Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/06/when-street-parking-was-plenti.html
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Not sure I understand since it’s not really explained. Is street parking restricted with a parking permit or what? Where I’m at in Austin there are entire sections in some neighborhoods where you can’t park unless you’ve got some kind of parking permit, so finding open/free street parking can be a pain in the ass depending on what part of town you’re at.
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Part of the New Cruelty?
I’m afraid so.
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In the ATL, there is one in-town neighborhood I go to which has my favorite record shops, some good thirft stores, restaurants, etc. Back in the day (90s into the early 2000s), you could just go and park in the neighborhood behind the shops (if the free lot was full). Now, except for one street, you have to have a permit on the weekends. A sure sign of gentrification!
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Skateboard or inlines. Take a bus, clunker bike, or carpool. Avoid big cities – or develop other viable strategies. Live near shops, not out in filtered burb estates. Be tricky: obtain an official placard to defy local parking rules, maybe by working for the traffic commission. (Don’t fake it.) Or submit: change your home, schedule, and needs. And await the delivery drones. Who wins? Amazon, of course.
There are so many cities that seem like they used to be interesting places.
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How are they going to switch to all electric cars if you street park them?
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Exactly. One of the reasons I now use Lyft instead of renting a car in L.A. is to avoid that hassle.
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I just googled the address of that house where the movie was filmed and can confirm that it looks fully parked up in the google street view, so yeah, parking isn’t great.
But hey, at least the part about LA residents going about their lives and ignoring earthquakes still applies.
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Permit districts are usually only in residential areas adjacent to busy “walkable retail” neighborhoods (which are being revived citywide as people move away from malls) that didn’t incorporate adequate new parking, and where the residential nabes are old enough that they were built without any offstreet parking.
So this mostly occurs along the older, more glam/hipster-rific areas in the basin that didn’t build parking structures as part of the retail refurb.
In newer nabes with offstreet parking in most residences and retail strips that never died, or added parking garages during their revival (like most of the San Fernando Valley half of the City of LA) street parking generally remains widely available and unrestricted.
(The Transit-Oriented Development rules aren’t helping - they permit reductions in / elimination of required offstreet parking in areas adjacent to rail stations and transit hubs. This assumes that proximity to a transit hub eliminates the need for a car.
But it mostly doesn’t. As vastly improved as our current transit is, it’s still not conducive to a “car-free lifestyle” (unless “car-free” include lotsa Uber/Lyft/taxi trips). Most transit-adjacent Angelenos still need a car for the gaps in the system.
Transit-adjacent residents can use transit for most routine commuting/shopping/errands, so they may use their car a lot less (and this is a good thing!), but that means they need a place to park even more, since their car so often sits unused.)
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I also think that the “nabes with plenty of parking, where people will drive two blocks” cliché holds up a lot better than “Nobody Walks in LA.”
That one hasn’t been true in twenty years. “Walkable retail neighborhoods” have become big, big business here in LA.
People will drive from all over to get to them. 
Walking is very, very hip these days.
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Once knowledge that a city is an interesting place leaks to the outside world, that city is already starting its death cycle.
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I remember when Perry Mason would park his convertible right in front of the courthouse.
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Now Dale is former FBI agent in Vaneattle
Another thing you can do is park a few blocks further away. No reason you can’t walk five or six blocks. I know, LA (where I live) can be a boring place to walk, unlike NY (where I’m from). But still, there are a lot of interesting houses and while there isn’t a lot of street life on the side streets, there is much to look at.
Also, of course, mass transit. They haven’t quite worked out how to make it work, but you can still do it. I recommend having a TAP card with you at all times.
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Parking in LA sucks. Parking tickets for all you beotches!
This is why electric scooters are so useful.
95 cents?!?!
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Growing up in Southern California in the '80s, but somehow never having access to MTV, I was limited to getting my music from the radio and trying to decipher the lyrics the old fashioned way, and I never actually learned the names of the songs. It wasn’t until this century that I learned that song wasn’t about “walking in a daze.”
[I’m also having a hard time finding that old Guns & Roses song that goes, “Take me down to the **very last city** where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.”]
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