There you’ve nailed the root of the problem. I would have no problem living in an Asian set up type city. They have public transportation, shops, and entertainment close by within walking distance, but in the US they regulate that businesses mostly can not be in with residential, so…

If they would ban anyone who attacks people or is aggressive towards others in public transportation more people would use it. But you have vicious maniacs who they never do anything about so people avoid it.

In some parts of the US now White people can be murdered openly, and Black people will just let them go.

Professor Shoup may be accurate in that cost estimate — but he is certainly misleading.

There is no subsidy; someone is paying for that “free parking”. Usually, it is the businesses or municipalities that provide the free parking. If businesses did not offer parking, they would have difficulty finding employees — or they would move the business to the suburbs. If a mall did not offer parking, it would have few shoppers. If cities do not provide parking, they lose shops & businesses — and tax revenue.

And if we trace the money flow, Shoup’s “subsidy” is eventually paid by the person using the parking space, whether through higher prices in the shops or lower wages from the business.

And the reason the market knows nothing is because it keeps getting lied to. We learned that in the accounting scandals of 2002.

Many parking spaces are extremely valuable, even if that’s not reflected in current market prices. In fact, Professor Shoup estimates that many American parking spaces have a higher economic value than the cars sitting in them. For instance, after including construction and land costs, he measures the value of a Los Angeles parking space at over $31,000 — much more than the worth of many cars, especially when considering their rapid depreciation. If we don’t give away cars, why give away parking spaces?

Yet 99 percent of all automobile trips in the United States end in a free parking space, rather than a parking space with a market price. In his book, Professor Shoup estimated that the value of the free-parking subsidy to cars was at least $127 billion in 2002, and possibly much more.

You could have put the period right there.

Mass transit, how about NYC, how’s that mass transit working out? What’s the next regulation due to the next “Covid” mutation?

Thanks for the pointer.

“When people are crowded together in artificial habitats, they must be rigidly controlled — like factory farming.”

This. All in service to the GDP, Praise Be Upon It.

Meanwhile, our overlords have vast estates: Bill Gates, largest farmland owner in the US.

Ironically I personally have some preference for dense urban areas, transit rail, all that fun stuff, with limitations more on that in a minute. I would love to be in a situation where I never had to drive unless I really, really, wanted to.

The oldest parts of old cities are often very livable and human, because they were built back when men knew what it was to be human more or less.,The London of my youth was reasonably safe, plenty of parks, it felt like a bunch of villages that grew around each other, which it was, even in Westminster.

The bright idea people now don’t want to have a look at then though, it’s planning for people who aren’t them. I’m not really a libertarian, but if the answer to your question at this point is “more taxes” it’s probably a bad question.

Megacities are incompatible with human dignity.

That is indeed the path the Enemy is attempting to force upon us. However, historically, mass transit came first — boats, stage coaches, railroads, street cars, subways. Personal transportation in an automobile (more convenient than a horse) came later. The adoption of the automobile allowed lower-density development — which is what many people wanted and is what we now have.

China’s modern cities have very effective mass transit systems, along with plentiful neighborhood shopping and parks within easy strolling distance. However, this requires very high-density development, where most people live in 30 story apartment towers (with shops on the lower floors) — maybe a thousand people living in each tower. That high density works in China because the authorities have a very low tolerance for public anti-social behavior.

It is asinine for Shoup to get excited about parking without thinking through the rest of the system required for living. Maybe Shoup should move to China? As long as he is comfortable in crowds and is prepared to behave with decorum in public, he will be quite happy there.