Certainly, if you make it less practical to arrive by personal car, less people will travel to places by car, and then you'll have less traffic. Unless this comes with a massive improvement in other means of transport, you'll probably have less visitors as well.<p>The problem with alternatives to personal cars is that personal cars have many desirable properties:<p>a) near zero latency to take a trip: if there's not a cab at my curb, I have to request it and wait -- or request it early and hope I'm ready when they are. Buses and trains are usually not waiting for me at the station.<p>b) proportional penalty for leaving late: if you miss a bus or a train by 10 seconds, you have to wait for the next one, which can be an hour. If you leave a couple seconds late in a car, you'll probably arrive a couple seconds late (around rush hour, it gets worse of course). If you don't make it to a requested cab in time, they may leave, and you have to wait for another one to come.<p>c) availability: a personal car generally provides the same service during the day, at night, and can be used in rain and mild snow (heavy snow, if properly equipped). Busses, trains, and even cabs have less availability at night.<p>d) flexibility/directness: a personal car can drive to almost everywhere, and can generally take a fairly direct route. Trains only go where there is track, and busses only go where there is a route. Cabs don't always pick up and drop off where you want to go. In case of an urgent change in circumstances, you can change your destination at will in a personal car or cab, but may not be able to easily redirect to where you're going in a bus.
This article didn't touch on the interaction between free parking and public transit, and I've seen a few comments here talk about the dearth of good public transit options as justification for free parking. I believe it's worth pointing out that <i>free parking causes bad public transit</i>:<p>- free parking siphons away would-be bus and train customers, which deprive the transit authority of revenue (leading to less frequent service, older vehicles, etc.) and also reduce the political impetus to deliver high quality transit.<p>- subsidized parking leads to lots of drivers circulating looking for an open spot, causing congestion and pollution -- the article mentioned that 53% of SF residential parking permit holders spent more than five minutes looking for parking at the end of their most recent trip. This congestion makes surface buses and trams run slower and with greater schedule uncertainty, making transit even more unattractive.<p>Obviously I would like great public transit in America yesterday, but I don't think the current state of transit is good reason to preserve subsidized parking. Preserving subsidized parking is going to keep transit in America as unattractive as it is now.
Why does everyone think that the solution to traffic problems is to first make driving even more terrible and then oh yeah maybe get around to improving or even providing public transit? Why can't we swap the order, especially when it takes years to implement public transit improvements?<p>Also, we need to resist the temptation to assume that low utilization of a half assed public transit solution means that nobody wants it. In my small town, we had a bus line that had almost no utilization despite going between two desirable locations; an area with tons of apartments oriented towards students and the university itself. The city was talking about killing the line but someone convinced them to try making the bus run more frequently, and continue running later into the day as a trial. The line went from having the lowest ridership to the highest. Not every improvement will be that dramatic of course, but I think often times public transit is underutilized because it's not meeting the needs of the population.
I would really, desperately like to agree with this article, but I hit this point and may not read further because this is a completely clueless statement:<p><i>If they do not also change their parking policies, such efforts amount to little more than window-dressing. There is a one-word answer to why the streets of Los Angeles look so different from those of London, and why neither city resembles Tokyo: parking.</i><p>I wanted to be an urban planner and I have done a fair amount of related reading. Los Angeles sprawled before it became known for being so car oriented, back when people took the tram and walked everywhere.<p>It sprawled because it was built in the desert. The fact that water has to be imported to the area means that you had to develop large tracts of land in order for the financing to make any sense. It has to do with how much it cost to develop the necessary underlying infrastructure.<p>It's layout is somewhat unique due to the environment and circumstances in which it was built, the way that Venice is unique for being built in a swamp. If you don't study the history of the place, you can't understand how it came to be the way it is.<p>I would love to see the U.S. become less car centered. I would love it if we stopped whoring our cities out to the cult of the car and built more walkable communities and provided better public transit. But arguing for some particular approach and basing that argument on completely made up facts without understanding the history behind the places used as examples does not in any way impress me.
Putting aside the awkward title, the article is confirming what we instinctively would expect: increasing the burden of commuting by car will reduce the number of people who commute by car. The cost of parking is an example burden.<p>Obviously life needs to balance many things, and increasing the cost of parking in an attempt to shift commuters to alternative forms is also going to decrease the number of people who want to commute to the destination <i>at all</i>.<p>I live in the Los Angeles area and significantly prefer living in and visiting cities that have free parking (e.g., the southern beach cities). I actively avoid cities such as Santa Monica that have costly and insufficient parking--and importantly, that means I don't spend any money at Santa Monica retail businesses. Alternative transit options are not appealing. Light rail, while expanding in this metropolitan area, is far too inefficient. Uber and Lyft are an additional cost friction that gets factored into any decision (e.g., where to go for a dinner out?). Plus I don't want to have to deal with an app to go somewhere.<p>All that said, self-driving cars may be a big game changer for my lifestyle. I would be more likely to visit Santa Monica if my car could find a suitable parking structure and park itself. To my mind the cost of parking would be less of a nuisance if I didn't even have to think about the parking process.
