Double Parking

[Datepalm]

Some places are getting there, (Paris. Seattle. Vancouver. Madrid. And Oslo, of course, planning to go entirely downtown car-free) The usual suspects, in other words. Atlanta is trying though!) but its very much a political and education type issue. Its not going to happen unless its made an issue and the city governments that will fight for it are voted in, and instincts, to a large degree, are still to demand better car infrastructure for car-woes.

[litechick]

On 1/9/2017 at 2:10 PM, zelticgar said:

In New England we have a form of asshole behavior with cars in the winter. After every snow storm a small subset of the population decides not to clear off the snow on top of their car. This creates a ticking time bomb of sheets of ice spraying all over the highway. Night quite as obnoxious as double parking but close. 

Lol, I used to manage a 26' box truck and we would specifically take it out for a run to blow the snow off the roof.  In cold climates it is best to run a vehicle at least once a week (particularly a diesel) just to keep the battery charged and all systems firing and it is really impractical to shovel the snow off the roof. 

Shoveling requires a small person with great cardio because the roof is made of thin fiberglass.  A heavy person will cave the roof in but it's still a 26'x8' surface to clear off (potentially) 1000 pounds of snow.

When it was my turn to do a 'snow blow' run, I felt bad for the people on the highway behind me but...get in the other lane and pass me.  Sometimes the cost/benefit analysis means that the inconvenience I cause you is less than the inconvenience to me.

[Altherion]

10 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Even if the spots are reserved (as I assume they would and should be!) I was referring to road use and parking conditions in general, which has 'trickle down' effects onto each specific situation. You have an urban form that necessitated driving creating untenable pressure on land use for parking which leads to an enternal downtown parking shortage which forces the rare crucial parking lot (like the one belonging to a hospital) to be squeezed for space and forced to draw out very small parking spots which is coupled with a cultural trend for pointless giant cars and you get sick kids doing acrobatics through car boots in parking lots.

My point is, if we had a less perennially not-enough-parking situation in cities, the children's hospital would have enough parking spots, even for stupid giant cars because this is the rare situation where a good parking spot trumps making life incovenient for urban drivers. The only way to have enougb parking spots or enough road space? Counter-intuitively, it's to make less of it.

This means I have a foolproof way of never being pissed off or angry when I'm stuck in traffic or can't find a parking spot or see someone parked in a ridiculous way or blocking traffic in the classic double-park. I just think that being inconvenienced as a driver . by and large, is right, proper and also couldn't be any other way, and notch up a slight uptick in motivation to use public transport or walk next time.

I understand your philosophy, but it requires either (1) or a combination of (2a) and (2b):

(1) A massive investment in public transportation on a scale that I have not really seen even in Europe.

(2a) People willing to tolerate long travel times.

(2b) People wealthy enough to own a car, but still rely on public transportation for commutes to downtown.

For example, consider the city of Geneva, Switzerland. They are well on their way to implementing your ideal: they don't want people driving to downtown Geneva and they're not shy about letting anyone know about it. At certain times, it is faster to walk the few kilometers from the close suburbs to downtown than it is to drive them and nearly all parking must be paid for. The alternative is a pretty good (if somewhat expensive) public transportation system which one can use to get to downtown in a reasonable amount of time (although not at night).

However... there is a caveat here. The transportation system works fine for getting from any given suburb to downtown and back. There is no guarantee that it will be even remotely timely when traveling between suburbs. My last apartment in the Geneva region was about 15km from my workplace (the latter is in a suburb and not downtown). It took a total of around 20-25 minutes for me to drive these 15km, but, when I was leaving the area, I sold my car and decided to rely on public transportation for three weeks. It was a rather lousy experience: the commute now took between an hour and ten minutes and an hour and a half each way. Furthermore, shopping became kind of a hassle because I was restricted to the closest stores. And going to visit a friend in a different suburb was a different kind of hassle because Geneva's passes are divided into zones so going to other zones costs extra.

Basically, the system works, but it only works because the vast majority of people living in the suburbs have a car even if they take the train or bus to work.

