Is parking too cheap?

Not bad at all, but is that really how everyone pronounces the forum name? The soft "ch" as opposed to the hard "k" sound? I always read it as ArcBoston.
 
Took me an hour to get from the World Trade Center to Coolidge Corner one night on the T. That's about 5 miles. (I injured my foot, so I couldn't walk to the green line like I normally would.)
 
Boston Globe - September 18, 2010
Space invaders
In Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, citizens find perfect spots to raise environmental awareness

By Eric Moskowitz, Globe Staff | September 18, 2010

In the parking spaces along Commonwealth Avenue in front of Boston University?s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences yesterday at 1 p.m.: Honda, Lexus, Lexus, Ford, patch of sod with people lounging on a couch.

What?

A professor and his former student beckoned passersby to check e-mail on a laptop, play board games, get their bikes fixed, or just hang out with them. ?No Stopping?? and ?Tow Zone?? signs nearby were tweaked to read ?Stopping?? and ?Toe Zone.??

?Even on a rainy day, you can enjoy the outdoors in a city like Boston,?? said Greg Hum, a recent BU graduate and one of the hosts in the spot. It was one of 10 parking spots in the Boston area, and hundreds around the world, where pavement was temporarily reclaimed for PARK(ing) Day, an annual, unofficial anticar celebration.

In Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline, ordinarily mundane, if coveted, parking spaces gave way to live chickens, sidewalk chalk, fortune-telling, live music, and hula hooping. The day ? its founders call it an ?open-source global event?? ? is part art installation, part environmental project, and part garden party, meant to encourage people to consider the urban landscape and how much of it is devoted to moving or storing automobiles.

?It?s rethinking public space. It?s a demonstration of how much can fit in the size of a parking spot,?? said Jackie Douglas, executive director of the LivableStreets Alliance, the Cambridge nonprofit that introduced PARK(ing) Day to Boston two years ago, occupying a single spot. ?And it?s fun.??

The event started in San Francisco five years ago when Rebar, an art and design studio, fed the meter in one of the city?s bleaker sections, unrolled sod, put up a bench and tree, and created a two-hour park between a pair of parked cars.

A photo of the event went viral, and Rebar was soon fielding requests from others wanting to know how to re-create it. Instead, they encouraged people to have fun and be creative, putting their own stamp on a parking space-turned-park on a coordinated Friday in September. Last year, more than 700 spots in 140 international cities were used.

?People sort of say, ?PARK(ing) Day, what the heck is that?? ?? said Linda Olson Pehlke, an urban planner and Brookline Town Meeting member who helped organize the spaces yesterday in Coolidge Corner. ?But once they experience it, [they want to] get in on the fun.??

On one side of Harvard Street an ?urban oasis?? offered beach chairs, sand, and water for wading. On the other side, in front of Coolidge Corner Theatre, passersby watched short films of a similar theme (?Depaving Day,?? ?Paint a Parking Lot, Put up a Paradise??), collected literature, and tossed discs provided by the car-sharing company Zipcar.

Participants secured permits from local governments to occupy spots all day. Brookline and Cambridge waived their fees and helped promote the event, but in Boston, Nathan Phillips, a BU professor, put up about $225 to secure permits and post an insurance bond for five adjacent spots in two locations.

Phillips contemplated that for a moment, but he didn?t seem disappointed. ?We value the parking space,?? he said, standing on sod he had collected from Gold Star Farm in New Hampshire. ?It shouldn?t be free.??

The Cambridge spaces received a promotional boost from CitySmart, a program in that city that encourages people to walk, bike, or ride public transportation rather than drive. In Brookline, Pehlke?s effort quickly attracted support from backers ranging from the town?s Department of Public Works to the Garden Club to Upper Crust Pizza.

But the event does not enjoy a universally smooth relationship with business. Some shopkeepers welcome it, some oppose, and some are torn.

?I think anything we can do in the city to encourage people to use their bikes, to walk, to take the bus, to plan fewer car trips . . . is a good thing,?? said Rick Henry, owner of Stellabella Toys. Still, he said, ?Neighborhood retailers in Cambridge and Somerville and places like that, we need our customers to be able to get to us, and sometimes they can?t conveniently do it by walking or taking the T.??

In Porter Square, hula hoopers swiveled in one space, while up the street, a space occupied by the Cambridge Climate Emergency Action group was less whimsical. It featured a bookshelf of works by environmental writers Rachel Carson and Bill McKibben, a display of energy-saving posters from World War II (?Have you REALLY tried to save energy by getting into a car club??? a GI on the front asked), and a planter brimming with homegrown parsley. Minka vanBeuzekom asked people to sign a petition promising to reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions, and asking government to take action.

But it wasn?t without fun. The group had a raffle for an electric bike and put out spread of secretly healthy chocolate muffins.

?You can?t really tell there are beets in there,?? vanBeuzekom said from a parking spot in front of Pemberton Farms market, ?unless you?re looking for the beet flavor.??

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.
Click to expand...
 
Saw something about it in the Metro on Thursday, under the events section I think.

"of 10 parking spots in the Boston area" Oh my.
 
END STATIST INTERVENTIONS TO PERSECUTE DRIVERS!!!!!!

Oh wait, the state's the one keeping prices artificially low? Carry on then.
 
If we're going to be capping anything, I don't think capping the number of garage spaces is a good idea. I'd much rather see the number and size of garages capped, but allow them to freely add or delete levels of parking.

