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> Rational people quickly become emotional about parking ... Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for snap judgments about urgent fight-or-flight issues, such as how to avoid being eaten.

Lol. A bit melodramatic, but sure. Charge for it, yes, but give motorists a civilized experience when possible.

Some of the emotion and impatience and anxiety can be reduced. IME, parking anxiety can come from 1) finding the expensive parking, 2) navigating in/out of it, 3) paying for it, and 4) worrying about it expiring. Technology can lighten some of that chore and people can get on with their business and pleasure. Self-navigating/parking cars might soon be helping with 1 & 2. Background: I cofounded PayByPhone with a goal of providing a civilized solution to 3 & 4.

5 comments

I feel like that's not all of it; there is a certain expectation for parking to be free from many people and I feel like it's because the demand for parking can be drastically different in geographically nearby locations.

For example, in the bay area, parking in SF is difficult to say the least and usually in paid garages. But go less than 30 miles to east bay (far east or south east bay, not Oakland or Berkeley), parking is much more plentiful everywhere and the expectation for parking is free.

If you live in the east bay and visit SF once in a while, you are coming from a daily life of the expectation of free parking to suddenly seeing signs for $20 a day, $50 a day, and so on. Without really consciously thinking about the economics and thinking, oh, it makes sense, because millions of people want to park in the city, it can definitely drive some emotional responses. If you live in SF and have thought about the economics and have accepted that parking is expensive, then the emotion and impatience and anxiety can be reduced/removed by the UX.

> For example, in the bay area, parking in SF is difficult to say the least and usually in paid garages

I think it's useful to consider that SF downtown parking is - in the grand scheme of things - an exception, not a norm.

As it turns out, parking is free in most geographical locations. Even within SF, there's plenty of free street parking around areas like the Sunset or Potrero Hill for example, a mere 20 mins away from downtown core. Go another 15 mins further south and there's free parking at Home Depot, Costco, etc. Go further out to places like San Jose, and strip malls with abundant free parking dominate the landscape.

IMHO it doesn't make sense to think parking space can be easily replaced with residential space. This has been a theme in places like downtown Toronto, where parking lots were literally getting turned into condo buildings. Without a supporting transportation strategy, all that ends up happening is overloaded roads because more residences equal more people, and people need transportation. Going back to Toronto, they're now apparently talking about expropriating businesses to make space for public transit expansion in the worst congested subway station (Ironically, several businesses were already displaced from a lot to build a high rise mix use condo building in this exact intersection some 5 years ago, and there's now another high rise in construction right across the street from it). I honestly wish them good luck with scaling public transit to match demand, as all forms of traffic there - including the subway - already get to pretty bad levels.

Paying for parking changes the calculus of life. It makes everything significantly more expensive and really puts a damper on membership type things.

Like we've got a membership to the children's museum. But parking is ~$15 a time so we go far less frequently than we otherwise would.

Economic arguments about freeloading are good and something I theoretically agree with. But in practice when the other option is 2 busses & 45 minutes you end up not going to as many places as you otherwise would.

To some extent, this is the very point of having these charges. They relieve congestion on scarce resources by ensuring the only people using it are the people who want it really badly and are willing to pay, in either time, money, or inconvenience.

> this is the very point of having these charges. They relieve congestion

Yes.

>> ensuring the only people using it are the people who want it really badly

Not necessarily. People using it could just have more money.

You're paying either way - the time you'd otherwise waste on finding a parking spot has a direct value, which makes 'free' parking even more costly than paid-for parking.

> For example, in the bay area, parking in SF is difficult to say the least and usually in paid garages.

Funnily enough, when you live in SF, you find parking to be easy and mostly free :-)

I was halfway through your comment and getting ready to tell you about this great solution call PayByPhone that's used for parking all around my city. Thanks for that :)

However I would argue that charging sufficiently high prices for parking solves #1 too, the remaining difficulty would be finding cheap parking, not expensive parking.

If parking gets too expensive, I can imagine self-driving cars circling the block until the owner is ready to go.

This will run you afoul of existing no-cruising laws.

(...which were put on the books decades ago to keep taxi drivers trolling for fares out of high-congestion areas.)

Passing an enforceable law against that will be a lot easier, since the companies responsible for self-driving car algorithms can be bashed upside the head with it.

Send the car on an errand and have it come back, or even send it “home” and summon it later. (I’m deeply skeptical that we’ll have level 5 self-driving cars in my lifetime, but if we do, we won’t need to pay $50 in today’s money to park anywhere…)

Agreed on the likelihood of having ubiquitous level 5 self-driving cars in my lifetime as well (I'm in my mid-30s). But I'm also very skeptical about the desirability of this kind of a transformation, and the desirability of (re-)building cities around it. Your examples are two of infinitely many that illustrate how self-driven or not, cars fuck things up.

