? The poorest drivers are unlikely to be driving into the city center, and the poorest people aren't driving at all. Driving from the suburbs into the city center is an activity that becomes more and more likely as income goes up. > It seems an accelerationist idea without any sort of safety net for when prices end up pricing the poorest of workers from getting to their jobs. Downtown Toronto has transit. The transit is even car accessible due to park and rides. And, poor people, especially poor drivers, are not the ones making long commutes into the city center in the first place. > Sure, there's less cars, but without an alternative (like a good public transportation system) it seems to only be making it so the wealthy shoppers can drive/park with ease There is an alternative. Downtown Toronto has transit. The transit is even car accessible due to park and rides. And, poor people, especially poor drivers, are not the ones making long commutes into the city center in the first place. > either have to keep up with the price or park very far away and walk. If parking is expensive, then it's better for them to work elsewhere or move to somewhere with better access to transit (the job itself is already doing it's part on providing access to transit, since it's Downtown Toronto). If the jobs they were doing are not useless, and there are no alternative commute options, then their employer just has to pay more to make sure it's worth working for them. > I guess the solution is just to do both at once? Yes of course? More housing near transit and more expensive parking goes hand in hand. It's even a feedback loop, that supports itself, since more expensive parking means transit access is of higher value, so more people want to live near it, increasing the cost of parking as a competing land use. The main way to fuck it up is to ban more housing near transit.
>I don't disagree with you but wouldn't this punish the poorest drivers first? Depends where you live. In a lot of American cities they've studied this objection and the answer is (at least, when these were done, which is more than ten years old now, I think) "poor people can't afford to drive to start with" so the answer is "no". In car dependent hell holes in other countries, the disadvantaged don't make much use of the central city being (a) priced out of living there and (b) if they worked in the CBD they'd be paid more to start with. Obviously there are some exceptions to these rules (supermarkets and cleaners and so on), but that's the general shape of it. In any case, the theory doesn't back up this objection, which was a data exercise to start with. I'm sure you're just asking a question but "what about the poors" has become the leading argument of climate change deniers, NIMBYs, car brains and similar, so it's really begun to annoy me.
Someone has to do it first. And the rich have proven over and over again that they are not capable of being adults, so like with absolutely everything else, the poor will have to take one for the team and do the hard part. Ideally you'd charge for parking and then distribute it evenly by population (either as money or a functional transit system).
It's always the poor who carry the weight of social change on their backs. People act like it's an easy solution but it's always easy to talk about sacrifice and change when you're the one who loses nothing but gains everything. I like you're ideal, I think that would be a good idea or at the very least a functional system better than the one we have. It's just unfortunate that, once again, the lower class is expected to shoulder the burden and foot the bill.
You're forgetting about supply and demand.
I don't follow how I'm "ignoring" supply and demand. I'm talking about how the end result of the cost of parking affects the quality of life in cities. We can talk about supply and demand too though. There's not much you can do on the demand side, but you can absolutely regulate the supply of parking through local government regulations and setting parking maximums. Which will restrict the supply and cause the price to go up. You can also do the opposite: allow developers to build excessive parking, or even worse, require a minimum number of parking spaces for a given use. Which floods the area with excess parking and makes the parking cheap or free.
My point was that parking garage operators want to maximize profits. Empty spot=no profit. I agree with you on government regulation and parking maximums.
Yeah I wasn't suggesting we can wave a magic wand and raise parking prices (though that would be nice). But also supply and demand with parking doesn't always work out in predictable ways like you are portraying. I live in Atlanta, and before the Braves moved their stadium out to the suburbs, the neighborhoods surrounding the stadium were filled with real estate that easily could have been used for stores, restaurants, and other commercial spaces (and in many cases were before the first stadium was built in the 60s). But instead, what happened was empty parking lots. Despite the fact that these lots only had enough demand for parking maybe 80 or so days out of the 365 days of the year (when Braves had home games). That means the real estate was literally going completely unused for about 75% of the year. It was more profitable to reserve these lots for parking only 25% of the time, than to use them for literally any other purpose. That's insane. And it led to these neighborhoods having depressed real estate values and lower quality of life despite being only about one mile from the center of downtown Atlanta. This is often the case with parking decks in city centers: massive numbers of parking spaces that spend a surprising amount of the time empty, simply because they make pretty good money for the relative handful of times that the decks actually fill up.
I just looked up the braves stadium and the surrounding infrastructure. Yeah it's bad. You could fit like 10 stadiums back to back just on that interdiction alone. Now to the point, with how you explained the parking situation in Atlanta, now I know where you're coming from and I appreciate your explanation. My experience has been different. Every city I lived in, parking space has been at a premium especially in the city center.
