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Depends. I'd rather risk a minor injury than one that could leave me incapacitated for years or disabled.
The trouble with minor injuries is that they don't always stay minor. Once the skin is broken, an route for infection has be established and should those minor injures get complications....best not to get injured at all.
And your car took up space that someone else could have used while you biked downtown or walked to classes. Off street parking often frees on street parking for people who are visiting the neighborhood or shopping.
I paid for a yearly permit from the city like many other residents on my street. Available parking for the residents is a priority with the street I lived on. It was classified as a neighborhood street and often times had college students that tried to get out of having to pay for parking downtown by parking on our street all day long.
Plus there wasn't anywhere to shop by my street, it was pretty much a dead end street on the edge of downtown next to the college.
I used my car when I needed it, and I liked having my car available for those times, but I also preferred commuting by bike and foot whenever I had the chance.
Lots of stuff to chime in on. Here is my take as a car owner, bike rider and transit users.
Not all areas need abundant parking. I am hoping to get rid of my car. It is on my 5 year plan. In denser, compact development it is entirely feasible to not drive often. I started a new job a few weeks ago, and as a result I am averaging about 7-12 miles a week. Post work errands are done via transit on my way home. Many weekend errands are done via bike. I have used uber as well. I used my car to carry extra people and to go shopping in a further out suburb at the mall.
Expecting everyone to bring a car in all locales reduced the efficiency of development and drives up costs on the whole. Options are good!
I paid for a yearly permit from the city like many other residents on my street. Available parking for the residents is a priority with the street I lived on. It was classified as a neighborhood street and often times had college students that tried to get out of having to pay for parking downtown by parking on our street all day long.
Plus there wasn't anywhere to shop by my street, it was pretty much a dead end street on the edge of downtown next to the college.
I used my car when I needed it, and I liked having my car available for those times, but I also preferred commuting by bike and foot whenever I had the chance.
The point remains during the time when your car sat there someone else could have used it. Your car inconvenienced others because there was no parking. Sure I well and truly understand the reason behind residential parking but the reason why many places have off the street parking is to free on the street parking for others.
Lots of stuff to chime in on. Here is my take as a car owner, bike rider and transit users.
Not all areas need abundant parking. I am hoping to get rid of my car. It is on my 5 year plan. In denser, compact development it is entirely feasible to not drive often. I started a new job a few weeks ago, and as a result I am averaging about 7-12 miles a week. Post work errands are done via transit on my way home. Many weekend errands are done via bike. I have used uber as well. I used my car to carry extra people and to go shopping in a further out suburb at the mall.
Expecting everyone to bring a car in all locales reduced the efficiency of development and drives up costs on the whole. Options are good!
What drives up costs is the fact that some people are able and willing to pay more than others and that is about it.
The point remains during the time when your car sat there someone else could have used it. Your car inconvenienced others because there was no parking. Sure I well and truly understand the reason behind residential parking but the reason why many places have off the street parking is to free on the street parking for others.
He wasn't on a commercial street, it's possible the resident didn't really want visitors to use their street for parking anyway. Many urban residential streets are limited to those with resident's permits (depending on city).
My job includes visiting commercial buildings with medical offices. 90% of the time these offices have zero spots available during normal work hours. In each of these cases the local zoning board has underestimated the parking needs and /or bought the developers reasoning for having what turns out to be too few parking spots on the property.
I didn't think we were discussing commercial in this thread, just residential. Still, even in these cases, if a developer has wrong-sized parking too much, the tenants will look for other digs with more ample parking when their lease is up. So I'm not sure it's something which needs to be solved via government fiat.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 46H
There are lots of train towns in NJ that have huge parking problems which do not meet your 3 descriptions. These are not high density areas with most buildings 2 stories or less. There are parking lots for commuters, but they usually require a permit (sometimes at great expense, sometimes with 5 year waiting periods) for daily use and are usually jammed. The street parking is metered and also jammed due to the draw of these towns. Developers do have demand to build within the downtowns as many people ( like empty nesters) want to enjoy the restaurants and shops and be able to walk to the train. The problem is the developer would rather use the land for units. Any extra parking will take away from the number of units. In these towns, a car is needed. If they assume 2 cars per unit (these will be very expensive) they will still have problems with visitors, cars for children who might return home, home aids, etc. Where are these people going to park? The commuter lots are full and the streets have metered parking and are full.
I admit I wasn't thinking about railroad suburbs in particular, although they are essentially an exclave of urban development within the suburbs. They also have some characteristics of tourist traps, in that they're commercial draws that encourage people from nearby communities to come there during the day to shop, or at night to socialize.
I also admit that, unlike in cities or college towns, relatively few people would willingly choose to live in such a place without a car, even if they tend to use their car a bit less than most people would. However, I'm also going to hazard a guess that not only are these areas desirable, but on a price-per-square-foot basis, they are costlier than the not walkable areas which surround them.
