02-19-2019, 09:30 PM
(02-19-2019, 09:15 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(02-19-2019, 09:09 PM)jamincan Wrote: It's not really. Once something is built, we generally have to live with the consequences of it for a long time afterward.
The owners of the property have to live with it. Maybe they fix it by buying a nearby vacant lot for parking, maybe they knock down the last store in the strip mall for parking, maybe they change the use of the property to something with less parking demand. Regardless, it’s their problem to fix, just as it would be Zehr’s problem to fix if they didn’t install enough refrigeration capacity and needed to have a renovation to put it in later. In a free society, people will make mistakes, and sometimes they just need to figure it out for themselves. Right now we require everybody to make the opposite mistake. Much better to have some people screw up than everybody. We can’t prevent some properties from being poorly designed anyhow. What’s so special about parking that we think we can tell the owners the right amount?
It is really ironic how our country fears this idea.
We're a capitalist country in most ways. We trust the invisible hand of the market for many things, hell, even our last mile internet service, which probably shouldn't be entirely free market. Of course, some things we trust to central planning, and sometimes they have positive outcomes, or at least the outcomes we're aiming for (i.e., staying on the transport trend, we centrally plan what safety features must be required on cars, and that has reduced fatalities on our roads)...yet for parking, we centrally plan it, it has enormous negative consequences that we are well aware of, yet we are terrified of considering another option.