[Datepalm]

No one cares about getting between suburbs - alas. That's an issue with current transportation planning, which is heavily focused on facilitating the rush-hour morning commute going suburb-CBD-suburd at predictable times and en masse. This is a problem, and to really get into it, actually goes in tandem to a degree with car-centric planning, in which the role of a PT system is only to get people out of cars (at the most crucial, crowded spaces and moments) so that other car users have a better time of it, rather than planning for PT users in and of themselves, if that distinction makes any sense. (Um, yes, my thesis might be about transportation planning for demographics with travel patterns that don't fit the standard, middle-class, wage-employment pattern, why do you ask?)

In this sense, you're the kind of person - suburb to suburb commuter - who planners don't really 'mind' having a car, because you're not taking up that highly in demand commuter roadspace. Basically, at this point, planners and municipalities in most developed countries would be happy if every suburban household were to pare back to owning one car on average (US current motorization rate is something around 800, IIRC. That's 800 vehicles registered per every 1000 men, women and newborns,) which is roughly the situation you're describing. If you were living with a partner, probably you could make do with 1 car in a city like Geneva (on AVERAGE, of course. You might be the odd household where you both work in suburbs and have two cars but you'd be balanced by your neighbours who both work downtown and don't have any cars, etc), whereas you'd probably need 2 if you were living in Houston.

(Travel time, by the way, is a weird thing. People have a reasonable tolerance for it - about 30 minutes on average, I think - and they don't particularly work to minimize it. If anything, it might be growing. Most, it turns out, are pretty happy to spend an hour a day on the train with wifi and their laptop, for example, and they won't change jobs, homes or modes to make that shorter. So sometimes improving your suburban train service will just make people move further out to where they can own a bigger house.)

More public transport (and corresponding pressure on parking and driving*) is only even going to be a partial solution, no one is claiming otherwise - there's a whole dynamic around density, walkability, Transit Oriented Development, etc, that needs to reshape the way housing, workplaces, business districts, services, etc, are spread out around the city that reduces the overall, average need for driving to the point where most households will be comfortable with one car, or require only one car trip per day, or even rely on a share-car service for only the ocassional car use, and this is both as convenient and as cost effective for them as owning as many private cars as they do today. Places like the S suburbs might be doomed to car reliance, low density and enternal traffic problems (geometry here. It's not solvable) until they're trashed by the zombie hoardes, for all we know. But, generally speaking, there's an effort to build new places with less of an inherent car-dependence for every trip.

*mixed research here - Givoni, 2011, argues that the improvement of bus services in central London did a lot more to reduce traffic than the actual cordon and the results to traffic mitigation would have been almost the same without it.

[Swordfish]

On 1/14/2017 at 1:56 AM, larrytheimp said:

Just had my truck towed to the place I'm apartment/dog sitting, tow truck couldnt get it into the parking space in the alley (well could have but the guy didn't want to unhook the truck in the middle of the alley and then let me move it with a come-along) so had to drop it one the street.  But he could only get it like 2 ft from the curb so I tried to roll it downhill closer to the curb but with no power steering clipped the curb with the back tire before itncod straighten out.  

So the truck is sitting a like a 25 degree angle to the curb, rear tire tight but front one line 20 inches from the curb.  With an extension cord running out an upstairs window across the sidewalk and plugged into the block heater.   Pulled the batteries out to charge them, caught some guy out there trying to open the hood to see what he could take about an hour ago.  

The parking job looks like a drunk did it.  Just hoping I can get this thing fired up before the cops try to tow it.  Thinking of asking the neighbors to park right to the truck so no one can tow it once I hear them up (about an hour and a half before dawn here).

 

It's been snowing here which always tends to lead to some very interesting parking jobs, primarily where people either a - just abandon their vehicle where it is or b - drive into snowbanks and get stuck,frequently with the ass end fof their vehicle sitting in the roadway.

 

On 1/14/2017 at 3:03 AM, Datepalm said:

Some places are getting there, (Paris. Seattle. Vancouver. Madrid. And Oslo, of course, planning to go entirely downtown car-free) The usual suspects, in other words. Atlanta is trying though!) but its very much a political and education type issue. Its not going to happen unless its made an issue and the city governments that will fight for it are voted in, and instincts, to a large degree, are still to demand better car infrastructure for car-woes.