Parking problems are basically a sign of success for a neighborhood, not a failure. In the modern era every desirable walkable area develops them. I don't see that changing any time soon, unless self-driving cars really do make remote parking a possibility. Regardless, we have a lot of past experience that putting too many parking lots into urban neighborhoods makes them less desirable, not more. And I have never heard of a gentrified, traditionally walkable neighborhood which has lost desirability because parking was difficult. So I think the status quo will remain.
Quote:
Originally Posted by im_a_lawyer
Construction companies don't care about long term consequences, cities do. Here is what the "market" does to the city:
I'm no fan of capitalism, but you really shouldn't be using an image of a (publicly-funded) highway to prove this point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana
Just how could a developer ascertain that? You can use averages, which is what I believe cities do when they come up with figures for minimum parking requirements. But that doesn't mean your building is not going to be full of outliers who raise or lower the number of cars. In an apartment building that is constantly changing residents, the numbers could change constantly.
There are plenty of housing market studies available online if you want to peruse them which have been produced by cities or nonprofits. Developers of major apartment complexes usually at least undertake a cursory market study of their own to determine the correct pricing for their project.
I have no doubt a developer could come up with a more accurate estimate of parking needs than is established by city zoning. I think Pittsburgh is better than most, but the way it works here is that any residential development needs to provide at least one space per unit, unless it's located Downtown. The thing is, there are many cases where you might not need this much parking. For example, if it is a senior condo, or a student-focused apartment. And while it's not a huge deal if you're building a townhouse development, if you're building an apartment with a few hundred units in a busy urban area, that either means you're talking about probably burying 1-2 levels of parking partially underground, and then having a few more above ground level. Structured parking like this is ridiculously expensive, meaning in order to recoup their costs developers will need to charge high rents.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana
I think on-street parking is a bad idea. My daughter and her boyfriend have both been victims of hit and run accidents in their neighborhood since they moved to a place that requires you to park in the street. No one was injured, they weren't even in their cars, but the cars were damaged.
I've dealt with streetside parking here in Pittsburgh for nearly ten years, and before that in many other cities. You inevitably eventually end up with someone scuffing your bumper who can't parallel park, and occasionally get your mirror clipped, but that's about it. I'm sorry your daughter and her boyfriend have had bad luck, but as with nei, I don't think the experience is typical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana
In most cities that I am familiar with, including Denver, the speed limit is 25-30 mph on all but a few streets. I'm not opposed to on-street parking, just to the idea that somehow that makes the streets safer.
The argument is basically this:
Most people drive in one of two ways. First there is active, alert driving. This is how we tend to drive when we are going somewhere for the first time. Then there is the "autopilot" driving which happens when we are traveling along a route we know well. In this case our mind wanders, and alertness drops. As should not be surprising, most accidents happen when we are in "autopilot." We tend to speed up, and not expect to see obstacles on the road. And indeed, most places where we can go fast things obstructing the road are rare, but when they do happen, collisions at high speed are of course fatal.
On-street parking (particularly on narrow streets) is one way in which our mind is forced to be more "active" while driving. We have to actually pay attention to not clip mirrors, make sure we're leaving enough room for cars to pass us on the other side, etc. For similar reasons, two-way streets are safer than one-way streets. A full on Dutch "woonerf" model complements this by eliminating any grade change between the sidewalk and the road, along with adding slight turns to the road to break up sight lines from block to block. All of which makes driving a bit more "edgy" in some senses, but also ensures no one is driving fast, and they always have time to brake to a full stop if a child runs into the road or something.
Yes, as you explained! OK, but more accidents may translate to more injuries.
The study I linked to found that on-street parking led to lower fatal crash rates. Which one is better to reduce, injuries or fatalities? To me it is obvious that reducing fatalities is where the focus should be.
There might be a point if we are talking about thousands and thousands of injuries compared to just one life saved where I would admit it is better to reduce the injuries than save the one life, but I have not seen any evidence that the injury/fatality ratio between on-street and off-street parking is so stark. I doubt anyone has even done research on that question.
In light of that uncertainty, I'm not going to say street parking should be mandated everywhere, but I'm certainly going to say it would appear to be preferable to take the option that reduces fatalities overall.
There's the Japanese method: to buy a car one must show proof you have an off street parking, either through ownership or renting. The roads are too narrow to have room for parked cars.
I'm no fan of capitalism, but you really shouldn't be using an image of a (publicly-funded) highway to prove this point.
The point was that Houston didn't plan for their growth properly so that's why the traffic is so bad. No matter how many roads you build, car traffic just doesn't scale. Good luck having 10 million cars going to work at the same time...
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OK, but more accidents may translate to more injuries.