A concrete thing you can do about this is email your local City Council or Supervisor and ask them to reduce parking requirements for new buildings. Send them this article.<p>Many local municipalities require absurd amounts of parking per new housing unit, and many Baby Boomers show up to meetings to complain about how there's no parking and thus a new project should be denied.
This analysis seems to ignore the benefits of free parking, both for drivers and for the businesses they're driving to. Personally, in cities where I have a car, if ample parking (day or night) is not available near a business, I patronize someone else. I do prefer public transportation, but there are only a few cities in the US where that actually works.
Two things I'm seeing reading the comments:<p>Anyone referencing European public transportation should realize that over half the countries in Europe are smaller than the state of Iowa, and none of them save Russia & Turkey are larger than Texas. You're comparing apples to oranges.<p>Second, not one of the comments below mentioned the Auto lobby. If your beef is with the number of personal vehicles on the road vs. public transportation, you should probably look there first. Tell your billionaire friends to start outspending the $61 million spent in 2016 by Automotive[1] industry lobbyists (compared to the $1.4 million for Misc Transport[2]) and maybe you'll start seeing a difference.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&year=2016" rel="nofollow">https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=M02&yea...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D000047007" rel="nofollow">https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00004700...</a>
Chances are this would have the desired effect for me: I would simply not shop during those times. I enjoy purchasing items in a store and going to the theatres, but I hate paying for parking or dealing with public transit. So I would just stop patronizing stores and movie theatres and instead use Amazon and Netflix more than I do now.
This article paints an overly rosy picture of self driving cars. A significant cause of traffic on our roads is single occupancy vehicles. Opening up the gates to zero occupancy vehicles could cause the number of cars on the road to skyrocket, because you are no longer bounded by the number of people.
First, the double negative is simply terrible. Title should have been "How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free" so their point would be more clear.<p>Second, I'm no fan of cars or Apple, but if Cupertino doesn't want their largest employer there who is paying more taxes than everyone else combined, they should just kick them out. If they do want them there, and there's traffic problems, they should use the tax money to build gigantic boulevards so the Apple employees can drive wherever they want. They are taxpayers and their taxes pay for roads like everyone else. The city takes charge of building roads so they should do their job and build roads, or public transport, to serve the people paying taxes, especially those paying the most.
I think if two key driving skills were taught, traffic would be greatly improved.<p>The first, efficient merging, which means, no, you don't stop in your lane to move to the right, you speed up a little and leverage the accordion effect of the slower traffic on the right to find a spot big enough for your car to fit in and then merge. More efficient utilization of the space on the roadway, while keeping the lane you're leaving and the one you're entering moving at their respective speeds.<p>Second, speed up when you get out in front of the jam. This is well studied and found to mitigate the traffic jam behind, when enough drivers do this.
Here in Toronto we don't have per-unit parking requirements. Developers are constantly putting up towers with less than one parking space per unit.<p>It surprised the hell out of me when I bought a condo apartment. No parking spot included.
><i>How not to create traffic jams: Don’t let people park for free</i><p>This title is horrible because it uses a double negation. Here's one without it:<p>><i>How to create traffic jams: Let people park for free</i><p>Doesn't that read much less confusing?
There already exist considerable barriers to car ownership -
1. Cost of car, which in itself is a perpetually depreciating asset.
2. Insurance
3. Recurring service fees
4. Non open market for parts and replacements
5. Price gouging of insurance if found liable in an accident<p>In my honest opinion, any design that doesn't attack the root cause is an improper one. Please make public transit a clean, safe, affordable and sufficiently widespread in coverage instead of increasing barriers to car ownership and ridership.
I avoid places that don't have free parking almost as assidiously as I avoid places that don't have public restrooms. It's a sign that a place is not for people like me.
"Ohh. Ok. I didn't realize we were doing trick questions. What's the safest way to go skiing? Don't ski!"<p>Basically the argument here is to stop traffic jams from happening just make it so annoying that people won't drive. Well here in Texas you literally can't get anywhere without driving. Buses don't really run, there isn't public transportation to utilize, and you're going to tell me on a 100F day to ride a bike 15 miles?
The rise of punitive solutions is real. I was involved with discussions with local municipalities placing (private) local schools under restrictions for <i>not</i> providing sufficient carpool coverage -- levy fines based on percent of families carpooling.<p>Would the inverse of these punitive solutions, ie., encouraging carpool / ridesharing, not also work? It always amazes me how relatively unutilized the HOV lanes are.
It seems to me that you have two choices when dealing with traffic:<p>1. Make the location less desirable.<p>2. Make the transportation more efficient.<p>Obviously nobody wants to do the 1st option, but the 2nd option is more difficult so they stick to the 1st. It seems a little backwards to me, like the goal is simply having less cars regardless of secondary or tertiary negative impact.
Is there free paying in New York city? I thought parking rates there were astronomical AND the city has a decent public transportation system, and yet traffic is so poor... So there may be more to it than free parking
That's funny, I thought congestion charges were how to prevent traffic jams.<p>Could someone parse out 'The Grand Tour' chart for me? I have no idea what it is trying to present.