Comments on: The High Cost of Free Incentive Parking

By: JÃ©rÃ©mie Dunn

JÃ©rÃ©mie Dunn — Sun, 17 Jul 2016 18:58:19 +0000

The problem is that the rails are often built before the city/borough where it is, before the streets that allow us to get to these rails and before the implantation of the stations. It is the exact opposite of the TOD philosophy. This gives us poorly located stations, poorly accessible from major streets and then poorly accessible by bus because it means line created for the only purpose of drivant people to the train stations. In that situation, the car is the only efficient say to catch a train.

Many train stations are not located on an idÃ©al spot but on least bad location for X city of borough.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 16:48:28 +0000

Here in Cambridge, UK we have a debate about park-and-ride charges. However these park-and-rides are for bus services into the centre, not train services.

The city introduced a Â£1 per-car charge last year on the park-and-ride car parks. Then each adult has to pay Â£2.70 for a return ticket on the bus.

The city centre has several multi-storey car parks available. Prices vary, but let’s say that they are between Â£2-3 per hour for a typical shopping trip of under 4 hours, and on the order of Â£25 for a full working day.

There are many streets in the city with unrestricted parking so that anyone may come and use them, albeit most of these streets are outside of the centre and may not be familiar to occasional visitors.

So what happens: during the week, all of the unrestricted streets are cluttered with commuter parking during the day. We know this because the streets all become empty of parked cars after 5 pm! The buses get caught in massive car congestion and are terribly unreliable.

And on the weekends, when shoppers come to town, there is a queue a mile long to get into the multi-storey car parks, backing up all the way out of town. Blocking the park-and-ride buses, in fact!

So your typical shopping family probably looks at the options and says “I could pay Â£6.40 (or more) to use a park-n-ride and still get stuck in traffic, or I can pay Â£2-3 per hour to get stuck in traffic but inside my own vehicle, or I could try and find an unrestricted parking space.”

There’s extreme political resistance to raising the city centre multi-storey parking charges. And while putting parking restrictions on the streets seems to be popular, we’re still waiting for the process to go through (maybe next year, if we’re lucky).

Many of us think that the park-and-ride charges should be dropped and the bus fares lowered. What do you think?

By: ant6n

ant6n — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:56:59 +0000

@emdx
The REM calls for TOD, but then they built every new station along a highway. So I doubt it’s going to work. To me it looks mostly like a desire to make money building mega-developments, instead of building livable, walkable places.

I think it would be better if they had a more urban routing in the West Island (e.g. Salaberry), and have more frequent stops that are actually _on_ the perpendicular arteries. Corridors like St-Jean are already slowly densifying, and transit stops would make it even easier. If you build the transit but make nearby space available for development, it will happen eventually.

Suburbanites have to understand that more density and transit along their corridors will increase their quality of life, it will bring services within walking distance and increase everybody’s health. It won’t destroy their way of life, people can still have their single family houses if they want.

By: emdx

emdx — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:48:58 +0000

The main problem is the NIMBYes who will froth ballistically at the mere mention of increasing density in their suburbs. This is why the city needs to be re-merged, without boroughs and where planning is centrally done so suburbanites can no longer stand in the way of progress. IIRC, the Caisse plan for their transit network precisely calls for densifying around stations, and taking a cut of the tax revenue. Basically, thatâ€s a return to the streetcar suburbs of 100-130 years agoâ€¦

By: David Tighe

David Tighe — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 17:56:45 +0000

I agree.However, at present, the implicit strategy seems to be to continue to maximize mobility by keeping people dependent on cars. Unfortunately they continue to be the cheapest and fastest way of getting around. The constraints on this strategy must be recognized, such as pollution, CO2 levels, congestion reducing mobility for all, exclusion of those who do not or cannot use a car etc and then woven into an explicit strategy of appropriate pricing, competitive options to cars, from bicycles to public transport, and so on.

I do realise that this diatribe is not exactly fresh and innovative and it is completely off the point but the basic problem remains that there is no political will to even define much less implement such a strategy because of the perceived political costs involved. There are isolated efforts to tinker with this glaring fact: new metro cars, a display to tell you when the next bus is coming, a cosmetic bus lane, even REM which although I rather admire it, is terribly badly integrated, but they are merely a few crumbs of a strategy. Maybe this is all a democracy can come up with?

By: ant6n

ant6n — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 16:26:10 +0000

I don’t think that getting cars of the road is actually the objective of transit.

The objective is moving people.

Right now we’re in a situation where basically any decent transit we provide will be filled up. So we should strive towards mobility, i.e. moving as many people as possible. So that means providing as much service as possible, to those who can’t afford cars and to those who don’t want to drive. We shouldn’t divert money for those goals to trying to bribe drivers into not driving by giving them a premium service below cost.

Or, to express it more postively: right now in the West Island people keep asking for more parking on the Deux-Montagnes line. If instead we increased the service to rapid transit levels and provided good feeder buses, a lot of people would take it. Even people who drive today would start taking all-transit trips.

By: David Tighe

David Tighe — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 16:17:56 +0000

Given that the objective is to take cars off the roads, especially those going downtown at peak periods, in Utopia we would implement a parking or congestion pricing policy in the downtown area that makes motorists pay the real costs, we would add a minimum of 0,25$/ lit to gas prices, and we would set parking tariffs at stations at the price that will just fill them.
Montreal is not Utopia so let us just improvise and maximize our vote.
Sorry for the cynicism: it is not really very productive

By: ant6n

ant6n — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 15:44:58 +0000

I guess part of the issue is that if the alternative is that drivers feel compelled to drive downtown and park there, then the market will ensure that’s not possible. We surely won’t provide anymore parking downtown, so if everybody wants to drive there the costs would become prohibitive. Right now the public expensively subsidizes that some percentage of drivers don’t go downtwn, which effectively reduces parking pressure downtown and keeps the prices lower.

The point is, the parking supply downtown is the limiting factor in any case, always. So changing the parking-equation by providing suburban parking is moot.

By: ant6n

ant6n — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 15:14:58 +0000

@David
If we invested the money we saved on parking, plus the money we gain from developing stations into transit service, then the incentives become more useful, and more equitable:

a) drive all the way downtown and pay 15$/day for parking
b) take a feeder bus or cycle to the station and pay 4$/day for transit.

Sure it cannot capture everybody, but it can move a hell of a lot more people than for example the 300 parking spaces at station Anjou of the Mascouche line.

By: David Tighe

David Tighe — Wed, 13 Jul 2016 15:10:57 +0000

I remember when the buzz-word was kiss-and-ride; park-and ride was less important since one-car families were common. Kissing is still in fashion but the idea of your wife having to get up to drive you to the station would seem absurd or even sexist today. Anyway, she had probably already left for work.

You raise an interesting point but remember that the social benefit from preventing that car polluting and congesting all the way downtown and then filling valuable space all day is significant. Nevertheless, free or small parking charges for the driver are inequitable. I have noticed that in the UK, for example, parking costs even at distant commuter stations are quite high and have already wondered at the logic of having them free here especially when they are already full by dawn.