Peak Car and the future of everything

[fattony]

There is a new app called 'Spot' that allows space owners to rent out their "owned" space to another person by the day, week or month. This could lead to higher utilization of the existing infrastructure, however, it seems to come into direct odds with the air pollution regulation.

I bet that works great for driveways, but not well at all in garages.

 

[rinserepeat]

It really is an insane notion that people get to store huge quantities of personal property on the street for free--but only if it is a car. A homeless guy can't leave something as small as a shopping cart (ok, stolen shopping cart) without folks freaking out about it not being there, but any of us can leave a licensed car many times the size (almost no matter how derelict).

To their credit, Brookline and Arlington never did accede to letting people park on the street overnight, but elsewhere its just crazy to look at a street and ask whose idea was it to warehouse immobilized stuff on what's supposed to be our mobility infrastructure?

to be fair, though - in much of the urban core - that on-street car storage is physical protection from moving cars. I actually leave the beater car I rarely use on the street to keep us safe when we're out front. We've had a lot of issues with dangerous driving in the neighborhood - and that car gets dinged maybe once every other month. at the other end of the block the house on the corner lot has bollards - someone rams into them every couple years when they take the corner way too fast. last one came within inches of the house.


Ideally you want to create streets where people are discouraged from driving too fast in the first place... but baby steps...

anyway - I find it interesting that there are people on both the left AND the right who are pretty much in agreement that there are some serious problems with the auto-centric suburban experiment.

 

[cozzyd]

Given the number of non-drivers in the core cities (Boston, Cambridge, Somerville), I wonder if speed cameras could be politically palatable. I imagine many of the speeders are suburbanites taking various shortcuts.

 

[F-Line to Dudley]

to be fair, though - in much of the urban core - that on-street car storage is physical protection from moving cars. I actually leave the beater car I rarely use on the street to keep us safe when we're out front. We've had a lot of issues with dangerous driving in the neighborhood - and that car gets dinged maybe once every other month. at the other end of the block the house on the corner lot has bollards - someone rams into them every couple years when they take the corner way too fast. last one came within inches of the house.

This. Banning on-street only works when the roads are narrow enough to calm traffic without the row of parked cars. There are some side streets in Brookline and Arlington that get treated like drag strips during the overnight parking bans. It doesn't work everywhere, and there's no systematic way to rate which streets are safe for a ban and which streets the parking row fills a somewhat necessity for keeping the pavement from getting too wide and too fast. You can't exactly blitz a bunch of street-narrowing construction to easily step it down, either. There are just too immensely many streets to cover; it would take decades to do even if unlimited money were available.

 

[Matthew]

This. Banning on-street only works when the roads are narrow enough to calm traffic without the row of parked cars.

I don't disagree either. There's utility to well-regulated on-street parking. That's one of the reasons that Jeff Speck made it a key point in his book, Walkable City. On broad streets it can protect pedestrians and cyclists. It also adds some additional traffic (but not as much as often assumed) to local businesses. These are not bad effects. Ideally, the parking prices would be balanced with demand so as to maintain ~85% occupancy at any given moment, Shoup-style.

The real problem with on-street parking comes when it becomes seen as an entitlement. Removing on-street parking spaces for more valuable uses, like bus stops and crosswalks, should not be a battle. And on-street parking supply should never be used as a weapon against development of underutilized parcels. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, both of those behaviors are quite common in the perverse politics of American cities. Even in Brookline, where overnight on-street parking is banned, it is still used as a weapon against density ("minimum parking requirements"), even though on-street parking is not an option at all. The worst of both worlds.

anyway - I find it interesting that there are people on both the left AND the right who are pretty much in agreement that there are some serious problems with the auto-centric suburban experiment.

If there were more "true" conservatives in this country, then this kind of agreement would not be surprising. The "suburban experiment" is one of the more radical forms of social engineering we've engaged upon in the short history of this country, and real conservatives would be questioning the whole concept of making human beings entirely dependent upon machines, as opposed to more traditional forms of human settlement. Alas, real conservatives are few and far between, and most of what passes for conservatism is better described as "pseudo-conservative", as described in that famous article by Richard Hofstadter.

 

[Arlington]

to be fair, though - in much of the urban core - that on-street car storage is physical protection from moving cars. I actually leave the beater car I rarely use on the street to keep us safe when we're out front.

Ok, but private cars are far from the only objects we can use to calm streets, and, if there's a general desire to pile personal property as a levee to channelize traffic that's (1) pretty damning of cars, as a mode and (2) of all modes, why give cars first dibs? How about a boat on a trailer? Or a pile of firewood? Or one of those silly "utility sheds" and I'd park a bike in it.

I'm sure that motorists, confronted with change, will tell us that we happen to have exactly the right number of cars (what were the odds?)
- Any more cars, and there'll be gridlock and no place to put them
- Any fewer cars, and there'll be drag racing and mayhem.

I'm not buying either. Moving beyond Peak Car means that metro areas are going to *have* to be redesigned.

 

[millerm277]

We should be striving for 100% utilization of existing spaces before thinking about building more (i.e. MassPort Seaport garage).

That garage is primarily aimed at ensuring the BCEC has a good supply of parking which is disappearing with current/future development getting rid of most of the surface lots. Conventiongoers are not a group that are going to stop driving to the city, nor are one time visitors likely to investigate multi-modal options. If the garage has 100% utilization normally, it's useless to the BCEC.

