> Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.

This is got to be a huge factor. Making everyone pay for "free parking" through inefficient use of space is such a waste. I strongly recommend everyone to read Donald Shoup's "The High Price of Free Parking".

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cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.

	▲	bluebarbet 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And that's without mentioning what's like for the lowest of the low (in the USA): pedestrians.

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ericmay 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots in American downtowns and stopping the development and expansion of highways through the same. If you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact. For almost all communities those surface parking lots are economic extracts from the community. They're woefully underpriced for tax purposes too.

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spike021 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Maybe the parking lots, but if you know anything about the major Japanese cities with satisfyingly good train systems then you'll also know they have a lot of expressways running through them.

	▲	ericmay 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, I do love the rail system in Japan. Went a few years ago, going back next year most likely. I've also driven in Japan (Osaka). I just meant, in general, a low-hanging fruit we could tackle is making surface parking lots a thing of the past in downtown or urban areas. With actual economically productive constructs there instead, such as business, retail, housing, parks, &c. we could pretty much get to the density where trams make sense, and in some cities we could work on intra-city rail too. I think where I live (Columbus) is very well positioned for this model if only our civic leaders had courage and stopped thinking of transit as a "blue" thing (also our city council needs to stop suburban thinking). We don't need to build any more expressways or highways. We are maxed out. The only sane option is respecting appropriate density, and focusing on categorical changes in how we move people: walk/bike/rail instead of bus/car/roadways.

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PacificSpecific 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow weird. I've lived there and never knew but now that you've pointed that out I'm realizing we never parked on the street. It's always at the house or the parking lot of the place we're going.

Of course 95% of the time we take the train. Only use a car to go to Costco or possibly go out to the country (even then a lot of remote areas are super accessible in public transit)

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vondur 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it is. You have to prove that you have a space to park your car and if you have space at your house, they come to measure and verify that you do. I don't mind parking for places that you are visiting, but you need to have your own parking and not depend on the street for it.

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gonzalohm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In which part of Europe is cheap to park?

	▲	ciupicri an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Romania. Even its capital and the largest city - Bucharest - is still pretty cheap, sometimes even free like in this example on Google Street View https://maps.app.goo.gl/r6TFFtHbj2SELTqY9 If you're willing to take the risk which is pretty low, you can even park it on the sidewalk like here https://maps.app.goo.gl/y6DNVBdR2KvJsA917 But times are changing. Lanes and sidewalks, sometimes even green spaces, are being converted to parking spaces, so there's less spaces for freeloading. They're also becoming more and more expensive. The residential ones have also been hard to get and it will probably become even harder to get as more drivers will need them as the risk of getting a fine increases.
	▲	bluebarbet 32 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not Paris and especially not if you have an SUV: 225€ for six hours (sic). But unlike Tokyo the average narrow street in Paris is still lined with parked cars from end to end, so apparently the fees are still too low.

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newsclues 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Makes you consider the cost of anything that is “free”

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SilverElfin 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That won’t fix the cost of rail in America, which is the main reason America doesn’t have better rail. Look at California high speed rail or light rail in Seattle. They have insane costs per mile, are still very over budget, falling behind schedule, and basically are forever grifts. The availability of parking is unrelated to these issues. It comes back to mismanagement and corruption.

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jltsiren 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

If you try building a single megaproject, nobody knows what they are doing, everything is inefficient, and mistakes will be made. But you learn by doing. If the individual projects are small enough that there are always multiple projects in various stages, you develop and maintain expertise. Then you can build things cost-effectively and finish the projects in time.

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WorkerBee28474 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> The cost of passenger rail is high in America, because America doesn't build enough rail.

The cost of passenger rail is high in America because America has 11% of the population (read: customer) density of Japan.

(For cities, NYC has 25% lower population density than Tokyo.)

	▲	wahern 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Dividing population by total land area is a horribly misleading way to understand density. There are alternatives, like population-weighted density, that give you a better picture: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3119965 Here's a blog post where somebody re-invented the concept and analyzed density in Europe: https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... The population-weighted density of the US is roughly similar to continental Europe.

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n8cpdx 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you explain how Seattle is an example? They’re opening new lines, Link is packed often, seems like a well used reliable service, but I only visit once or twice a year.

	▲	SilverElfin 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It’s been a while since I read about their system but as I recall, across the entire system something like 100 billion is the total cost. But that’s only for like 75 ish miles. So it’s very expensive. I recently saw a news article saying they’re 30 billion short per their projections and are now cutting lines out of the plan that voters expected when they supported levies, and some surrounding cities where residents have each paid hundreds or more a year for the rail to come to them, now may not get them at all. Even though they’ve been paying into it for a decade or two. Which to me is a form of theft.

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jccx70 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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thaumasiotes 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased.

> This is got to be a huge factor.

If the USA implemented that exact rule, it would change almost nothing. People already need nighttime parking for non-legal reasons.

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mjamesaustin 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You are dramatically misinformed. Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.

Such a change would have a significant impact.

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Gibbon1 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you tried that your politicians would get tossed out of office the next election.

Your argument totally ignores that all this infrastructure was built around using cars. Doing things like banning street parking doesn't magically reorganize the way everything was built out over the last 100 years. Took a 100 years to build this will take 100 or more years to undo it.

I'm also suspicious the people pushing stuff like that would in a different time and place would be wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves. All nice but that's not most people.

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thaumasiotes 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Where I live in Los Angeles, a very large number of people park their cars primarily or exclusively on the street.

> Such a change would have a significant impact.

What would that impact be? Do you see, or experience, a lot of contention for nighttime parking?

There's plenty of contention for street parking in nonresidential areas. But a nighttime parking certificate doesn't do anything about that. Nighttime parking is done in residential areas.

	▲	numpad0 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's not like you have to get waivers to park your cars in front of your house in Japan. Your car MUST have a designated lot, with proofs(more or less a set of simple declaration forms than anything detailed and concrete), to be registered under your name. Otherwise it cannot be registered. A full waiver for parking violations technically exist, but they are reserved for official and/or actually special vehicles only(like actual fire trucks). The vast majority of cars stay in an off-of-road parking lot of some sort, be it a fancy mechanical one or a crude gravel lot next to apartment complex. I reckon that not many other country do that kind of legal setup. But Japan is among those very few.
	▲	Tumblewood 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not the person you're replying to, but I see the same thing happen in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Dense neighborhood with a lot of nightlife, but many of its residents exclusively use free street parking to park overnight. There is a lot of contention for spots after about 7pm.

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nkrisc 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps you’ve never lived in a large American city? In many cities you can’t even park on the street overnight in residential neighborhoods because the parking is permitted for people who live in that neighborhood. Without the right sticker (or a guest permit from a resident) your car is getting ticketed or towed, formalizing the usage of overnight street parking for residents.

In Chicago, for example, many neighborhoods are full of former single family homes that at some point (often long ago) were converted into 2 or 3 unit residences, but there is still likely only one garage that maybe fits two vehicles. If you’ve got units filled with 2-3 roommates each, there might be 9 cars for a building with only 2 spots.

Obviously I’m not arguing this is good, but that’s the way things are for now.