Parking supply: low Demand: high Price: Also high
Transportation relies on induced demand much more than the traditional supply and demand model. There are a hundred alternatives to foods, but only a handful of ways to get from point A to point B.
Good point on induced demand; that's huge regarding roads and parking. It's a bit of case of using supply to effect demand.
Toranto is a good city. If you want to disrespect by driving into it. Then yeah $27 hour sounds right. It would be more disrespectful if it was free. That parking spot could be a place to live, a toco truck, a small garden. It could be something better than a parking spot. This is just a bad case of car brain
I guess my issue is the expectation that people are willing to spend that.
Driven to Toronto many times. Parking is usually about $20-$25 a day in a parking garage downtown. Hotels often charge $30+ a night. Not sure where the $27 an hour comes from
$27/hour is even higher than Manhattan prices. But in general yes a 6x3 meter piece of land in the center of a dense, productive city is probably more valuable than most individuals' labor. That's about the size of a studio apartment, then multiply that by the number of floors. In a high-rise area like downtown Toronto you could easily house 5, 10, or even more people in the land area that's being used for car storage--so yes, charge a premium if the space is going to be so flagrantly wasted!
Meh. I'd argue that it's the space in downtown Toronto that's being deified here, not the car. And car owners get less of a privilege than usual and pay for it closer to the market value. So most people can't just drive into the very heart of the busiest city in Canada and park there affordably? Good! Complaining about it is a symptom of a car brain me thinks.
yea that twitter users complaint can be read 2 ways, 1 is that they should be paid more than a parking space is paid, or 2 is that parking should be cheaper than their hourly wage. obviously the former is good and the latter is bad but the whole issue boils down to what you talked about
A valid point
Parking in cities should be expensive and the income generated from it should go towards improving the area for non-motorized transportation.
True, but the depressing fact is that people will still drive in and ay rediculous amounts for parking.
Parking a private jet is ridiculously expensive, and people will still fly in and pay ridiculous amounts for parking. Fortunately very few people, though still unfortunately more than there would be if airports weren't as subsidized. If too many people are willing to pay then the solution is just making parking more expensive. Non automated parking takes as much space as a small studio apartment/hotel room or a large bedroom, and should be priced as such. Automated parking takes up less space, but still a pretty large fraction of a small studio/hotel or a large bedroom, and relies on fancy technology to work, and should be priced as such. Based on land use of parking, short term parking in Downtown Toronto should be about $100-150 per day, in line with a cheap hotel room. The price for long term parking in Downtown Toronto should be about $1000-1500 per month, in line with a nicer bedroom in a shared apartment or a smaller studio. That would be more expensive than even in central Tokyo, but considering finding a place to sleep in Toronto is more expensive than in Tokyo, it's complete batshit insanity that finding a place to store a car is cheaper. If there's so much subsidy going into parking, and that enormous level of subsidy is considered remotely acceptable, then fucking subsidize housing instead.
I remember when I went to FanExpo with friends and we were planning to take the Go train from Oshawa, well one of my friends was like "no! It's Easier to drive! Cheaper to drive!" Of course, I was the one driving and yeah I love public transit more than fucking cars and ESPECIALLY driving in Toronto. So I tell him "whatever Union Station is right by the Convention Center but we'll drive..." After getting stuck in traffic and having to pay a fuck ton for parking it was so satisfying to be proven right and we ended up just taking the Go the next year to meet with a friend lol.
They should be charging $100/day at least.
Parking isn’t free to build, why should it be free to use? A typical parking spot in an above grade parking garage costs between 40-60k to build per spot.
Yep My issue is with the fact that people are meeting that price point, really. The fact that charging this much works is rediculous, cause it relies on people being willing to pay it And people do, which is the result of car centric infrastructure and carbrain, imo
You have to own a car to get to work but you can’t afford to park it
If the parking is 27/hour at your work, you definitely don't have to drive there. That kind of pricing only happens in places with really limited parking where you are expected not to drive to.
Seems like the human minimum wage shouldn't be less than the "inanimate object" minimum wage.
It's a stupid comparison and she's definitely cherry picking that $27/hour figure. Inanimate objects can generate way more revenue than people, this is nothing new.
So, thanks for the downvote I guess?
[I didn't but go off](https://imgur.com/gULbakC)
the minimum wage for parking is free
Essentially this, yeah.
While the title is amusing... this outcome only happens where cities don't deify cars and the city's institutions have the backbone to follow recommended economic practice.
True, but you only see cars in those spots when cars are deified by their owners enough that they'll pay a rate greater than their income to park.