I do agree with others that on-street parking as it's done currently is poorly utilized. I'd like to see it charged for at different pricing tiers without being too extreme. If you're someone who uses your car once a month, there ought to be an incentive for you to keep it in a lot out on 128 instead of in the middle of the city.

 

[MBTAddict]

To their credit, Brookline and Arlington never did accede to letting people park on the street overnight, but elsewhere its just crazy to look at a street and ask whose idea was it to warehouse immobilized stuff on what's supposed to be our mobility infrastructure?

My problem with this is that you end up with a good amount of surface lots near transit. I live near Coolidge Corner and on my walk form from the T, I pass by 5 or 6 good-sized surface parking lots which could be put to a much better use.

I'm fine with overnight parking on streets if it is paired with a reasonable resident permit parking system.

 

[Arlington]

My problem with this is that you end up with a good amount of surface lots near transit.

The solution there is to tax land at a higher rate than improvements are taxed.

Land can't chose to go elsewhere, but investment/improvement dollars can. If you make holding an empty lot cheap, people will chose to hold it empty (as surface parking).

 

[bigeman312]

Land-based tax assessments! Land-based tax assessments! If you're pro-development, this is priority #1.

 

[BPLange7]

I do agree with others that on-street parking as it's done currently is poorly utilized. I'd like to see it charged for at different pricing tiers without being too extreme. If you're someone who uses your car once a month, there ought to be an incentive for you to keep it in a lot out on 128 instead of in the middle of the city.

I don't think it has to be that much to make a difference. $25-$50 a month in the core neighborhoods should be enough to encourage a few people to leave the cars at home. If not, keep raising the price until it does until there is always 5-15% overnight availability. Can even mirror garages and have a 24/7 option and a night/weekend option. Money collected goes either to 1) improved transit access and/or 2) direct property tax reduction.

People with cars win as they get a place to park. People without cars win because they get fewer cars on the road, improved transit and a reduction in their property taxes. Businesses win as resident spaces are opened up for temporary parking needs.

 

[rinserepeat]

I've been thinking about "right to the street" lately - the only laws protecting pedestrians in the street are marked crosswalk and sidewalk laws - but there are many residential neighborhoods where there are no marked crosswalks (or even sidewalks) - and many areas of Boston where the sidewalks are too narrow or impassable. from what I understand, if you don't have crosswalks within 300 feet, you can cross the street anywhere but motorists aren't legally required to yield to you (even if they see you). Boston and Cambridge have "shared streets" in their street design guidelines, but I'm not sure how pedestrians are protected in these places due to current law.


I know bike advocates have done a lot of work to protect cyclist's right to use public ways - but pedestrians don't have the same rights - it's pretty amazing that we have as high levels of walking around here considering that pedestrians are treated as second-class citizens on our public ways. I think what's most important right now is challenging this belief that the main purpose of streets and roads are only for moving vehicles - and that there can be some streets - particularly residential streets, where there is truly shared space. This is going to be the big challenge over the coming decades.

 

[CSTH]

I remember reading a story somewhere about how way-back-when (like the 30s?) there were protests and uproar when Boylston st. was painted with lanes and stripes. The Bostonians of that era (correctly) perceived that striping the street for high-speed traffic was an usurpation of public space, analogous to sub-dividing the common into private fenced-in lawns.

....Anyone recognize this, even if its apocryphal?

 

[Matthew]

My problem with this is that you end up with a good amount of surface lots near transit. I live near Coolidge Corner and on my walk form from the T, I pass by 5 or 6 good-sized surface parking lots which could be put to a much better use.

This is caused by minimum parking requirements on development, not the banning of on-street parking. Tokyo also bans most on-street parking, but instead of forcing developers to build off-street spaces, they require all registered vehicles to have proof of off-street parking. Then there is a natural market that developers may choose to respond to or not.

I've been thinking about "right to the street" lately - the only laws protecting pedestrians in the street are marked crosswalk and sidewalk laws - but there are many residential neighborhoods where there are no marked crosswalks (or even sidewalks) - and many areas of Boston where the sidewalks are too narrow or impassable. from what I understand, if you don't have crosswalks within 300 feet, you can cross the street anywhere but motorists aren't legally required to yield to you (even if they see you). Boston and Cambridge have "shared streets" in their street design guidelines, but I'm not sure how pedestrians are protected in these places due to current law.


I know bike advocates have done a lot of work to protect cyclist's right to use public ways - but pedestrians don't have the same rights - it's pretty amazing that we have as high levels of walking around here considering that pedestrians are treated as second-class citizens on our public ways. I think what's most important right now is challenging this belief that the main purpose of streets and roads are only for moving vehicles - and that there can be some streets - particularly residential streets, where there is truly shared space. This is going to be the big challenge over the coming decades.

I tend to regard Boston's walking mode share as being in spite of the attempt by many DOT and public works departments to stamp out those pesky pedestrians. Yay for stubbornness.

FWIW, intentionally hitting a pedestrian is illegal. Of course it's easy to claim that you didn't "intend" to do so and therefore skate by. CMR only says that pedestrians must use sidewalks if those are present. One part of CMR, IIRC, says that street corners form unmarked crosswalks -- but MGL only mentions "marked crosswalks" when laying out protections for pedestrians. Nothing is said about bikes and crosswalks. So a lot is unclear and ambiguous, and as far as I know untested. Boston city ordinances are silent on these matters except to say that pedestrians may not "saunter" in the street.

Yeah the laws could use a clean-up to clear out the ambiguities. And while we're at it, establish some solid pedestrian rights to the street (...dreaming).