Letters to the Editor
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Parking Lots Even Affect ... Caves?
During a 1994 visit to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, the tour ranger pointed out something obvious: the "hall" we traversed was noticeably dryer and devoid of the giant stalactites and stalagmites that populated the other areas.
The reason, she explained, was that we were directly beneath the visitor center parking lot. The water that normally percolated through the soil in that area, leaching minerals and forming the -mites, was diverted from the parking lot to storm drains.
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Montgomery County MD - the buses.
A twenty minute drive translates to one hour to one and a half hour bus ride. You can wait twenty minutes for a bus during rush hour and then you see two buses running in tandem - true stupidity. Twenty mnutes is a short wait and very often a bus just won't show up at all.
Driving in Montgomery County is a pleasure and parking is no problem especially compared to Northern Virginia which is to be avoided like the plague any time between 3 pm and 7 pm.
But for those who want us to take the bus there is something you don't hear about. I have been assaulted on the bus six times. I had to throw a young thug off the bus two times and while he was pounding away at me, not one person did anything. This was broad daylight. I even had to tell the bus driver to open up the door so I could toss him out onto the curb. Whne he came back for more, I had to ORDER the bus driver to call the police. Next time I saw him at Wheaton Metro he promised to shoot me and kill me. Late at night drunks will try to pick fights with you, which is a lot easier to deal with since it is hard for them to land a decent punch. The metro police come fairly quickly to deal with the problems, but why should people to be subjected to this stuff? Then there are the guys who expose themselves, yes, on the bus in broad daylight trying to pick up a woman. It is crazy.
One night at the Wheaton metro I was confronted by six thugs who figured I would be easy game. Over a hundred people watched as i dealt with the problem and not one of them did anything. The thugs fled when they noticed security approaching, One person said he was thinking about helping me out. The crowd was quite entertained by the show but they would have been just as entertained if these three thugs had beaten to a bloody pulp. I didn't have to hurt them and they couldn't land any blows or kicks on me.
If you are not prepared to deal with thugs and be able to manage a small group of them then it really isn't safe to ride the bus. I prefer to drive.
If you take the bus, study martial arts or carry a weapon.
This is in Montgomery County Maryland, a place where this stuff isn't supposed to happen.
Oh, I didn't hurt any of those thugs because then I probably would have been arrested.
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ample free parking
It is possible, even in Los Angeles to dump the car and still commute. I take a "Rapid" bus from Beverly Hills to my office in downtown Los Angeles every day. Instead of leaving in my car at 7:20, I leave at 7:10 to get to the bus stop three blocks away and am dropped off at Grand and Hope by 7:50. Even on weekends, if I am going to Santa Monica, I will brave looking like a loser and take the bus out there: I don't have to worry about finding parking or fighting for a space in a parking structure. If more people here got over the idea that the MTA is for "them" (i.e. the poor) the better off LA would be.
I still have my car, but I am happily only driving it once a week, if that.
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parking on the University of Illinois at Springfield campus
it is explicitly stated that parking sticker fees on this campus are the only revenue source permitted by state law to pay for the construction and maintenance of the campus parking lots, yet people still act as if being asked to pay a portion of that bill is akin to an act of piracy
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Paying people not to drive
Katharine's article reminded me of a policy established by Ecover, the Belgian ecological cleaning products company, when they first constructed their factory: they paid workers extra for not driving to work.
Fuzzy-headed idealism from a bunch of tree-hugging enviros? Nope, hard-nosed dollars and cents (make that francs and centimes). Ecover execs realized there would be a cost saving that more than makes up for the additional wages to employees. They save cost because, needing less parking space, they could buy a smaller parcel of land (apparently, there were no requirements on parking lot size, as the article describes exist in the US). A smaller lot meant less up-front expense, and lower costs for on-going maintenance and taxes.
It's an excellent example of - to use economics language - internalizing externalized costs. The article's quotation that "parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else" is a plainer way of saying that parking is an externalized cost, i.e., a cost borne by everyone - so little that we seldom notice it.
Externalized costs, whether financial or ecological, are the bane of sustainability. Asthma from increased air pollution, below-market oil drilling leases on public lands, and municipal landfills that enable us to be more wasteful are all examples of externalized costs. Many governments – especially in Europe – have been vigorously passing laws based on the principle of “polluter pays.” It’s ironic that here in the land of the “free”, such measures are so often lampooned as “socialistic”.
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Ridiculous biases of the naysayers
It's interesting how Laurel and other parking enthusiasts are convinced that their preferred arrangement is some kind of libertarian ideal, and the alternative is "dictatorial" based on the preferences of the "elites." Actually, the parking-and-sprawl-based status quo is very much a product of government regulations and subsidies, as the article partially explains. The considerable percentage of the American population (from a very wide demographic) that would prefer an alternative is very often denied it by laws and government policies.