Parking kills businesses, not bikes or buses

I&#x27;d just like to add some context:<p>People seem to be talking about this much more now because of the prominent placement of the r&#x2F;fuckcars subreddit&#x27;s parking lot on the r&#x2F;place canvas.<p>If the whole fuck-cars premise or really anything about not owning a car, replacing car lanes with bike lane etc, sounds really radical&#x2F;non-sensical to you, please spend some time on the Not Just Bikes YT channel, read a bit of r&#x2F;fuckcars or r&#x2F;lowcars and try to approach this with an open mind.<p>I come from a rural European area, so some of the stuff these people say sounded a bit extreme to me, but you have to realize that some US&#x2F;Canadian cities are absolute hellscapes compared to what we imagine a &quot;city&quot; to look like.

I’m reading this while vacationing in Barcelona. We’re staying in the city’s Gothic Quarter, which has this labyrinth of narrow medieval streets. This evening we realized that the whole week of our visit we never got into a car, not even a cab.<p>I can see the reason why people walking around spend more than people in cars. Today while returning from a tourist site a little early, we remembered there was an ice cream store we wanted to try, which turned out to be close to our subway station. On the last part of our walk back, we randomly noticed a unique indoor mall and walked around it just to pass the time (Malda Galeria? Turned out it has lots of board games, anime merch, and other “nerd” stuff!). I had made a purchase the day before on a similarly casual browse, so I resisted!<p>Comparing this to a trip to Houston a month ago: we were on highways the whole time. Even if we did see something interesting (unlikely while flying through Houston’s confusing highways), there’s no way we’d stop navigation on Google maps, find an off ramp, make a left turn through busy traffic, then search for a parking spot… just to casually browse for stuff. How are you supposed to catch the notice of passerbys if you’re a little shop keep? The fun stuff we did required planning, paying for parking, traffic, etc.<p>Another YouTube channel that might convince you cars are horrible for cities: CityNerd is some sort of urban planning professional and has great videos about induced demand and a particularly good one about how expensive paying for a car is when you consider the full accounting (it’s something like $10k a year).<p>Bothering my local politicians about bike infrastructure has been on my to do list for months. I need to get to it!

This has been shown in studies over and over, but seemingly most businesses thinks their situation is somehow special and actively lobby against their best interest. Even 5th Ave in Manhattan, one of the busiest pedestrian areas in the US has had street improvements indefinitely delayed because businesses are fighting to defend the vehicle lanes.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nyc.streetsblog.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;08&#x2F;city-dot-still-mum-on-long-delayed-fifth-avenue-busway&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nyc.streetsblog.org&#x2F;2022&#x2F;04&#x2F;08&#x2F;city-dot-still-mum-on...</a>

Am I the only one bothered by articles of this nature never really clarifying that nothing they say has any meaning below a certain very specific population density and in very specific areas with permissive zoning allowing commerce near to housing?<p>&quot;Parking is, however, just a symptom of our massive car addiction.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s especially hard to take seriously with comments like the above. I don&#x27;t personally have a single friend in North America or Europe to whom it would be a &quot;reasonable alternative&quot; to travel on highways (where it is prohibited) by bike or bus and invest maybe 90 minutes to simply get to the closest grocery store and then be able to take home maybe 1&#x2F;10th of what they normally load into their trunk. This false alternative is always brought up, but the only real option that exists is reorganizing housing across the whole society to massively increase density and to mix commerce zoning with homes in a way currently unheard of.

That is an awfully biased article.<p>&gt; “A study in Berlin . . . more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.”<p>So what? Even in Berlin, businesses care about the 49% of car travellers. Plus, a study in Berlin not that relevant to Auckland: Berlin has a population of 3.6M (area 892 km² with 1.2M passenger cars and a metro system), Auckland 1.6M (area 1,086 km² with 0.74 passenger vehicles per capita and no metro system). New Zealand has a population of 5M.<p>Personally I know lack of parking affects me. I live in the suburbs of Christchurch where a car is necessary. I rarely go shopping in town, because our city council has been making the city centre more difficult to access (expensive parking, congestion due to slow zones and newer slower traffic signals, removal of street-side parking). I love pedestrian zones, but there needs to be a way to get to them.

