~one billion
~1,000,000,000
That's how many parking spaces there are in the USA. For every car? About 4 empty spaces... just sitting there, not absorbing the rain, making flooding worse, making cities hotter as they bake in the summer sun.
Our built environment and laws bend over backwards to make driving the only viable transportation option in nearly every imaginable context.
You need to pay for healthcare, but almost never parking.
(Pointing this out makes libertarian heads explode.)
@futurebird Yes, we have too many cars, and too many parking lots with too many spaces, but free? It's .50 to a $1.00 per hour in my small town to park, $30-$40 a day in the city and double that to park at a hotel.
@ron_miller @futurebird you listed the only two places where parking is ever not free (walkable small towns and walkable big cities), and generally the reason those are nice places to be is that they don’t have government subsidized parking. Even still, $0.50 to $1.00 and $30-$40 a day is likely still subsidizing car owners, and is not an accurate representation of how much those parking spaces are costing their local municipalities
@bwebster @futurebird The garages in cities tend to be privately owned, but the "metered" parking is municipally owned -- and downtown business owners in my town still complain about charging for parking, claiming it keeps customers away (it doesn't).
@ron_miller @bwebster @futurebird I think it does keep customers away, at least to some small degree if not more. I know I've avoided going places for this reason. Your point may remain that it isn't worth some trivial increase in customers.
@ech @bwebster @futurebird I have a Park Mobile app and it's just a simple matter to pay and watch the meter on my phone, so it's no big deal to me. I certainly don't stay away because I prefer the shops and restaurants in town to the chains that tend to be clustered around the malls.
@ech @ron_miller @futurebird it depends a lot on how car-centric a place is. If you live in a place where walking, biking, and public transit have been removed as transportation options, then paid parking may actually reduce customers. But if those other transportation options are available, and paid parking is used to incentivize more walkable areas, customers will always increase overall, even if some people don’t want to pay to park