So that means government pressuring the business to provide such parking to customers.

Parking provided by malls or restaurants with their own lots is not a subsidy of any kind. [I'm struggling with the idea that anything a private business can do for its customers could be considered a subsidy, even in theory. It's called customer service.] It’s private business incentivizing their customers to bother showing up by offering them a convenience.

I like having public transit and ours is good. Sometimes vehicles are bit rough around the edges.

Yet I’m usually on the pro-car side. So it goes.

Sam J makes some good points.

Of note, the price of gas is high and the bulk of it goes to taxes that were originally meant to support the costs of driving infrastructure. How well they do so I don’t know, but they’ve gone into general revenue for generations either way. [I generally don't support hypothecated taxes- that's how you get dysfunctional systems like Old Regime French finances. But it does help to answer questions like this.] If we’re going to consider ‘hidden subsidies’ like ‘free parking’, we need to consider now hidden costs like taxation of gas, imposed on the driver.

Beyond that, this notion that ‘free parking’ is a hidden subsidy is curious. Cities of which I am aware here in Canada have always charged high per-time fees for municipal parking garages. Although the cost of the garage may have been originally covered by general taxation, in a population with a heavy plurality of car users at the upper end of the property tax scale, it’s hard to argue that this is a subsidy from non-car taxpayers to car-owners. Plus, the usage fees are high.

Street parking I’m familiar with is free evenings and weekends, but that’s a municipal subsidy to restaurant and shop owners, not the drivers. The incentive structure is designed to prop up dining and retail in denser neighbourhoods by bringing in more than just the neighbourhood trade.

One might consider the provision of city parking at all, using up lane space and lot/garage land, to be a sort of subsidy in kind and at the conceptual level, but in a city that also has expensive and extensive public transit I would say that everybody’s needs are being subsidized in that case, and at least evenly. Transit fees are kept relatively low. At this level, the ‘subsidy’ just amounts to actually balancing the transport needs of citizens as they actually exist. Seems fair.

Of course, if your framework is that cities should provide some support, and balance with charges to users, for all citizens transport needs, then most major cities are doing it. If your framework is to use the incentive structure to manipulate people’s transport choices in an officially-preferred direction, then I guess there’s a different issue.

This is where I get into what I assume is Sam J’s mindset. I love my public transit and wish it were incrementally better. But, if I might sum up my attitude to urban progressives, I don’t want to live in their f****** ant colonies.

There, that’s better.

I get his numbers. I get that he adds all these numbers up I just reject the numbers he uses. How does he get that it cost,

”…Even parking in suburbs has been estimated to cost more than 850$ annually…”

I don’t believe this for a minute. It’s silly. You pay for the driveway with the house. It’s not a subsidy. He’s taking a cost people pay for their house and calling it a subsidy. It’s double talk. I see an absolute ton of this these days. People just make shit up and call it something. It’s all over the news, this making shit up business. It gets on my nerves. Let’s go with his “cost”. He’s just adding up all the parking spots and calling it a subsidy. Well the roads are paid for by gas taxes, including the parking spots on them. The parking spots at malls, stores, etc. are all paid for by the people that go there. Actually all these people walking around are using all these nice spaces paid for by car owners. The car owners should be paid by the walkers and bike riders for all these nice level places to walk and ride on. There is NO subsidy. He just made the whole thing up. About the only way you can call this a subsidy is if you count interest deduction on interest for housing but there’s no way in hell you can get “…850$ annually…” out of that for a driveway.

The gas taxes have actually been stolen for other uses and not been put to use as road building which is the reason they were levied.

This is really an attack on personal freedom with some jacked up numbers that mean noting at all.

About 87 percent of all trips in the U.S. are made by personal motor vehicles, and parking is free for 99 percent of these trips (p. 590). But free parking is not a spontaneous outcome. The required parking lot at a restaurant usually occupies at least three times as much land as the restaurant itself. Shoup reckons this a subsidy to parking, and estimates the U.S. total of such subsidy between $127 billion and $374 billion a year.

[...]

The extent of free parking is so enormous and so normal that people just think it nature’s endowment, like air. Everyone feels entitled to free air and free parking. Hence, “most people do not see it as being any subsidy at all” (591). “Because parking costs so much and motorists pay so little for it, the hidden subsidy is truly gigantic” (591).

The only reasonable case IMHO for rail in the USA is that it is probably the best way to overcome the vast distances of city to city travel (it is the consequence of having 1/10 the population of other 1st world nations) since speeds of 150-250 mph are not safely attainable with cars.

To compare cars with trains is to compare apples and oranges. You need to compare trains versus cars + roads + parking (both public, commercial and on private residence). Comparing buses versus cars is a bit more fair, but you still need to take into account all the subsidies given to cars by the US federal and local government: the public parking, the zoning regulations favoring cars, the subsidies for highways which favour cars more than buses or trains, etc.

Japan has a modern, safe (low criminality anyway), clean, and cost-effective (self-sustainable) modern public transport. And they have high car-ownership. (They also make parking proof mandatory.)

A few good links I advise if you are not convinced, about subsidisies, about “we will all use Uber“, about the return of the subsidies to cars versus to public transportation, and how the subsidies to cars are a form of tax ponzi scheme.

None is my blog. I just like urbanism because of a random article in hacker news (y combinator) about it.

For once I have something to contribute.