I spent two years commuting by bike and bus and by doing so I was much more aware of the stores within a 5 mile radius of me. I wanted to stop and spend my money and time BUT it wasn’t worth missing my bus or risking my bike getting stolen so I never stopped. This was in Los Angeles. If buses were more reliable &amp; enjoyable I would have stopped or gone back on weekends, and if I could trust my bike to still be there those businesses would have benefitted.

Anecdotally certain areas in London shops with parking near or in front of the premises seem to survive better than shops that have no parking at all.<p>I&#x27;ve seen certain areas in North London with no parking on very busy roads die within months of opening, repeat cycle of new shops that come and go, I can&#x27;t imagine the costs to outfit some of these places.<p>My thinking was the area just isn&#x27;t right but less than 200 meters down plenty of free short term parking and the area is bustling with businesses that have been around longer than I can remember.

&gt;Replacing kerb-side parking with bus or bike lanes does not hurt local businesses, and in some cases, it can increase patronage. Bikes and buses don’t kill businesses - parking does.<p>Where is the evidence to support the claim that parking &quot;kills&quot; businesses -- I read the article and don&#x27;t see any.<p>What about businesses whose products are too big&#x2F;heavy to carry on foot or even on a bus? Where are all the pedestrians carrying 24-can cases of beverages? 40-pound bags of dog food?

&gt; A study in Berlin found that shop owners believed only about 12 percent of customers lived within 1km of a shopping street when more than 51 percent of customers lived within that walkable distance.<p>This seem to imply that shops don&#x27;t benefit much from parking when majority of customers lives within 1km of the store, and if that&#x27;s the definition of local businesses then I don&#x27;t see much problem eliminating parking. Local businesses catering to local customers. Non-local businesses, ie businesses where the majority of customers isn&#x27;t with that 1km, should not be located next to shopping streets, which might require a new definition of shopping streets which centralize all kind of shopping to a specific street.<p>This seem to somewhat match a trend that I have noticed here in Sweden. Stores catering to a larger audience seem to have started to move away from expensive city cores in the last couple of decades, with specific shopping street decreasing in importance as a result.

Since this discussion is mainly US-centric, and not NZ centric, I feel at liberty to ask this question even if it&#x27;s not strictly about the article:<p>I understand the argument that the U.S. is reliant on cars, because it is so spread out, and spread out because it is reliant on cars. This may be due to an alliance by automakers, marketers, and the government. Stipulated.<p>But given that that it <i>is already the case</i>, how would a plan to get people to ditch their cars actually work? Is there a plan that describes how to consolidate a sprawling population of hundreds of millions of people, who already own houses and property all over a massive country?<p>Do the people in suburbs who drive everywhere just demolish their homes and move into apartments in the city? I say demolish, because in this scenario there are enough disincentives that nobody chooses to live in the suburbs anymore, like they have historical, so all these homes would lose their value.<p>Maybe we still have those suburbs, but we imagine a mass transit infrastructure that replaces cars. That could work, but we don&#x27;t have it, and it seems hand-wavey to me. Does anybody (not in this thread, just anywhere) <i>actually</i> have a detailed plan for how it would work? And the answer isn&#x27;t &quot;yeah: Europe!&quot; because, as stipulated, the U.S. is currently laid out radically differently, in a way that just wanting it to be like Europe won&#x27;t solve.<p>I&#x27;m not arguing that cars are great, I&#x27;m just trying to figure out to what extent this is based on wishful thinking &#x2F; science fiction, versus whether there&#x27;s a serious plan behind it.

