On-street parking, what a waste of scarce resources. Look at this street, 3 lanes. It could perfectly be 2 lanes for cars and one for bicycles. Streets would be available for people moving from one place to the other.
I had no idea Biel had the common sense of not allowing to park on the street in the building has an underground parking. Zurich would be a much nicer place if a similar regulation passed too.
But, people really loves subsidized parking. Let’s try to give a price for a on-street parking place. This year 2022 estimate of building land per canton prices gives 2’270 CHF/m2 for ZH canton (whole canton). A mid-size car easily occupies 10m2, that’s 22k. People paying 360 francs a year would have to pay 60+ years to pay for the space of building land that occupies a mid-size car. And that’s assuming the average cantonal price of land, in zip codes closer to city center prices go higher. So, on-street parking is a subsidy.
The sad part is that the regulation proposal will be probably defeated in vote by populist parties.
What? You don’t think people aren’t already paying through their taxes? It may not be very fair how the are apportioned but homeowners and renters are already paying.
In any case your proposal won’t get cars off the street but just make it more difficult for the less wealthy.
Guest and visitors have no blue parking cards. Well, there is a 3 day card for visitors on blue zones, but how many plates from other cantons or countries you see around?
Yes, but they can still park for one hour in the blue zones using a disc. So, the only benefit of your proposal would be more curbside spaces for visitors and guests. Even on streets without curbside parking, there are often planters that make a two-way street effectively feel like a narrow one-lane road. You have to wait for oncoming cars to pass before maneuvering around the planters. Design a street like that in the States, and you’ll have riots, if not collisions with the planters or oncoming traffic.
No, the plan would be to remove the on-street parking.
Paris plans to remove over a third of it’s on-street parking in the next few years and has already removed 80,000 places.
Contrary to what Axa has written in titling this thread, the space has been turned into green spaces with trees and playgrounds and even vegetable plots.
This makes a massive improvement to air quality, provides natural street cooling in warmer months and makes a more pleasant environment in which to live.
The condition “if they live in a building with underground parking” makes no sense, the cost of a blue zone space doesn’t depend on people’s UP availability. All it does is privilege old buildings as they’re unlikely to have UP.
Also, there won’t even be enough private parking spaces to make this doable. The consequence would be even higher costs for the private parking slots.
Blue zones allow guests and visitors to park for an hour with the wheely clock thing, and a day by paying the 15chf day-pass (at least in Zurich).
It’s the way that I can shop at smaller stores, rather than being forced to go to large stores with parking lots (as in that case, I just goto Germany).
Removing the spaces does just that - remove them. Also guests, visitors, etc wouldn’t be able to park there if it’s a 2 lane road (or a green space or whatever).
I went to jucker farm this weekend, and after 30 minutes trying to park (they closed their parking lot and redirected people to another parking lot - which was full), opted to not goto the farm.
It’s a wonderful concept to push people to public transport, except that with a young baby, elderly grandparent + a dog, becomes near impossible without a car.
Well, Paris (20,000 people per km2) is not the same as Switzerland (Zurich 4,500 people per km2). Paris perhaps needs the space for parks and playgrounds, Switzerland is not a densly populated country, cars and people can coexist more easily.
Not everyone can bike and society needs to care for all citizens (those with young families, elderly, unfit). Building bike lanes is not enough to persuade more people on their bikes, eg take Copenhagen with 3-meter wide lanes everywhere, there are a lot of bikes but also a lot of cars, everyone owns one. Lausanne removed street parking from its center and replaced with bike lanes, but that didn’t change much… car owners adapted and using underground car parks, just hiding the ‘problem’, new bicycle lanes mainly empty with the occasional bike, even in the summer.
Last time I went to Milan by car (normally it’s by train), we parked in a multi-storey on the outskirts but got public transport into the centre.
We had young children at the time but didn’t have a dog.
Aside from the fact that most dogs can walk and actually enjoy it, Jucker Farm isn’t in Zurich so is as irrelevant as saying that you couldn’t park at Europe Park.
Agreed that the dog can walk, but a bit challenging to hold a leash while pushing a stroller over rough terrain… all while finding a way for grandma to actually get there…
While Jucker farm is outside zurich, the point is - reducing parking is a bad idea… regardless of where you do it. If you expect people to actually live/visit somewhere, there needs to be suitable infrastructure. Roads are useless without parking…
Problem? Parked vehicles using space that can be used for mobility, or as Tom mentioned, playgrounds or bars.
Think a bit that the local government policy for housing is give some support to cooperatives, even though housing is a “human right”. Now look at the public policy of subsidized parking.
Along with bike paths, I didn’t mention bars either but now you come to mention it after COVID, in the UK, in an aid to help struggling restaurants and bars, on-street food and drink licences were granted which, along with closing roads and reducing parking, actually encouraged people to visit these establishments and produced more of a European ‘vibe’ to many city streets.
