~one billion
~1,000,000,000
That's how many parking spaces there are in the USA. For every car? About 4 empty spaces... just sitting there, not absorbing the rain, making flooding worse, making cities hotter as they bake in the summer sun.
Our built environment and laws bend over backwards to make driving the only viable transportation option in nearly every imaginable context.
You need to pay for healthcare, but almost never parking.
(Pointing this out makes libertarian heads explode.)
@ron_miller @futurebird yeah, so many business owners seem to think that because they drive to their business, everyone else does too. We have that a lot where I live when business owners try to prevent bike lanes replacing parking. It’s almost always a fundamental misunderstanding of their clientele.
Private paid parking may not be directly subsidized, but it does still have an opportunity cost in terms of preventing something more useful being built there
@bwebster @ron_miller @futurebird Also kinda interesting: metered & time-limited parking tends to be good for business owners, b/c it encourages turnover of the parking spots, which means more customers b/c there’s somewhere to park nearby.
The best-priced parking is where there’s always one empty spot nearby.
@futurebird it’s a vicious cycle. In suburban areas with car-centric culture:
- Zoning rules require buildings to include a certain amount of parking, to accommodate the additional demand
- That parking is often provided using an ocean of asphalt, reducing density
- Walking is harder and public transportation is less feasible, leading most people to use driving as their default mode of transportation.
- This leads to the adoption of zoning rules that require “adequate” parking…
@futurebird @ixtility I know I’m just repeating your point in a less subtle way, but here goes regardless:
There is no such thing as a libertarian Libertarian. They are all just racist fucks who learned the opposite lesson of the point of all the sci-fi they read.
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. In the century since
@futurebird You pay for parking when you use the services/stores that pay for that parking.
If you go a grocery store, your dollars spent at that store go to pay the rent for the building. That building's rent goes to pay parking lot upkeep.
I drive into Philadelphia. I have to pay $20+ each time I visit a doctor.
Sometimes the fees are overt, sometimes they're hidden. There are always fees. Someone has to pay for that parking. Used or not.
Average parking spot in the US is 9 feet x 18 feet, or 162 square feet. 162,000,000,000 square feet is 5811 square miles. That's 1.25 NYC Metropolitan Area in parking spaces; 2x Atlanta proper.
@futurebird 100% this. A good portion of what drove me from "Libertarian" back when I swung that way was most of 'em just weren't smart enough to see that what they really wanted was a continuation of the subsidies that was creating the world they lived in.
You apparently don't know the right libertarians. Or maybe you only know *right* libertarians, if you know what I mean.
(I, for one, oppose it. Pretty sure it's come up more than a few times in my circles where we sit around and bitch about bloody stupid top-down attempts to hammer square solutions onto round problems, too.)
@futurebird https://www.sambutler.us/costs-of-car-economy-bike-transit
According to a 2019 study by Harvard [1], the public cost of the car economy is $5,645 per person per year. (The private cost is $6,000/year per car.)
Together, the cost of maintaining the U.S. car economy is $3.5 trillion per year.
In the communities with significant bike infrastructure, the public cost is $150 per person per year. (The private cost is $500/year per bike.)
In the communities significant public transit, the operating costs are $1,230 per person per year. (The private cost of transit is $720/year per rider).
Together, the cost of a bike and transit economy in the U.S. is $0.862 trillion per year.
#fuckcars #transit #bikes #carfree #publictransit #walking #publicspace #infrastructure #pedestrians #degrowth #postgrowth #economy #government #civic #trillion #parking #parkinglot #highway #road #bicycle #sidewalk #urbanism #community #neighborhood #subsidies #policy #road #street #StrongTowns
@Skyliting @futurebird Even where parking is paid, it may be severely underpriced!
My city only very recently made it possible to eliminate parking minimums in building requirements.
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