Letters to the Editor
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Welcome to good old european standards
Living in germany, I would like to tell everybody over there:
Paying for parking on the street or wherever else in the city (downtown areas at least) is the normal thing to expect in a german town.
And it works just fine, thank you.
With suburban shopping malls, it is a different matter of course - free parking still being the standard and one reason for many to go there.
Anyway: I would like to encourage you Americans: Go ahead and start putting some decent economic pressure on the use of your land, at least in downtown areas. It does a good job of managing and directing the behaviour of drivers. And nobody is going bankrupt privately just by paying some Euros (= some Bucks) for some hours of parking.
Really, it works. Good luck trying!
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Cars are Money Pits
About 25 years ago I sat down and worked out the math of what owning a car would actually cost me in time, based on what I expected my hourly wage to be by the time I was 30. I added up all the hours of driving that I would really do over my lifetime (beyond just getting from A to B) how much I'd probably pay in parking, tickets, fines, repairs, insurance etc. To my surprise, I found that driving would end up costing about 50% of my expected annual salary for the rest of my life. I haven't owned a car since, and I've never regretted it.
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Explosion of self-referential liberal idiocy
I think Ms. Mieszkowski should come clean, and admit her own biases -- I'll bet she lives in a trendy neighborhood in NYC, is relatively young and fit and can walk or take a convenient subway anyplace she needs. Or she resides in a quaint college town in California, where the weather is always mild and a fit youngish person can easily take a bike ride when they wish. She's also affluent enough that the idea of paying 1000% increases for a street parking spot is "no problema".
It's easy to pontificate when you are in such a position. Unfortunately, HER circumstances are very different than the vast majority of Americans. Most of us live in climates where it is freezing cold six-to-seven months out of the year, with two feet or more of snow and ice on the ground. Just try riding a bicycle to work in that kind of weather. Even taking the bus is a misery, since you must wait for the bus while standing outdoors, in a blizzard, with no shelter and often for an HOUR or more, because the badly run public transportation is not reliable.
Then have your commute to work or school take TWO HOURS each way, instead of maybe 20-30 minutes! Yes, there is a higher cost to driving but most of feel it is well worth it to gain a couple of precious hours with our FAMILIES.
Speaking of that, has Ms. Mieszkowski any children? Because I'd like to see her bicycling around town -- in the dead of winter or a brutal summer heat wave -- with two or three children strapped to her mountain bike. Or hauling infants and toddlers onto a hot, crowded bus that has no more seating, so you have to stand for the two hour ride into town.
Before she accuses people she does not even know of "being lazy" and having "fat asses", I'd like to see her go to the grocery store, and buy a week's groceries FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR OR FIVE (including stuff like mega-packs of toilet paper) and carry it home on a BUS or tied to a BICYCLE, or maybe she could get one of those cute tiny folding carts and WALK FIVE MILES HOME in a blizzard. In the dark. In a bad neighborhood.
Please -- I will pay good money to see this. Then we can move on to seeing how she manages to bring home a dozen sheets of dry wall from Home Depot on her bike, bus or by walking.
The "idiot liberal" viewpoint is that EVERYONE is young, fit (or could be if not a lazy fat ass)....that they have no arthritis and good knees....nobody is old or has disabilities. Of course, you are single and childless, and since you only shop at Whole Foods (or other chi chi expensive organic health food emporium) and you only buy enough locally grown organic health food to last maybe two days, you can simply put all such food in your trendy hemp re-usable bag, and hop on your titanium mountain bike and head back to your densely populated trendy urban neighborhood.
If this is your view of an ideal future, you are welcome to it. To most of us, it sounds like hell....a hell where many will be endlessly driving around, miserably looking for an wildly overpriced parking space...that thanks to your self-serving vision, does not exist. Anyone who thinks it is a good idea to build a 4200-seat MOVIE THEATRE, with less than 1000 parking spots, is in dire need of a course in Economics 101. They did something like this in my neighborhood -- a beautifully renovated art deco theatre -- and it promptly went out of business. Why? Because the vast majority of us want AMPLE FREE PARKING, and we will drive -- or MOVE -- to where ever OUR NEEDS ARE BEING MET, and not your pathetic liberal vision of a quaint walkable village....some tribute to the past that is based more on a Frank Capra movie set than anything that existed in reality.
For what it is worth, my parents grew up in the kind of antiquated environment Ms. Mieskowski idolizes and they loathed it, and moved to the suburbs as soon as they could afford it.
She and her ilk are welcome to this kind of inconvenient, overpriced liberal mecca with my hearty blessings. Just don't make ME live in it.
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Winter busing...
I worked for a government lab where the commute was 45 miles each way and the bus tickets were 50 cents. Very few (idiots) drove. I had to walk about half a mile across a pasture and a canal to the bus stop and wait in the cold. In Idaho it's typically 40 degrees at 7 AM in July and August, even though it will be 90-100 by 5 PM. In the winter it could be 30 below. Many men were dropped off by their wives wearing light jackets. One day the hill up to the bus stop was covered with black ice and the buses got stuck a half mile away. There was much suffering that morning, but because of my walk through snow drifts I was wearing insulated pants and a mountain parka. I was like the Emperor Penguins and could stand there all day if necessary. But for urban commuting, who would put up with that? I had no interface problems and the buses came by continuously every few minutes. It took less than 45 minutes to go the 45 miles, with no towns, houses, or traffic control signals for the entire distance. I really liked it out there, with antelopes and coyotes visible nearby out my office window. The labs area was and is 900 sq miles of sagebrush desert, so parking was not a problem.
Now that is where public transportation really is practical.