The way I see it, we want as many people as we can possibly get out of their cars and onto mass transit. Pure-punitive measures have a very low chance of succeeding, and a "carrot-and-stick" approach is bound to work much better. I also believe that there are people who will never give up their car but could certainly be persuaded to give up city driving - i.e., people who would happily drive to the edge of the city and shift to the transit network. For this reason, I believe that "at a train station" is one of the only places where building a garage is appropriate, and I think it would go over much better than anyone might expect it to if we started slashing the available parking in the city but expanded it at the city's edges, and/or on top of transit hubs.

Although, as for capping the quantity of parking spaces... I'd absolutely support the capping of available on-street parking and surface parking lot spaces. (Then again, I'd also absolutely support outright banning all on-street parking. I'm not a fan of on-street parking.)
 
The purpose of capping the number of garage parking spaces is to cap the number of cars that are driven into the city. This is to satisfy the Clean Air Act, but it also helps alleviate traffic congestion (somewhat).

If you allowed unlimited number of garage parking spaces, but capped the number of garages, then garages would add levels and invite more cars into downtown Boston. It would be less ugly than surface lots, but just as bad on pollution and traffic congestion.

The induced traffic caused by parking lots also applies to park-n-ride train stations. That's why I only support park-n-ride lots near highways. Otherwise, local streets get flooded with car traffic going to and from the parking lots.
 
Interesting article, though I don't understand the authors point that cheap on-street parking leads to more expensive garage parking.
 
underground said:
END STATIST INTERVENTIONS TO PERSECUTE DRIVERS!!!!!!

Oh wait, the state's the one keeping prices artificially low? Carry on then.
Click to expand...

Anyone who calls themselves anti-statist (I'd include myself) would not say "carry on". It's more like this, as said by a Republican, not an anti-statist:

END THE LIBERAL INTERVENTIONS TO PERSECUTE DRIVERS!!!!!!

Oh wait, the liberals are the ones keeping prices artificially low? Carry on then.
 
Writing this post from Paris. There are cars and scooters on the streets here that compliment the extensive, cheap and easy to use metro. Parking is free in many areas for motorbikes.

Boston should not cap parking as it is bad for business and street life but instead improve mass transit.
 
Haha, parking is good for street life? Are you kidding?

Unless you meant honking and screaming as drivers in traffic jams, induced by the promise of free parking, attempt to swoop in onto the spaces they are fighting over.

Or maybe you meant the "street life" of the suburban shopping mall parking lot.

But seriously, expansion of parking facilities is in almost direct conflict with street life. Parking lots are dead zones for pedestrians. People leaving their cars only briefly to stop in stores doesn't make for much life.
 
Last edited:
Street parking in Paris is not remotely close to a parking lot, though. Paris has the density and street level activity from pedestrians and bicyclists that more than makes up for the hideous amount of cars that line its myriad of small streets.
 
Matthew said:
Haha, parking is good for street life? Are you kidding?

Unless you meant honking and screaming as drivers in traffic jams, induced by the promise of free parking, attempt to swoop in onto the spaces they are fighting over.

Or maybe you meant the "street life" of the suburban shopping mall parking lot.

But seriously, expansion of parking facilities is in almost direct conflict with street life. Parking lots are dead zones for pedestrians. People leaving their cars only briefly to stop in stores doesn't make for much life.
Click to expand...

If on street parking is priced right so that there are always a few spaces open along each stretch, then I think it can be beneficial to street life. It can act as a buffer between the travel lane(s) and the sidewalk, or if you are really ambitious, a buffer between the travel lanes and a protected bike lane or cycle track (and then the sidewalk).

Parking in and of itself is not bad. Underpriced and overpriced parking are what causes the problems.
 
Well yeah, but he said "should not cap parking" which isn't about Shoup-style reform (which I support) and more about allowing the creation of large parking lots.

If you don't have large urban highways feeding into downtown, then perhaps you can get away without an explicit cap. But Boston built those large urban highways, so the market pressure is going to demand large parking lots to go along with the large highways.

But the result of that would be disastrous (see: typical American city). The heavily subsidized highways would flood the city with cars, and too much space would be given over to parking. The cap is there to stop that from happening, as per the Clean Air Act. In short, the cap is a market interference which counter-balances another market interference: highway subsidies.
 
Matthew said:
Well yeah, but he said "should not cap parking" which isn't about Shoup-style reform (which I support) and more about allowing the creation of large parking lots.

If you don't have large urban highways feeding into downtown, then perhaps you can get away without an explicit cap. But Boston built those large urban highways, so the market pressure is going to demand large parking lots to go along with the large highways.

But the result of that would be disastrous (see: typical American city). The heavily subsidized highways would flood the city with cars, and too much space would be given over to parking. The cap is there to stop that from happening, as per the Clean Air Act. In short, the cap is a market interference which counter-balances another market interference: highway subsidies.
Click to expand...

I don't buy that a whole lot more parking would get built without the cap. Policy should be neutral - get rid of the cap, get rid of mandatory parking minimums for development in downtown areas, market-price street parking a la SFPark, price neighborhood parking permits at some level, sell municipally-owned garages and lots. I'm sure a bit more parking would get built, maybe 10%, 15%, but i doubt it would be a lot. The current policy just results in arbitrarily and economically inefficiently high rents for incumbent lot and garage owners, excessive air pollution and congestion from those searching for spaces, etc. If you want to discourage garages you could always slap a tax on off-street spaces. I'd argue against that, but it's far more efficient than the cap.
 
I agree with you mostly, but I think you have to add "end highway subsidies" to that list. And it's too late for that.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top