There is nothing we can do to change this system from the inside. Governments were created to protect business and property, in other words, to protect mans’ interests.

So keep writing these editorials because they are very good and an inspiration to the people. And it is the people who we need to work on. Because it is not the politicians who change the world, but it is the people who overthrow the politicians who change the world.

1 No one (specifically no business) is dependent on parking–they’re actually dependent on smogmobiling. You can have all the parking you want, but if someone can’t afford to drive, and if s/he must drive to reach a destination, then s/he can’t afford to go there, no matter how free the parking is. Similarly, if folks were really walking, biking, and using mass transit as much as a lotta Carrboritos want to believe, those spaces would not be full.

2 The Town can, should it choose to, get into the business of providing free parking. But the Town cannot get into the business of providing the cheap fuel and free pollution on which smogmobiling currently depends, and will continue to depend for the foreseeable future. So if the Town provides free parking, and subsequently there’s an oil price shock, or the price of gas just keeps going up, or there’s a serious carbon tax, or whatever, those spaces will go empty. (Unless, of course, at the same time that the price of driving goes up, the incomes of the prospective drivers also goes up. Good luck with that.)

3 Free parking subsidizes car use. That’s empirically pretty well established: when parking is made more expensive, people substitute other modes (though demand is relatively inelastic for nominal charges, e.g. meters).

4 Free parking decreases density. That’s almost tautological, except for places where people live in their cars, which I’m presuming is not what Carrboro is looking for Otherwise, parking takes space that could be used for other purposes.

5 Density encourages bike, ped, and transit. Also what “studies show,” esp in areas where density “crowds out” parking.

So providing free parking is in fact to *enable* car addiction, and to bet that it can continue. It’s to provide space for cars instead of increasing density and providing amenities for sustainable modes of transport, like biking, walking, and mass transit. As public policy, that’s just dumb–it is simply not within the power of the Town of Carrboro to ensure the continuing economic viability of transportation by private automobile. As moral policy, given the reality of climate change, enabling the most polluting form of transportation per passenger mile is just wrong.

What should our policy be? Sustainability.

We need a downtown which people are encouraged, enabled, and, if necessary, *compelled* to access via lower cost, less polluting means, like bike, ped, and transit. (And, yes, I do mean “compelled”: the same way we’re compelling Iraqis to accept our occupation–not that we’re there except to “promote democracy”–and the same way we’re compelling the rest of the world to accept our carbon in their atmosphere.) And one way to break the smogmobile habit is to do what Mark Chilton advocated–for UNC–at the Focus-the-Nation kickoff @ UNC Great Hall Wednesday night (30 Jan 08), where he congratulated UNC for creating an environment where it’s “less desirable to drive because there’s nowhere to park.” Of course, he won’t advocate that for nice “progressive” Carrboro, probably because he suspects, as do I, that Carrboritos talk a lot greener than we walk. Because we don’t actually walk (despite our touted walkability), or bike, or take transit nearly as much as we drive.

We should prepare *actively* for the post-automobile future. Instead, Carrboro politicians, and this paper

http://www.carrborocitizen.com/main/2008/01/23/for-the-record-012408/

are advocating business as usual on climate change and transportation.