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November 4, 2004

Vehicular Storage

The other day a bunch of students put black plastic over the Dexter Lawn, with white stripes painted on it and statements about parking lots around the edge. As it happens, I've been thinking about parking lots and storage space lately, and how they relate to each other. And they relate to each other strongly, as random as that seems.

...

It's an old saw of the organizing business that if something is stored, you won't use it much. The harder it is to get to the thing, the less you will make the effort, even if it's one of your favourite items. So if you really love your wedding china and want to use it, don't pack it up in a complicated storage system and put it in a rental storage unit, because you might as well be throwing it away for all the use you'll get out of it under that system.

So that brings us to cars, and the way cities deal with them.

Anti-traffic people, folks who want to make the cities safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, are always trying to limit parking and reduce the number of hours when cars can park. So you get residential neighborhoods with 2-hour parking meters or odd-side/odd-night systems.

The catch is that a 2-hour parking meter guarantees that at a minimum, there will be two cars driving on that street every hour for every parking space, if not more. Rather than discouraging people from owning cars, the system encourages people to drive a lot more just to avoid parking tickets. The simple fact is that inconvenient parking doesn't make people choose not to have a car, it just makes them spend more time and energy on their car.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I mentioned, because I've been really enjoying putting my car in the garage at school -- it's safe parking, easy to get to and from, but I have a strong disincentive to move the car because I'll lose my primo parking spot (obtained by arriving at school at 7:30am, when most of the rest of the population is sleeping).

In fact, if there were such a parking garage in most towns, I would use it and leave my car there rather than drive through the city center. A series of free, unlimited parking garages on the periphery of a city, with good, fast, frequent buses or light rail into shopping and working areas, would be basically irresistible. Unless you're buying furniture or heavy bulky items, most of the time when you're shopping in a city a car is a liability, anyway.

Think of it: under the usual order of things, you drive into the city and park in a metered spot. You put in $8 worth of fricking quarters and that buys you two hours of time. You dash off to the stores you want to visit, but you have to limit your time and keep an eye on the clock because you need to move your car. Two hours later you come back and move the car to another 2-hour spot, lather, rinse, repeat, assuming you don't give up altogether and go home after the first round of this foolishness. So the city gets $8 in parking revenues, but misses out on some major sales tax revenues from your missed shopping, not to mention the benefits of the stores' profitability.

And for residents, the peripheral garages would be like heaven. All the intercity convenience of a car, without the localized hassles of street parking. You can still have a car and use it to buy furniture or drive to another city, but you don't need to worry about it when you're in your own city. In places like San Francisco, inconvenient car storage would take a lot of traffic off the city streets; commuters from outside the city could park in the garages during the day, and commuters from inside the city could park there at night.

What's the catch? Well, there's the obvious requirement of fast, frequent public transit. Most Americans are unwilling to pay for a public transit system; they want it to operate at a profit. That the profit is not cash does not seem to occur to them, so transit projects that are not freeway widening and street repair rarely get much funding.

The other major catch is that if the plan is really going to work, cities have to severely limit traffic in shopping and work areas, maybe even closing off streets to anything but pedestrians or buses. The idea is to make it less convenient to have a car in the city than to park in the garage and use public transit. Maybe on the periphery of the shopping areas, you have a few streets that have loading zones for bulky package pickup; if stores were really smart, they'd offer curbside delivery of purchases in that area, so you could shop all afternoon and not have to carry your bags around.

But the biggest catch of all is that this system requires a change in attitudes towards walking. I like walking, and I especially like municipal systems set up to encourage people to walk around. But I'm in a minority. Most Americans would happily drive from store to store all day, idling in their cars to try to get a parking spot within 20 feet of the door, rather than walk a little extra. This is why we are fat. I can see something like this working better in a European city, like Paris or London, than in any American city. Not because Europe is better than us, but because Europeans are not afraid to use buses or walk a mile instead of driving.

Posted by ayse on 11/04/04 at 9:44 PM