What it ignores is the downside of OFF-street parking. Even though this is provided at private expenses — by the individual for himself in residential areas or by property owners for visitors in non-residential areas — it still has public ramifications: 1) the access to these spaces require a loss of street parking spaces, which the city — now to market-price them — should be compensated for; 2) the point on the sidewalk where the vehicles intersect with foot traffic on the sidewalk is not controlled, and is also sloped to ironically allows the motor vehicles to travel faster at this dangerous point, and distorting the walking surface; 3) street parking takes less space than off-street parking and thus less of the impermeable tarmac is required; and 4) off-street parking is less safe, since there are other motor-vehicles on either side, whereas street parking (parallel) provides a pedestrian “sanctuary” on one side of the car, usually the passenger side, where children, the elderly, and pregnant women passengers alight.

In his book, Shoup also makes the point that much of the off-street parking is mandated by planning laws, which subscribes to what I call ‘OPOCO,’ the one-person, one-car orientation, and makes housing more expensive, especially for just the people who tend not to have cars because of cost. It also causes sprawl and it becomes a massive private subsidy for driving, as the parking costs are buried in prices and are a downward pressure on salaries when provided as an employee ‘perk’ (at least CA has pioneered with ‘cash outs,’ another Shoup idea).

The ideal solution is to move to a city-wide shared-car regime, in which the population of cars in each area of the city is so much smaller than all are parked on the street, and there is no longer off-street parking, offering a chance for the Parking Benefits Districts to guide a process of re-allocating the lands now used for parking to green spaces (especially front lawns) and increased housing or non-residential uses, or whatever makes the area more “complete.”

Chris Bradshaw
Ottawa, Canada

Now that the MTA is revealed as a creature of room 200, Prop E did not deliver political independence.

Now that Newsom has siphoned off Prop A ’07 dollars (and twice as much again) off on spurious extradepartmental work orders, it is revealed that the set asides are raidable for political purposes.

I don’t see how we get out of this other than to remove the Mayor and Board of Supervisors from influence by electing an eleven member MTA Board. Avalos’ proposal is interesting, but I can’t imagine a single citywide elected MTA director working out well over time.

-marc

Unlike NYC, we have no transportation leadership in this town. The closest thing we have is Maestro Moscovich, but unfortunately he spends his political capital fighting for expanded freeways in national parks.

We’ve got a chicken and an egg problem here, where we need a reliable and affordable transit system to provide a viable alternative to driving and parking. But we’ve got foxes guarding the Muni hen house, raising fares, cutting service, cutting lines, cutting stops and draining resources with work orders, so our Muni chickens never seem to hatch to lay their own golden eggs of sustainability. The best we can do is golden chicken eggs, geese are out of our pay grade.

Why would anyone agree to throw more money at the MTA given that we’d just done that and Newsom has absconded with those resources to fund his pet projects and the Board of Supervisors failed to stand up to that?

-marc