A great note from a parking vigilante in the Sugar House district of Salt Lake City

Image from a NextDoor discussion thread.  These notes are being posted on people's car windshields.

My joke is that if social security is the third rail of national politics, then parking is the third rail of local politics ("DC as a suburban agenda dominated city," 2013).

Living in DC without a car for so many years disabused me of the belief that a property owner owns the street space in front of their house.  Of course, not having a car meant it didn't matter to me either.

In our outer city house in DC, we have the equivalent of about three parking spaces in front, and except when we used rental cars or car share vehicles, we didn't use the space.  (Which likely encouraged our one next door neighbor to buy lots of cars like VWs and park them outside, although they do have some on-site spaces.)

We have a garage but it was sized for cars c. 1929 and we never tried to use it for parking.  Probably one car could fit in if it were parked in the middle.

Still, I've had plenty of arguments about this, especially when it came to Car2Go, the one-way car sharing program.


Revel scooter parked on a street in New York City.

Now, it's an issue with Revel sit down e-scooters too.  A NextDoor discussion in the Fort Totten neighborhood includes a back and forth on this and "the right to the parking space in front of my house".

Of course, there are the arguments in Professor Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking about the value of street parking space which is much higher than the $35/year permit fee per car in DC--some blocks, like mine, because supply is greater than demand, don't even have permit requirements.

In any case, like in Toronto, permit fees should be higher with each additional car.  They aren't in DC.  And permit fees should be higher based on the size of the vehicle, something suggested in my old H Street neighborhood's inaugural community planning initiative for the then new planning director Andrew Altman, back in 2001.

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I participated in a supermarket focus group a couple weeks ago, and in response to the question "does anything about what we do bother you?" I said all the supermarket loyalty programs focused on gasoline discounts ignore their customers who use transit or bicycle.

One of the other attendees said "I never thought of that before."

Why would she?  She drives.  And driving is natural.

People don't recognize automobility as a privileging.  Then again, there is so much other intersectionality to worry about.

-- "Supporting car sharing vs. privileging car owners and the use of the public space," 2011
== "Car share users are getting abused by the cities that ostensibly support car sharing as a form of sustainable mobility," 2016