Skip to main content

The high cost of cheap on-street parking - a vivid illustration

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?  
Try Reinventing Parking.]

So you think on-street parking is public property and should be free? Do you think local governments that charge for on-street parking are uncaring and money grabbing? Maybe you doubt that cheap on-street parking causes any problems?

Then please take a look at Bern Grush's vivid description of the "cruising for parking" in one specific trip and all the problems it causes.


The trip should have been 5km but searching for parking by driving in circles at the end made the journey 8.25km! And that is the least of the problems that Grush describes.

The image above is from the post at the Grush Hour blog and shows just that last part of the journey.

You couldn't ask for a better explanation of the need for performance-based pricing for on-street parking.

Comments

  1. Or indeed distance based charging for road use since what was consumed was road space.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Help improve this map of global sustainable transport advocates

I am working to map global "sustainable transport" advocates (for want of a better phrase).  You can help! Submit suggestions or corrections via this google form . Here is the map so far. Please explore it and help me improve it.

Transport-based City Types and their Trajectories

I want to help you get perspective on your city and its transport system with the help of simple city types based on their dominant transport modes, such as Walking Cities, Transit Cities, Bus Cities, Motorcycle Cities and Car Cities. This way of thinking about cities is a  heuristic  (an imperfect mental model or technique that is nevertheless good enough to be helpful). And it obviously is imperfect. For example, real cities often have various modes of transport, and modern cities are really all some kind of hybrid city type. But it is still useful, especially if we add the idea of a Traffic Saturated City , which is a very different beast from a Car City. It is important for change-makers in Traffic Saturated Cities to be aware they are not in automobile dependent cities yet. Options for digesting this:  Read the brief article below and study the diagrams. They complement the podcast.  For more depth, LISTEN to the 37 minute audio with the player above.  A full transcri

Heavyweight champions for better buses

Many cities strive for better public transport. But too few do enough to improve their BUS systems. For Reinventing Transport this time around I discussed bus improvements with  public transport planning veteran,  Colin Brader of ITP.   Colin has worked on numerous public transport projects around the world and is one of the authors of the 2019 EBRD report, " Driving change: reforming urban bus services ". A key point in our discussion: Cities need bus reform champions. We will see that one even has a bus improvement "heavyweight". Scroll down for highlights of our conversation or listen with the player below. Click here to learn how to subscribe to this podcast. Yangon bus stuck in traffic. Yangon has made drastic bus reforms recently. Colin Brader  is the founder of the  UK-based international transport consulting firm, ITP , and is currently ITP’s Chairman. For more than 2 decades he has worked through ITP on projects that have transformed p