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Chicago will no longer require new buildings near transit to include parking.
(chi.streetsblog.org)
this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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Parking is not a finite and limited resource. Road surfaces can, and regularly are, refurbished and established. That's why parking is not a tragedy; it's not a resource that is lost forever.
I think you do bring up a good point though: who pays for parking lots and street parking when it does need help? Is it only the home owner in front of the street or is it a general fund expense from local sales taxes? Double points if you can answer who is then allowed to park in that publicly-paid parking spot.
Parking is not an unlimited and infinite resource? Every parking space is lost walking space, green space, or construction space.
In an economic sense, it's not limited. Land is limited and there are oh so many negative externalities*, but we haven't paved over everything, there's more than enough bitumen and agate to level the world, and you can always dig or go up. We are nowhere near close to being unable to build one more parking spot. It'd be a hellscape, but it'd be one with plenty of parking.
... but those are all economic limitations too? We are limited, economically, by land and negative externalities.
I think you mean in a pedantic sense we aren't limited. Like, technically I could eat a fistful of rat poison. It wouldn't be good for me, but I could technically do it!
So long as you don't die from that fistful of rat poison, correlating to a economy that survives to another day, then yes, you could eat that poison! It would be very bad idea and may leave you maimed, but it would be possible. Furthermore, it's more poison than you are currently consuming (at least I hope you're not eating rat poison). I'm not sure why one would but if someone paid you to eat some poison, you certainly could do that transaction and I could say there's been an increase of rat-poison-eater supply.
Economics may be strange but it's not a value judgement on what we do. It's just a way of modeling and understanding how a society handles goods and services. Invoking economic arguments like the tragedy of the commons requires understanding consumption of public resources and what that does to the resources. Parking doesn't fit the argument because the supply curve does not change over time due to the pressure of strong demand. Parking can be refurbished, unlike a common livestock pasture. Parking supply can be increased by building on infertile land, up, or down, where a common livestock pasture cannot. A common livestock pasture can be consumed to the point where it cannot supply anymore (becoming infertile). A parking spot does not get consumed beyond a point to where it no longer functions as a parking spot.
Parking is not subject to the tragedy of the commons.
The economy would not survive another day if we paved the entire world with parking spaces.
This isn't a value judgement. It's an observation that we are economically limited by things like land availability. You seem to be using "economically possible" to mean "possible by the laws of physics" which is really strange.