Context: i am in Europe so might be irrelevant to US.
I was thinking : we already have a usable solution to traffic jams. It’s called parking lots, as the ones in airports. You drop your car, then you take public transport to go anywhere. So imagine doing the same, but on daily basis. Build many such parking spots outside of the city , irrigate with public transport, make the price reasonable for daily usage (fuck you Charles de Gaulle Airport and your 14€/day fee). Boom, reduces your traffic by X% every morning.
As someone who drives regularly from Reims to Paris, I d be glad if such option existed, so I wouldn’t have to drive on Périphérique.
The two reasons I think it’s not used is “planning” and “politicians”. The latter isn’t good at former.
I don’t drive in France, but there is already Train stations with parking, Centre d’expositions for example?
Park and ride require considerable space so often it might be preferable to park in a station that make the remaining journey okay or take the train directly.
Park and ride is what that concept is called.
Even with low parking fees and low public transport fees, you need to incentivize their usage even further by e.g. adding a city toll, so that people have to pay when going into the city by car.
But even then it’s not really THE big solution. In Vienna, for example, about 450 000 cars cross city lines into the city each morning. An average parking spot in a garage is about 12.5m² plus 7.5m² of space to access it, so ~20m² in total.
That’s a total of roughly 9km².
That’s about 2% of the total area of Vienna, and currently it’s provided by thousands of parking garages and parking lots distributed all over the city.
But if you were to build that on the outskirts of the city, the park and ride facilities would have to be enormous.
Even if you build 5-story parking towers that’s still roughly 2km².
We already have that, at least here in Hamburg it’s called Park+Ride. Parking spots next to many suburban Metro stations, the ticket costs 2€ per day or 100€ per year if combined with a monthly subscription for the train.
That doesn’t prevent Hamburg from being clogged up every day though. The two reasons I think it’s not used by all those people that prefer standing in the traffic instead are “stupid” and “people”. The latter are good at being the former 😉
We have two at the two major ingresses of Groningen. The thing with P+R is that they really only take away the traffic from visitors. People who work in the city will still take their car, people who live there will never use it.
The municipality is working hard to get rid of cars in the city which I can only applaud. You’ll still need your car to go to Ikea and the like but the infrastructure for that is great. As long as you stay away from the center you can pretty much manage by car.
Now, Groningen is still pretty much a walkable city. I think Hamburg is something like ten times its size, yet last time I was there we still walked a huge chunk over there. If I compare it to, for instance, Amsterdam, which is still smaller but closer to the size of Hamburg, you just take a tram anywhere and you’ll get to wherever you need to be.
City centers in Europe have no need for cars.
why would you need to drive to ikea? do other countries not do delivery?
Delivery from my nearest IKEA warehouse which is ~70km away in a completely different city costs 50 EUR, or 30 if you join “IKEA family”
Because driving to Ikea means you can take stuff with you without paying for delivery. Plus sometimes we just wanna walk through the store and that means either going by car or taking two busses.
okay so you don’t have to drive there at all, you just choose to do so.
Well yeah but most Dutch people are cheap as hell so paying for delivery is a bit much if you can drive there and have a huge amount of trouble fitting a couch in their 2001 Corsa.
You don’t buy furniture at Ikea because you’re rich. The delivery fee is quite high for some people. Plus sometimes you want/need something the same day. And it makes sense to look at the stuff IRL as opposed to ordering from the website. IKEA is one of the things that actually make sense to drive to.
damn, I thought my idea was original. Thanks for the feedback
We have P+R also in France, in Paris it’s called parking relais, there is 83 of them with 23000 parking spot. But even in smaller town (I live near Grenoble and there is P+R, sadly not use at is full potential because public transport in some are not up to pace, but its getting better) It is still a good idea :) hard to implement well, and it need a lot more that just parking spot to be useful.
i ve been living in Paris for many years, and just learned about it…
Is there congestion pricing in Hamburg? I wonder if that could be an effective tool?
