If you live in a car place, make sure you add $12k to your housing costs per-car before you compare your rent to a city where cars are not needed.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
This is cars, but it’s great. They made a publicly subsidized Uber equivalent. Use an app, and a car driven by a city employee will come to you and take you where you need to go on demand.
If lots of people use this, they can live in this place and not own a car. Saves tons of space wasted on parking. Lowers cost of living because using it is cheaper than owning a car. Increases safety since you won’t have old people driving. Increased freedom and accessibility for people that can’t drive legally or easily. Good for environment.
Even in a big city. We don’t like Uber because it’s an evil company. What if the ONLY cars in NYC were ride share? It would be incredible. This is a great transitionary measure for a car place to become a less car place.
3 Likes
Lockpicking lawyer is not a fan of the lawbreaking, but probably loves the bad locks getting comeuppance.
2 Likes
Isn’t that the opposite of “War on Cars”, allowing bad drivers, people parking illegally and not paying for parking to evade the punishments society puts on them.
I mean, “Fuck the police” and all that, but this seems like an odd thing to support.
War on cars is about increasing safety. Punishing people doesn’t make us safer.
1 Like
Well, they are just using a key they obtained from the manufacturer, however, most of 'em just use cheap tubular locks anyway, you can open them with a cheap bic pen and a lighter, so the point stands. Though if you do want a quality tubular pick, I strongly recommend the Covert Instruments low profile tubular, it’s a damned good pick.
Parking tickets can impact people already affected by institutional inequality.
1 Like
People get the boot because they have X unpaid parking tickets or are actively somewhere they need to be towed from and a tow truck will show up shortly (that’s how it works in Philly). It is not that hard to avoid parking tickets and if they are too onerous to pay I question how you afford driving at all in the first place.
People can’t afford driving, but they also can’t afford not to. The place they live has no suitable public transportation, and the roads are unsafe for anything other than a car. In such a situation you have lots of unfortunate people who drive the cheapest card they can get often without insurance, inspections, registrations, or even licenses. They can’t afford to pay for parking, and often have to gamble with getting tickets.
If they do get tickets, they don’t get paid because other expenses are higher priority, and they can’t afford them all. The boot, if they actually couldn’t remove it, is an attempt to make the ticket debt higher priority than the other debts.
People have a right to get around safely. If you build a car-centric place and then boot someone’s car, that’s almost effectively the same as putting them on house arrest.
People parking illegally isn’t a thing that individual person did wrong. It’s a systemic issue. They chose to make a car centric place. They simultaneously made too many parking lots, but still not enough parking lots. No matter what, there are going to be people who have to drive to and park at a place where there are no free spots, and no spots they can afford. And the person who gets caught in that trap shouldn’t have their right to move around restricted as a result.
2 Likes
As someone who grew up being raised on SSA dependent checks I have plenty of direct experience with being poor and living in poor neighborhoods. Does someone’s financial issues entitle them to effectively degrade the safety and livability of everyone else in their direct environment? The closest thing my local parking authority has to a regressive ticket is writing them for expired inspections, but those are a direct environmental and vehicle operation safety concern. Punishment/deterrence of unsafe, extra polluting vehicles seems like a net societal benefit for everyone who drives or walks or bikes or rides public transit. Everything else is a ticket for parking somewhere or sometime you shouldn’t and not deterring that behavior directly degrades the ability of other people to use public infrastructure (sidewalks, crosswalks, handicap reserved spots).
You would be right, but punishing people doesn’t make us safer. Punishment is not a deterrent.
Cops have been giving out speeding tickets and parking tickets for decades. People still speed and park illegally with great prevalence.
The only time I know of that punishment has been shown to increase safety is with things like red light cameras that enforce nearly universally. Even then, it only seems to happen in those areas and intersections where the cameras become known to the drivers who frequent the area.
In the moment the person knows for sure that if they run the red light, the ticket will come, so they make a decision differently and the unsafe action is prevented.
Punishing people for unpaid tickets and booting their car doesn’t prevent anything. It just punishes people for what has already been done, and will happen again. If that person doesn’t illegally park in that spot, another car will.
In my neighborhood, with excellent public transportation (as far as the US goes) and the majority of people not owning cars, every single legal parking spot is full. You have to drive around quite a bit and wait to get a free legal one. This holds true even very late at night, as I have experienced. If every car parked legally, there would be cars driving in circles at all hours with nowhere to go. Ticketing the people who inevitably park illegally will not prevent that behavior.
During alternate side parking, half the parking on each street must be vacated. Inevitably, not all the cars move, and many end up just driving around. This is necessary for street cleaning, which is necessary for flood prevention. But there are tickets every time no matter what because there is literally no alternative for the car owner who doesn’t have time to drive in circles for hours once or twice a week.
Vengeance and punishment don’t increase safety, even if you legitimately punish people for unsafe actions of which they are guilty. The true fault is with the system, and not the individual. It’s not a matter of individual responsibility, which is a right wing idea. It’s a systemic problem. We make a system by which some people have no choice but to behave badly, and then punish those people for it. People who have extra time or money can avoid or deal with the punishment, others can not.
TL;DR: You can’t train the rats, you can only change the maze.
3 Likes
1 Like
Lately I keep repeating “You can’t train the rats, you can only change the maze.” like a broken record.
Punishing people does not make us safer. Punishment does not change people’s behavior. Here is yet another example, clear as day.
“The results of the DVAP pilot indicate that it is likely not a lack of education that explains the unsafe behaviors of the small number of drivers who accrue many speed or red light camera violations. Despite attending a safety course, most continued to accumulate multiple violations,” the report found.
This program forced repeat offenders to attend safety courses or have their vehicles seized. The punishment of fines (they still got ticketed for the actual offenses) and attending safety courses did not change their behavior or make anyone safer. The city was not able to seize more than single digit numbers of vehicles due to lack of legal authority to do so.
Course participants all described themselves in a survey as either “very confident” or “somewhat confident” that they were safe drivers. “These perceptions were not always in line with reality,” the report stated, noting that “several” participants accrued double-digit speed violations after taking the course.
The most dangerous drivers on the road are very or somewhat confident that they are safe drivers. The only time a person’s opinion of their own driving can be believed is if it is a negative opinion. I don’t even know if we should believe Lewis Hamilton if he says he’s a good/safe driver 
The only thing that will actually make the streets safer for people who use all modes of street transportation is to redesign the streets themselves. Anything that relies on controlling or influencing human behavior directly is doomed to fail.
The only way behavior can be influenced is with the design of the system itself. People will take the path of least resistance, and the system must be such that that path is the safest path.
Side note. Why does the city have such legal authority to seize all kinds of property, including dirt bikes, eBikes, etc. but not cars? Yet another example of dangerous car culture being baked into the system.
2 Likes
Lewis Hamilton has said many times he hates driving. He loves racing, but driving normal cars on roads? Not his thing. Too stressful.
1 Like
He can drive me anywhere.
I totally get it. Playing organized basketball with people that know what they’re doing, super fun, you can go hard confidently. Randos of unknown experience? I’m mostly making sure I don’t get hurt.
And that’s just pickup gym league, let alone death mobiles.
Remember when Volkswagen had their cars cheat at emissions tests? Now we know how they did it.
1 Like
You shared a 20 page pdf? Do you have something like a 30 minute YouTube video with an enticing title I can watch instead?
4 Likes