Here’s another great video from Streetfilms, this time focusing on parking – the issue that I like to call the “elephant in the room” when it comes to land-use and transport planning. It has a huge impact, but for some reason it gets ignored 99% of the time. Now of course nobody likes to have to pay for parking, and over many years I think we’ve been somehow trained into subconsciously thinking that parking should always be free. But of course nothing as space hogging as parking can ever be properly free – and it seems that only now are we starting to understand the full costs of ‘free’ parking.
I like the idea of varying parking levies to maintain a particular level of free spaces on a street-block. It has a logic to it that makes more sense than the common perception of paying for parking – and that is simply a money-making operation for council.
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This is an issue which has been discussed to death by economists (is the bearded guy one?) The idea of price discrimination is not original: airlines, auctioneers and so on are a few examples. I know this is from a transport-planning POV, but the idea of verying the price of parking seems eminently sensible from an economic one.
“I know this is…” should be “I know this blog is…”
No mention of the other costs. That something costs the driver $2 doesn’t mean it costs $2 – there are very frequently huge costs in forgone land suffered by developers and cities. (as this blog has indeed mentioned)
They seem wowed by their technology, but unable to address the real issues facing them.