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.
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.
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 bam
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.
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.
edge of city park-and-ride is there to shut up the numbnuts who cry “but how will i get into the city?!?!?!”
Yep. Gotta make the bus faster than cars with bus only lanes.
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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?
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.