In short, many people agree that the human-driven, gasoline-powered car is the problem. But far too many zero in on the adjectives, implying that solving the "human-driven" part will solve our cities' problems (love the traffic-light-free intersection visualizations, totally want to be a pedestrian trying to live next to those). Then there are people pretending electric cars are more than just marginally better for the environment when the full life cycle of both the energy required to power them and the materials that go into them is considered.

Stop trying to fix the car. The car is the problem. Specifically, at a certain point (you can quantify it as certain population density, or population size) there are too many of them to rely on them for transportation of most people and to have liveable cities. In North America, we sacrificed the liveability of cities to keep the car, in Europe they're sacrificing the car for liveability. There's not too much more to it than that.

Electric self-driving cars change this a bit, but not enough to matter. It's basically the same as above.

Even outside of "cheating" like this, self-driving would have a pretty significant impact on parking economics. You don't need to have parking spread throughout the city in convenient places, because you can send your car to the central parking depot while you're shopping and recall it when you're done.

This sounds wonderful, except for the part where your desire to avoid paying for parking is creating gridlock for everyone else, as your car drives around, creating traffic. [1]

Since I'm not interested in paying the taxes necessary to double the amount of roads in town, and since I hate traffic, I'd rather just make what you describe illegal [2], just like how many other nuisances are illegal on public roadways. It should be pretty easy for legislatures to force vendors to disable self-driving summons/parking on public roads.

[1] And no, even if the traffic you create is counterflow, we will still need more road capacity, and I'm not paying for it. Where I live, there is no 'counterflow' - traffic consistently sucks in both directions of travel.

[2] Or toll you, preferably to the point where you'll find it more advantageous to just pay for parking.

I think you misunderstood. I'm not talking about driving around in a holding pattern. I'm saying that instead of interspersing valuable real estate with parking lots so that people can walk from their car to the shop/restaurant, you can put all the parking in one (realistically, a few) places.

I don't think sending a car on an errand is cheating in any way. In fact I think it's one of the great promises of self driving cars. People already do curbside pickup of groceries, dry cleaning, restaurant food, etc... There's no reason a person needs to be in that car.

> Send the car on an errand and have it come back, or even send it “home” and summon it later

Now imagine what this will do to rush hour traffic - There would be twice as many vehicle trips for the same number of people. Road tolls (particularly on unoccupied cars) would be needed as part of any solution, which everyone loves even more than parking fees.

A lot of rush hour traffic is asymmetric so increasing the number of cars headed on the reverse commute isn’t as bad as doubling them on the primary direction. I suspect new equilibriums would arise pretty naturally, with a mix of solutions depending on the circumstances.

"Road tolls (particularly on unoccupied cars)"

Why should the number of occupants affect the amount of the toll?

To disincentivize cars driving around empty.

You mean like the autonomous delivery van?

Clearly it's not that simple and we want certain vehicles to be devoid of human occupants.

A toll on all cars (not just empty cars) would already disincentivize driving around empty.

Tolls of some type are probably the answer to shaping congestion. If my car is going to pick up my dry cleaning, I probably only care that I have it by tomorrow and don't care if my car picks it up at 10 am or 10 pm.

Why do that when you could send it somewhere where parking is cheap? The behind anti-cruising laws is to prevent cars from jamming up popular locations, if you send it somewhere other than your destination block then the law is working.

If there’s a place nearby that’s more advantageous than a farther away place, people will naturally do that. It would hopefully spur some competition for economy parking someplace close but not in the city center.

Fortunately we're still quite a long ways away from self driving cars in the sense of truly driverless cars that can be relied upon to navigate safely on their own in random settings, like a city block.

Yeah, for sure.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote about his experience in a Waymo and he came to an interesting conclusion. Because self driving cars always defer to pedestrians, pedestrians will get very bold and not be scared about stepping off the curb in front of a self driving car. It could mean traveling through dense urban centers by car is almost impossible.

Of course, car owners vote in enough numbers that, if this were to happen, I could see cities installing barriers between side walks and streets like Las Vegas has in the strip area.

Better yet, with some planning it could go quite far to a place with ample parking (or even back home) to wait. Then come pick me up.

But that trades a lot of unnecessarily wasted energy to move those 4000+ pounds to a faraway place and back, empty, just to work around the parking rules.

(See parallel thread on "Lufthansa confirmed that 18k flights had been flown empty to keep slots", which feels related.)

Compared to constant driving around the block it can’t be much worse? Worst case it drives away and comes back later with no stop. Best case it drives home or to a parking and waits then returns. The former could be worse than cruising constantly (due to potential higher speed) but the latter is better than constant cruising.

The university near my house uses a parking app that requires all sorts of permissions to install. So I think there needs to be a hard limit with teeth (e.g., auditing and stiff penalties) on collection and storage of personal data.

Another idea is some kind of open API standard, where you can use the app of your choice in a particular locale, rather than being locked to a particular vendor. Then the apps can compete on which one has the best user experience, privacy, and so forth.

I use paybyphone on the reg.

background: I'm friends with Kush.