 

And that they can find the money for it of course.

 

[DireWolfSpirit]

Yesterday as I was pulling into my work parking area, a gentleman was just exiting his shitty little car that I noticed was double parked, preventing me from pulling through to a closer, better spot. I was having none of this, I immediately called him out and he had the conscious to pull ahead and align his car between the lines. Allowing me to park in the better spot next to where he had previously been over the lines, making the spot unuseable.

It fealt pretty good making that jerk move his car. He knew he was wrong and did the right thing, although he tried for one brief moment too defend himself, he gave up after the stare I gave him. I had this thread on my mind as soon as I saw the situation.

ONE SMALL VICTORY!!

 

[Inigima]

That's not double-parking.

[Jen'ari]

On 14/01/2017 at 11:03 AM, Datepalm said:

Some places are getting there, (Paris. Seattle. Vancouver. Madrid. And Oslo, of course, planning to go entirely downtown car-free) The usual suspects, in other words. Atlanta is trying though!) but its very much a political and education type issue. Its not going to happen unless its made an issue and the city governments that will fight for it are voted in, and instincts, to a large degree, are still to demand better car infrastructure for car-woes.

To be fair you'd have to be mad to drive in Paris!, driving in London is hard enough but Paris or Rome just look like utter hell to drive in.

I've actually driven in Madrid and as cities go I found it pretty decent to drive in.

I didn't think Paris and Madrid were planning to ban cars though?, I thought it was just diesel powered ones they wanted to ban because of their highly polluting emissions which have been proven to cause health issues.

Unless car makers manage to clean up diesel vechicles a great deal that is a plan I'd be on board with.

[Datepalm]

Madrid and Paris both have some fairly draconian anti-pollution measures that kick in if pollution is particularly bad and against old and diesel cars and such. (There's some mixed evidence on how much solutions like Madrid's, where half of cars are banned intermittently and such actually help though) but there are also broader anti-car policies in place, like gradual pedestrianization of more streets and investments in PT.

Donald Trump, bless his orange head, may meanwhile be planning to cut - or eliminate - federal transit subsidies. "Highways are a national concern but transit is not."

[DireWolfSpirit]

16 hours ago, Inigima said:

That's not double-parking.

It was one car taking up two parking spots, I call it double parking. 

[Jen'ari]

14 hours ago, Datepalm said:

Madrid and Paris both have some fairly draconian anti-pollution measures that kick in if pollution is particularly bad and against old and diesel cars and such. (There's some mixed evidence on how much solutions like Madrid's, where half of cars are banned intermittently and such actually help though) but there are also broader anti-car policies in place, like gradual pedestrianization of more streets and investments in PT.

Donald Trump, bless his orange head, may meanwhile be planning to cut - or eliminate - federal transit subsidies. "Highways are a national concern but transit is not."

I'd be in favour of more pedestrianised zones, I do think though banning cars from vast swathes of city centres wouldn't be practical.

I heard something about they were thinking about making Oxford Street in London pedestrianised and I think that's a great idea!, I don't think they should do that for the whole of central London though it just wouldn't be practical.

With the diesel situation I think car manufacturers and various governments are equally to blame for promoting them so strongly, yes they produce less CO2 and use less fuel per mileage driven but way more other toxic particles which cause health issues.

I also saw something recently about how large trucks and busses produce far less of these toxic emissions than a diesel car!, because they're subject to far stricter scrutiny regarding pollution, if diesel is going to stay cars need to be subject to the same scrutiny.

What is clear to me is there needs to be big investment not just in public transport but in better infrastructure for electric and/or hydrogen vechicles.

 

[Elder Sister]

People double-park sometimes at the manufacturing plant where I work, and while I 'know' it's because they're running late for their shift, I 'get pissed' that they do it.  It hugely pisses me off.  Hugely and Bigly.

Of course, I 'might' just be misrepresenting this, and there are actually two cars in the space, but I have chosen to only pick on one car because I'm a weenie.

Or not.  Don't double-park, people.  Sad.

[Which Tyler]

Not that this is double parking, but...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-39037547