I&#x27;ve lived half of my adult life in Manhattan and the other half in Silicon Valley in a suburban environment.<p>It&#x27;s nonsensical to assume that a place like Silicon Valley could ever give up their cars and the parking necessary to go to stores restaurants etcetera. It simply cannot happen.<p>In New York, all of my friends lived in apartments within a quarter-mile of the subway system. If I was living on the upper west side and wanted to meet my friends in the village, a 35 to 40 minute train ride was by far the easiest way to get there. No one owned a car (many of us didn&#x27;t even have licenses).<p>Before Uber and Lyft, we took taxis if it was the middle of the night or freezing snow; otherwise we took the subway.<p>In Silicon Valley towns, people live a mile or more from the city center. There is absolutely no practical way to get to shops and restaurants other than to take your car and park near the center of town. Once in a while on a whim if the weather is nice, I suppose a family a bit nearer than average to downtown might bike together to brunch on a weekend. But if you need to get a quart of milk to make coffee, or get some food for dinner, you use a car. There&#x27;s no other option.<p>The future I see plausible would include low carbon impact cars, small electric vehicles, self- driving, like an army of Lyft and Uber at very low cost.<p>I think that&#x27;s the best future we can hope for without a radical restructuring of Suburbia, which is simply not in the cards.

While thks article is quite interesting, I think it&#x27;s worth pointing out the vast differences in non-car accessibility between countries, probably due to zoning laws. Large and low-density population places would require reliable modes of long distance transport (be it cars or buses or metro etc). From what I&#x27;ve heard North America practically requires car ownership outside medium sized cities. Here in the Netherlands you can mostly get anywhere in the country with a bike and a train (OV) card. Back home in India not too many people have cars so buses, trains and taxis and autorickshaws (aka TukTuks) substitute them. Not criticizing the point of the article, but I think a bit more nuance is needed when comparing Germany with Canada with New Zealand.<p>Also, I&#x27;d highly recommend checking out Not Just Bikes on YouTube, and perhaps the more &quot;radical&quot; r&#x2F;fuckcars on reddit.

I have a theory: small shop owners are disproportionately likely to be car drivers, and when they say parking is essential for their customers, what they are really worried about is measures that will make it less convenient to drive them selves.

I don’t think a lot of research and articles are needed, visiting any European city (or small town) is enough.

As a midwestern suburbanite, these threads remind me that urban dwellers spend a lot of time thinking about me and the way I live, while I never think about them at all.<p>This is probably dangerous.

People who are perplexed about why a business would not want a bike lane need to take a look at the history books. It was business owners who were pushing for streetcar lines to be paved over into stroads like Geary blvd in San Fransisco. They see their clientele as one traveling by private car over one reliant on public transportation, and probably feel they don&#x27;t even want to be associated with public transportation and the image of who typically rides it.<p>You see the same tired dog whistle arguments come up today. &quot;Who is going to even use it?&quot; the residents of Beverly hills might say to the purple line subway extension under their city limits, whose arteries carry some of the highest levels of bus traffic in the country. I think the subtext is clear who they don&#x27;t want to be building infrastructure for when you look at the demographics of who is and isn&#x27;t currently using public transit in a place like Beverly Hills.

Anyone who has visited major Asian cities already knows that grocery businesses and customers both prefer dense cities - because everything happens on an app and a delivery system.<p>You don&#x27;t even have to worry about weather or biking or bulk groceries because of modern technology.<p>Suburban parking hellholes are a human aberration that needs to be left for the history books.

This is pretty obvious at least for some cases. Of course it depends a lot on the structure of the street &#x2F; city. I haven&#x27;t been much in the US, but I can imagine it&#x27;s not affected by some issues as much as other places. It comes down to space, and how you use it. I spent a couple months living in a busy street of a European city. The amount of parking space took easily 2-3x that of the sidewalk which was only maybe 2 meters wide. It was a busy street for pedestrians also and it was pure hell even walking there, but especially just stopping to see a shop window. You would automatically become an obstacle for all the other pedestrians, so almost nobody would ever do it. You can imagine that this is terrible for business - cutting down on the parking space would give space to pedestrians and they would have an easier time checking out shops and spending money there.

A question for all those in favour of street parking: If parking right in front of the store is so vital for business, why don&#x27;t they do it in shopping malls? Why do you have to park your car somewhere else and then walk to the stores?<p>I&#x27;ve never even gotten an answer, just silence.

