I’ve been mulling over Josh Barro’s contention that cars should not be blamed for the failures of mass transit and his conclusion that planning and zoning is to blame. His basic contention is thus: …the real culprit keeping Americans away from mass transit and inside cars isn’t subsidies; it’s planning and zoning. Cities impose barriers…
It’s timely, isn’t it? I just wrote about the Chicago parking meter lease and how bad it is for urban policy and next thing I know, the City is getting hit with a $22 million bill to cover a year’s worth of free parking. Even worse, it’s part of a total $50 million the City owes….
Much has been said about the parking meter fiasco and how badly Chicago has been burned. I don’t have any more to add. Rather, I’d like to focus on missed opportunities in parking technology – opportunities at the meter that support urbanism and can generate real revenues for the city. Principally, this opportunity revolves…
I’d like to delve a little bit further into the pernicious effect of parking minimums, particularly as it distorts the market tenets of supply and demand. Seeing an article over the weekend in Crain’s Chicago Business about the decline in parking demand in downtown Chicago residential buildings, I could not avoid beating my favorite drum about the high…
I’m sorry that I have been bashing the parking issue to a bloody pulp and I will move on to other things, but if you want to know what is wrong with urban planning today, how unresponsive we’ve become to market conditions, and how poorly we treat our towns and cities, pedestrians and transit systems,…
I would like to add a bit of anecdotal experience of living in a large city and commuting and the insidious effect that parking minimums have on cities, generally, and transit, specifically. I live in the Jefferson Park neighborhood of Chicago. It is part of the city’s famed bungalow belt and is located in the extreme northwest…