JeffRubinoff wrote:
>
>
> On Sep 9, 2:23 pm, Tom Adams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> On Sep 7, 5:17 am, James Annan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>
> ...
>
>> At UNC Chapel-Hill they have made it increasingly difficult to park
>> near where you work. As a result, most people have to take the bus
>> from an outlying lot even if they drive a car most of the way to
>> work. This destroys most of the advantages of driving to work.
>>
>> I think this is the most effective way to discourage the use of cars
>> in favor of mass-transit. But I don't think it
>> would fly politically in many places.
>
> It's also not very nice.
Well, car drivers killing people isn't very nice, and we put up with 10
of them a day in the UK (I understand that the USA is far worse, as is
most of the rest of the world). Societies are obviously free to decide
how they wish to allocate resources, and the provision of free plentiful
parking is of course a huge hidden perk to the subset of people who use it.
In the UK, there have been moves to treat workplace parking explicitly
as a taxable perk. I don't know how far this plan has gone. Of course it
was met with predictable howls from the motoring lobby but I don't
really see how they can object to paying the costs of their choices. Car
parking is an extraordinarily wasteful use of land in expensive urban
areas, and spaces are offered to rent for up to 3000ukp per year in
central London (I could probably find higher prices if I tried). I'd be
very happy to pocket that much extra salary and ride a bicycle instead.
Even where land is cheap, imposing additional travel time and cost on
others is still a factor that needs to be considered.
Ah, google tells me that Nottingham is planning to introduce this levy
shortly, and it will ramp up to 350 UKP per year by 2010. I'm sure that
a pound per day is substantially less than the cost of commercial car
parks in the area, and they won't even be at more than 70% occupancy.
James
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