Good luck with ideas like that in Germany. It’s a country owned and governed by old people
And car lobby
Same in Finland and just about every EU country. But apparently not enough, since OP hasn’t noticed.
The problem with park and ride is that the math doesn’t easily check out. Think about how much space around a railway station, say, 30 spots take up. Now you’ve built a sizable parking lot around a railway station but only gotten rid of 30 cars, which isn’t a lot.
And that’s the most valuable real state when it comes to transit oriented development. We should have dense mixed use developments in this area instead of car parks
park and ride should be done where land is cheap, like at the edge of an urban area.
Then you just slap down a station and a cheapo parking garage and maybe a small convenience store/café and bamJust because land is “cheap”, that doesn’t mean it should be ruined.
so how precisely do you suggest we transition away from cars in cities? just tell people living rurally to suck it up until 30 years in the future when we’ve gotten around to making public transport in their area usable?
park&ride when done right is fine, it’s a fine way to prevent people from losing their minds about change, don’t let perfection be the enemy of improvement.
We have the in the UK… they’re mid
Those parking prices and the lackluster connection from those parking lots to peoples destination is the problem that prevents this ideas success.
I can drive to my specialist doctors appointment, and it takes between 30 and 60 minutes.
Or I can drive to the P&R (20 minutes), take a tram to the city center (25 to 45 minutes, depending when the tram arrives), and then take a bus (20 to 30 minutes), and then walk for another ten minutes.
For the joy of experiencing overfull trams and busses that take longer and having an additional walk I have to pay €3.70 each way. Luckily, parking is free.
Now tell me, why on earth should I use public transport?
A fun game while waiting for the bus is to look at the cars and count how many have a single occupant and how many have more than one person. Why am I waiting for the bus? Because it’s stuck in traffic.
Parking is not a solution. Because of induced demand, if you make it easier to take a car more people take car instead of public transport and you are back to square one in worse. Parking is also a very inefficient use of space. More than 10 square meter per car for véhicule that stay unused it build up quickly. It seems easy but it’s really not.
Sure parking + public transport outside city is not that bad. But it is more a bandage than a real solution. I work in planning in France, believe me parking is the first go to solution for decade it never worked.
The fun part about that is how we in the US haven’t learned that lesson. We’re still building massive park and ride systems that see very little use in many places, but we’d rather fail big (and expensively) than actually reduce traffic.
To make Park and Ride be more effective it needs to be paired with fast, high frequency public transit (and/or great biking infrastructure), then make it very painful to driver the car into the city. Reduce speeds, narrow out lanes, remove in city parking, remove free parking, put in speed bumps, prioritize pedestrians. Basically make it suck to use your dangerous, ecologically destructive noise machine where people should be instead of cars. Otherwise people just skip the overhead of the Park and Ride to drive into the downtown area anyway.
Yep. Gotta make the bus faster than cars with bus only lanes.
edge of city park-and-ride is there to shut up the numbnuts who cry “but how will i get into the city?!?!?!”
In the US my mom used to do something like that, but the time it took to transfer to the train into the city and pay for the ticket and parking at the train station, it ended up taking about the same amount of time and cost about the same.
After a year, she just drove into the city as it was about the same cost and more convenient.
My Australian town of half a million people is about as car based as a US town. We have park and ride carparks in each group of suburbs, on the main bus routes, so you can drive about 5 minutes, park for free, and catch a bus the rest of the way
It saves about $15 a day in parking, and the bus costs about $6 a day
The alternative using just public transport uses a suburban bus to get to the main bus routes (which run each 5 or 10 minutes), but the suburban buses only run hourly, or half hourly during peak times, and add about half an hour each way to the trip
But doesn’t the parking building just scan your plates when you arrive and leave? Swipe your card for the train. Done.
Are you being sarcastic? It is not like that at all. Also the trains stop running kinda early, so you can’t stick around after work.
