![]() ![]() Will reducing space for parked cars and reclaiming more space for people make our cities better? Take our survey here to share your thoughts. I’m sure a lot of you have a lot of thoughts about parking, so I want to hear from you. ![]() If it’s easier to live without a car, they will be the biggest beneficiaries. Ruinous interest rates, borrowing to buy the car and pay for the fuel and the repairs. It’s always nice to have a car, but they’re expensive, especially for low-income people who then have to support the car. “We don’t allow that to be built now,” he said.īut low-income Californians would be the key winners, Shoup predicts, since car ownership can be a major burden. if it will save them a lot of money on housing.” If new housing can be built close to transit and without mandated, multiple parking spaces per unit, Shoup said it would attract “people who are willing to go without a car. He cited the city of Pasadena as an example, where revenue generated from parking meters funded infrastructure improvements that made Old Pasadena more walkable, drawing more people - and sales tax revenue - to the previously blighted district. ![]() That cost is paid by everybody, including people who don’t own the car.”īy making parking more limited and therefore more valuable to drivers, Shoup believes cities could charge “a fair market price” for parking. “But just because the driver doesn’t pay for it doesn’t mean the cost goes away. “Most people seem to think that the parking spaces come out of thin air,” he said. So how will drivers react as more cities move to reduce space for parking? I asked Shoup if he anticipated some growing pains, but he contends drivers have been allotted too much space for too long. “Like many things in life, it takes much longer than you thought it would for something to happen, but then it happens much faster than you thought it could.” “I thought would change things very quickly,” he told me. “It’s what the hippies used to call a natural high,” he said with a laugh. I asked him how it felt to see California and its cities begin to adopt policies he’d long been calling for. He published what he refers to as his 800-page “manifesto” in 2005, titled “ The High Cost of Free Parking.” In it, he laid out the argument that many state and city officials are echoing today: that creating so much space to park our cars has contributed to expensive housing, traffic congestion, air pollution and climate change - among other issues. “We have separate zones that you have to go from one place to another to handle all the obligations of life - and you get free parking almost everywhere,” he said. ![]()
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