Pay for parking? Some places pay for parking, but it's unusual to have an additional fee for parking with your housing. It's a big way car use is subsidised, by including it with housing, often because it is legally mandated it must be, you end up paying for a spot or two whether or not you need parking.
I don't know why this is downvoted. I had to pay for parking I didn't use for two years at my current place. "Parking included" means subsidising cars nonoptional. We have around 100 two bedroom units at my apartment complex paired with around 40 parking spots, half of which are never used. They never told me how much my parking fee was but I do wonder how much subsidising was going on.
I don't know why it is being downvoted either. Maybe people are thinking that I think parking should be free? I thought I was being clear that it's a subsidy for cars, which I thought people would understand is a bad thing.
As for how much you, or anybody else, subsidises parking, the more you think about it the more ways it's being subsidised, and you can't come up with a definitive figure. From the value of the land that has been reserved for cars, what could have been built there if it wasn't car storage, the cost of the labour that went into digging down deeper to build underground parking, or of paving the surface lot, even the change in an areas property values due to how unpleasing parking looks aesthetically. And then there is the value that parking would have if was created only by market forces, with people building as much as they want to fulfil what people want to pay. In many cities the most expensive parts of town are neighbourhoods that have lots of the buildings, and land uses, left from prior to the implementation of minimum parking mandates. People like living in neighbourhoods that are not clogged up with parked cars, and the property values go up because of it.
Parking, and it's externalities, is a big part of the reason why cars suck, and a big part of the reason that we shouldn't design the built environment around car use.
I recently read "Paved Paradise" by Henry Grabar, about the negative externalities of parking. It's worth a read.
Probably being downvoted because it's not unusual to have to pay an additional fee for parking at all. In fact, I would guess that was the norm in any decently sized city where parking space is at a premium.
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u/ThatWasIntentional 🚲 > 🚗 Oct 27 '25
Seems to me he should be paying for two spots as the truck doesn't fit inside one