No Parking Zone
Ride sharing and car sharing can significantly reduce the need for parking, thus freeing valuable space that can relieve traffic or be repurposed for private or public gain. But is it equitable?
Car sharing can greatly reduce the need for parking, which Zeljko Svedic thoroughly outlined in his piece on Motherboard. Based on the fact that an average car is parked 95% of the time, he makes a compelling argument that car-sharing programs, like Car-2-Go, can reduce the need for parking by a factor of 19. His vision of a parking-less future creatively integrates driverless cars, universal valets, a competitive market for car-sharing companies, and a myriad of apps that map out available cars, scooters, or rides to rent in your vicinity.
This future is not far off: ride sharing is already offering a solution in place of parking lots, which are costly to build and, in the cities, take up valuable space. The town of Summit, New Jersey will pay Uber to drive people to the train station, which will be cheaper than building a new parking lot to accommodate the increased demand on the park-and-ride commuter system. Incidentally, this will be the first state-subsidized commuter program, an intervention specifically for wealthy suburbanites who commute into the city.
Car and ride sharing programs can greatly reduce the need for parking, as thoroughly argued by Svedic and illustrated by the Summit program, but car and ride sharing programs reinforce a dependence on car culture, which is inherently problematic to equitable and accessible transportation. Cars were the mechanism by which the suburbs were designed to be inaccessible to the poor. Free parking in the city essentially subsidized the segregation that allowed suburbanites access to the cities without subjecting their affluent enclaves to access by the poor and the depravity, crime, unruly children and subsequent ruin that would accompany them. But now that the wealthy are moving back to the cities, and pushing the poor out, the popularity of car-sharing and ride-sharing is no surprise then; with the premium on space, it’s no longer practical or efficient for wealthy city dwellers to own cars, and the ride and car-sharing platforms are convenient work-arounds for gaps left by an incomplete public transportation system.
These seemingly novel interventions ignore public transportation as a reasonable solution that would reduce the number of cars on the road, the consequent need for parking and environmental pollution. If these innovations are going to be heralded as a panacea for transportation, then they must be made accessible for all and issues of equity should be thoroughly explored. It would be remiss for the city to permit private-sector innovation, which by design serves an affluent clientele, to take over transportation while public services become increasingly outdated, inefficient, and ineffective.
