Ah yes, more "cars are evil" claptrap. Some people like dense urban living, some don't. Cars offer that option. The author is one of those who wants to remove that option.
Where do you get that the author wants to completely remove the option of driving? For example, from the author's web site I read that he has a car.
Based on the linked summary, "If the function of parking in these places was to enable growth and development, the data suggests they were abysmal failures." What this paper says is that increasing parking does not help the city, economically speaking.
If the thesis is correct - which the data seems to support - then having cars diminishes the options for those who want a "vibrant city." If you're in favor of options, then surely you should be in favor of no-car parts of town, no?
If you're in favor of more options, then (as the author comments on a link from his home page), do you think that "factors like suburban infrastructure and the distance to most business centers and even the distance between many stores have made people reliant on motor vehicles" and reduced the transportation options?
You write that you don't want to remove options. The issue seems to be that some options have already been removed, and should be restored.
At the very least, it would get the cycle-only weirdos and walking fetishists out of the parts of town that you want to drive to.
Any time I see "country/state/city did X and got result Y" I am immediately suspicious of the lack of broadly sampled statistics. It's very easy to cherrypick examples for and against any policy setting you care about.
Sure. Now what's the evidence - hand-picked or otherwise - that suggests that increased support for cars enables growth and development? It seems like it would be an easy study to carry out, if it were the common case.
In any case, my question was 'Where do you get that the author wants to completely remove the option of driving?'
Its more like cars are unsustainable. Sure, some don't like dense urban living, but they'll have to pay for that eventually. We are lucky in the states that we have so much land and resources that we really have a lot of choices; this isn't as true for the rest of the world.
> We are lucky in the states that we have so much land and resources that we really have a lot of choices; this isn't as true for the rest of the world.
South Korea has much less land and much fewer resources, yet (relative to the rest of the world) it's just as wealthy as the United States. Ditto for Ireland, or UK (you could scream "but they were an empire!", but the question is -- how did they become an empire in the first place?)
Russia has land and oil. The situation there has greatly improved -- and having grown up there myself, I was still lucky to have had such basics an education, safe drinking water, and other utilities -- yet it's nowhere near as wealthy as South Korea or the United States.
Incidentally I disagree with your overall point (about zero-sum games, or that there's a binary choice between car-dependent suburbs and "dense urban living") -- but you're using a horrible argument to support it, too.
> South Korea has much less land and much fewer resources
Try parking a car in Seoul. We are still talking about cars right?
> Ditto for Ireland, or UK
Have you been to these countries before? Really? Car usage is anything but cheap there, it's definitely moderated compared to the states!
> Russia has land and oil
I'm sure cars are cheap in Russia right? Why did they have to block used cars being sent from Japan to Vladivostok?
I really wonder if we are talking about the same thing (that cars are cheap to buy and use vs, ANYWHERE else). Even in Iran you have to buy the car before you can take advantage of cheap subsidized gas.
If you don't like density, you don't have to live in it or work in it. Keep your car and your suburban lifestyle. Just don't ruin the cities we live in with your demands that we accommodate your lifestyle.
If you really want people to only pay for the transportation infrastructure they themselves use, that's fine, but look for your gas taxes to triple. You might be paying for public transit you never use, but those of us living and/or working in cities are paying a lot more to maintain a highway to your small town that we never use.
Apples and oranges. Cities can't sustain themselves without agriculture and products from outside of the city. If I never go into a city, I will never use their public transportation. If you never leave a city, you will still use public roads in order to eat, even if you never actually step foot outside.
The countryside also can't sustain itself at its current standard of living without goods and services produced in cities.
The whole point of infrastructure is that it benefits society as a whole. This is just as true of city infrastructure as it is infrastructure in the countryside.
(Not to mention there's a whole lot of countryside that doesn't produce food...or much of anything, really, other than a place for misanthropic people to retire to.)
To interject - there's a problem in any discussion about density. The frequent assumption is that either people live in skyscrapers or they live in the suburbs/exurbs. This is not true. Most people who live in a small or medium sized city live in single-family houses, and that's true for the ~100,000 population cities covered in this study.
Also, cities of this size don't tend to have rapid transit systems, unless they are part of a large metro area. Instead, they have buses or sometimes trams. Your use of "rapid transit" suggests that you are using a 'Big City, USA' like NYC or Chicago as your reference, and not a medium-sized city like Green Bay, WI. This study did not examine the policies appropriate for a big city, but it's rather obvious that NYC can't handle even one car per household.
In any case, the debate isn't in restricting the kind of vehicle you can buy, but in how much a medium-sized city should subsidize your ability to be able to drive to and park downtown, compared to the other things it could subsidize.
For example, is it better to require more free parking through zoning laws, or to have more space for shops and restaurants though with more limited parking options? Is it better to have free parking, paid fixed-rate parking, or variable rate parking?
If "better" is defined as "enable growth and development" then this paper suggests that more free parking is not the optimal choice.
I think your proposal is sound...the people that get primary benefit of the infrastructure should be the ones that pay for it.
Unfortunately, that causes more problems for drivers than it does for transit riders (which is why we are in the current state that we are in). You see, the cost structure of automobiles is linear, and when you throw in density, exponential. The cost structure for transit is inverse to its ridership (within vehicle capacity limits).
In other words, small increases in ridership produce huge decreases in costs per passenger. So much so that the most heavily used transit systems in the world are completely profitable (Hong Kong's MTR is an exceptionally profitable publicly traded corporation).
Now currently, both roads and transit systems are subsidized. But since they are substitutes (in the economic definition), a small decrease in subsidies to roads will push more people to transit, thus requiring fewer subsidies to transit.
