If there is parking, they will drive...

The flagship Examiner paper in San Francisco reports in "Study: If there is parking, they will come," that

"Fewer people in San Francisco would drive if they didn't have parking available, according to a San Francisco State University study.The study found that residents with access to one or more parking spaces at home were almost twice as likely to have cars as their counterparts in buildings where the ratio was much smaller.The exploratory study sampled only a small group of people at handpicked buildings around The City, but it provides a good backbone for further research, its authors said Thursday. "Fewer parking spaces also means fewer car trips," explained author Elmer Tosta, in presenting the findings to a forum at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association this week."
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Haven't dug up the study yet but it makes sense. Like with a hammer, thinking every problem is a nail, with a car every solution is to drive.

This is why it's important to require "Transportation Demand Management" plans for more types of businesses and institutions and developments. New condominuium and apartment buildings need to be required to negotiate with shared car services such as Flexcar and Zipcar to provide spaces and to encourage use amongst residents, etc.

Matt Clausen and Margarita Diaz use a Zipcar for errands. Owning a car "was more of a hassle than anything," he said. (Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

The current issue of Congressional Quarterly's cover story is how the capacity of the Interstate highway system will be exceeded by the growth in truck trips. Probably not if more businesses took deliveries at night?

Have you ever noticed that it takes a long time to get from Georgetown to Bethesda via Wisconsin Avenue during the day? Most nights of the week, at 11 p.m., it takes about 12 minutes, max. (or at least it did when I worked in Bethesda), although not on a Friday or Saturday night...

Remember during the height of the Internet Boom, and a number of companies were working on creating refridgerator-sized lock boxes to accommodate the delivery of all sorts of stuff to be bought off the Internet? What about having UPS and FedEx Ground (formerly Roadway Package Service) do deliveries to certain residential areas after 6 pm?

Etc.