I just got an ebike with the intention of riding to and from work. So far I have chosen not to do it for the 5 work days I’ve had the bike:<p>Weather is an issue: what do bike only people do when it is raining? Cold?<p>First couple days it was still dark when I was about to head out… I’m hoping that goes away soon.<p>I’ve misplaced my bike lock keys so I need to get a new one if I want to ride anywhere else.<p>Even if roads were changed tomorrow to be 100% bike friendly, at least 80% of my car trips are too distant to bike without a major shift in my schedule. And that is with most of my long trips cut off since Covid.<p>The electric motor does help with arriving super sweaty and some of the safety issues, but there are quite a few problems won’t be solved by removing some parking and nicer bike lanes.

&gt; In a study of Parkdale Village in Toronto, a quarter of business owners estimated that over half their customers drove to their business – in reality, just 4 percent drive.<p>Come on, Parkdale is just behind Little Portugal and near Dufferin Mall, all very walkable areas, how is this a surprise? Repeat the study w&#x2F; Yorkdale Mall near highway 401 and those car numbers will shoot through the roof.<p>The reality is that areas closer to downtown that are a hassle to park at will attract downtown folks and more suburban areas with big parking lots will attract suburban folks with cars.<p>What&#x27;s the point of cherrypicking one area and try to draw general conclusions about parking from that?

&gt; <i>Both the Toronto and Berlin studies found that people on foot, on bikes or taking public transport spend more money when they go to local shops and visit much more often than those who travel by car. In the case of Berlin, people who did not drive were responsible for more than 90 percent of weekly spending.</i><p>That makes perfect sense. People who drive far are looking for better prices. They will buy one or two things they know are usually cheap or often on sale and then get other things in some other store that&#x27;s along their route to wherever they are going.<p>The walkin&#x27; locals are going to be the more captive customers.

Meanwhile in America, Old Town revivals in like every small city in the United States has used abundant free parking as a key driver to get customers into businesses.

Cars are C++ of the transportation world, every body bitches about them but the entire cities and sub-divisions are planned and built around them.

I think the bias come from a pretty obvious fact: people who drive do 100% of the whining about parking and traffic. People who walk to the shop just come in looking happy and well-adjusted and ready to spend money. So the only thing the shopkeeper ever hears about transportation is how bad traffic and parking are.

If the advocates are so positive about it, then they shouldn&#x27;t mind putting money in escrow to be paid out to any business that are negatively impacted by this.<p>Do any of these advocates have an ownership stake in any properties or businesses in the affected area?

Let&#x27;s be honest. Lack of parking and paid parking kills businesses.

<i>&quot;Studies from across the globe have found that shop owners consistently overestimate the number of shoppers that arrive by car and vastly underestimate the number of people who arrive by other modes.&quot;</i><p>Perhaps the stats support this, we&#x27;ll see (but I&#x27;m suspicious). What I am certain about is that I&#x27;ll shop where there&#x27;s parking for my vehicle—and that&#x27;s how I go shopping. It would be difficult for me to estimate how many times I&#x27;ve bypassed certain shops&#x2F;businesses because there&#x27;s either no parking or the on-street parking is full up.

Yeah I think lots of cities in the USA will eventually figure this out. Even if parking is limited people will find a way to get to these businesses.

Decades of evidence indicates how bad stroads, parking and car culture in general are for society.

Off topic, but I have never seen the &quot;kerb&quot; spelling before.

What are the chances that millions of business operators across the world and over the course of decades are completely wrong about how traffic, including parking, affect their businesses? We could choose to believe that business interests are not public interests so to hell with what businesses want, but lets not harbor the lie that the businesses are mistaken in their experience.

A whole article about this without a mention of self-driving cars is silly. Even if you think they&#x27;re still a decade away, they <i>are</i> coming and they are going to change <i>everything</i> about parking in cities.

Expensive and sparse parking kills businesses.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a city center with hundreds of shops die out because businesses shut or moved to the newly built mall outside the city that has a huuge parking area.<p>There is no reason to go into the city anymore, people can do all daily shopping and errands at the mall.