Montreal City Weblog

Kate 13:34 on 2020-02-25 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 19:04 on 2020-02-25 Permalink

  I do wish these lengthy thinkpieces came with references like old-fashioned essays. While I don’t disagree with the premise that the social contract doesn’t always mean supporting things you don’t benefit from directly or that you simply disagree with for political reasons, I do disagree with a lot of the logic around perceived property value vs. sunk costs in infrastructure which the article’s fiscal angle seems to be mostly predicated upon…

  …but since we have all agreed to be “sweet” I promise not to respond any further.

• Kate 19:07 on 2020-02-25 Permalink

  We have?!

  Ian, if I link to a story it’s only because I think it’s interesting or relevant to other discussions here. My only purpose in my comment a couple of days ago was I found the tone was getting a little snarky among participants. You can tear up the argument in anything I post, as hard as you like.

• Blork 19:35 on 2020-02-25 Permalink

  OK, I only scanned the article because it comes off as very dense academic wankery, meaning it has some merit based on a lot of diagrams and formulas in books but no actual human being can see how it relates to reality.

  To be precise, the article seems to be arguing that “free” parking defeats the ideas of DENSITY AT ALL COSTS and is therefore bad. But what does that really mean? Unless you either level the entire city and rebuild it as a series of huge soviet style bunkers — or to be less extreme, replace all the parking lanes on city streets with narrow railroad style buildings containing housing units, then the rest of it is just academic hogwash.

  To be clear, that “less extreme” version means every street in the city has two rows of thin buildings put in place between the sidewalk and the driving lanes. So you have your triplex, then a sidewalk, then a narrow house, then the street, then another narrow house, then the sidewalk, then a triplex. FFS! This is not only ridiculous but it would make the city ugly and weird.

  So there might well be arguments against “free” parking, but complaining that the parking lanes are taking up square footage that should be used for housing is just weird and insanely out of touch with reality.

  …or did I misread it?

• JONATHAN 07:10 on 2020-02-26 Permalink

  Anyone interested in reading more about it should read Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. He goes into the calculations but also looks at it in a way that makes sense to the average person. There is also the author of Walkable Cities. I forget his name, but also a very good read. He recently came out with a ‘rulebook’ which very clearly outlines 101 rules to making cities better places.

• Ian 10:07 on 2020-02-26 Permalink

  The problem with these calculations is that they always assume road space is somehow easily converted into buildings, so they run the calculation based off of square footage values of adjacent built properties. When we are talking about street parking, the space used for parking is effectively a sunk cost – you will have to spend money on having this street level space regardless of how you use it – unless you actively extend the building and sidewalks to narrow the streets. Even if you do narrow the streets you still need to leave room for delivery vehicles, ambulances, fire engines, garbage trucks, streetsweepers and hopefully buses or streetcars. This is why most cities build vertically in high value areas. It’s not that a square yard of land is worth a million dollars, it’s that in a neighbourhood where there are 50 story plus skyscrapers you can get a million dollars worth of property built on a yard of real estate. And yet, even with new skyscrapers, they leave in sunk cost sidewalks… part of that is zoning, but part of that zoning is because people still need to get around at street level.

  In any case to recoup those sunk costs of wide streets you are basically looking at redoing all your building stock and infrastructure including of course all the utility infrastructure and sewers. I think just looking at the debacles on Parc, St Larry, St Denis & Ste-Kitty we can see how that would go if we undertook it citywide.

  Slightly tangential but meant to serve as an example, consider this article extolling the value of a holistic approach to data-driven urbanism. With references.

  “Veracity of data relies on many dimensions of concern and context. Veracity is not the same as accuracy.”

  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-government-data-theater-very-real-cause-fake-news-jeff-berg/

• Chris 13:38 on 2020-02-26 Permalink

  Blork, I think you misread it, at least partially.

  JONATHAN, yes, that’s an excellent book. I’ve read it.

  Ian, it’s a very long book, probably too long to read unless you’re very into this topic, but you could get a summary idea searching for “Shoup parking” on youtube, ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akm7ik-H_7U

  >the space used for parking is effectively a sunk cost

  Even if so, it doesn’t have to continue to be. We can and should charge for parking. The point is that land is valuable and should not be given _for free_ (or at a loss) for parking. Especially because of all the negative consequences of automobiles (pollution, collisions, sedentary lifestyles, social isolation, etc.) It’s one thing to subsidize good things, altogether another thing to subsidize bad things.

  >In any case to recoup those sunk costs…

  You can’t recoup sunk costs, that’s the definition of sunk costs .

  >…of wide streets you are basically looking at redoing all your building stock and infrastructure

  No. Sure, putting buildings where on-street parking currently exists is maybe not the best choice in most cases. But as numerous Parking Day events have shown, there are many other choices. Could plant a row of trees and grass, chairs and mini-cafes, bike lanes, wider sidewalks, more car _movement_ lanes, etc., etc. Been to Times Square recently? The possibilities are endless.

  (Putting buildings where _off-street_ parking currently exists is quite easy in fact, and has been happening here and elsewhere.)

• Douglas 19:58 on 2020-02-26 Permalink

  Of course us drivers believe we deserve free parking spots.

  These are our roads we paid for. Roads were built for cars.

• Kate 09:00 on 2020-02-27 Permalink

  Douglas, you’re trolling. There was never a social compact to provide drivers with free parking in perpetuity. Drivers simply took it, and it has taken a long time for cities to react to this seizure of the commons, and every time they do – look at recent changes in Outremont – drivers react badly. But it has to be done. Parking space is public property and you need to pay if you want to store your things in a public space.

• ian 21:23 on 2020-02-26 Permalink

  There were roads before cars, that’s a ridiculous assertion. Most of the city grid was well in place long before cars were a concern.

  Which also makes me inclined to say this “stolen space” is just an evolution of the desire paths the city’s #centreville roads evolved from.

• Ian 15:34 on 2020-02-28 Permalink

  Well at least we know where you stand on the issue, haha – I was wondering why this was a Montreal item but there you go. One thing that has crossed my mind is that if your landlord takes away a feature of your rental included or implied in your lease you can sue them for a rent reduction. If you moved to a neighbourhood because it had public gardens for free and the city took those away saying public space necessitates more equitable use of land and not everyone gardens, wouldn’t you be annoyed? That is how people that live in neighbourhoods with free parking feel, I imagine. I have my own backyard garden and [pay for sticker parking, these are all just examples.

  This is the thing about stuff like taxes and the public good, we end up paying for all kinds of things we don’t need personally or even agree with. I don’t agree with having an army. I am not religious so I don’t think religious organizations should be untaxed. That said, I’ve had people tell me they don’t see why they should subsidize me having children by paying school taxes, or having their tax dollars going to subsidize garderie. Catholics get mad about the government paying for hospital abortions. Leftists get mad about corporate tax breaks. That’s society, we compromise and work as a group over time to reshape government as social views change.

  If you don’t like cars or that they get free parking in some neighbourhoods that’s fine, but don’t let it cloud your judgement on what the social compact is. Government by fiat when one interest group gets in doesn’t help. That’s how Drapeau got away with razing poor neighbourhoods, it’s exactly the same logic: we must modernize at all costs, and if you don’t like it, YOU are the problem. PM is also currently acting all stick no carrot, and winning neither hearts nor minds of those who don’t already think they are perfect. They are losing a lot of the political goodwill they simply walked in with by “being on the right side”.

  This, in a nutshell, is Montreal politics.