The law has significant nuance whenever someone is killed. Each state uses different terms, but it generally runs along the lines of:

• First degree murder: intentful and planned.
• Second degree murder: intentful but unplanned.
• Third degree murder: not by intent but also not accidental. Fit of rage type of thing.
• Manslaughter: no intent, no rage, often negligence, and similar regrettable deaths.

Each one carries a progressively lighter punishment. You can be found guilty of manslaughter and get off with a fine, probation, or even time-served. The courts will adjust punishment according to each crime’s circumstances.

What ticks this community off is a special type of murder: Vehicular Manslaughter. It has all the hallmarks of regular manslaughter, except it’s much harder to prosecute and often with zero consequences. It’s, quite literally, a whole different section of law to reduce the consequences of driving. The exception-to-the-exception is intent! If someone intentionally kills with a gun or a vehicle, then they get charged first or second degree murder. But the consequences are different if someone with a gun negligibly kills (it does happen) and a driver negligibly kills. It’s not justice when a boss who didn’t maintain a ladder which killed his painter faces more consequences than the driver who didn’t maintain their brakes and ran over a child.

The alternative to resident parking isn’t street parking but to provide residential parking as determined by the developer and purchaser. You’re not going to sell a condo if there’s no parking and prospective buyers need to drive. Likewise you’ll make better sales if you sell a condo without parking for a lower price to people who don’t/can’t drive. Let your local developers work with their civil engineers to figure out the best bang-per-buck of housing to parking spot ratio with each property they work on. I’m sure there would be fewer spots built near transit and downtown but fully loaded with parking on the edge of town; a nuance often missed in one-size-fits-all regulations.

Also the alternative to private parking is not necessarily street parking. You can:

• Lease a local parking space (a developer builds parking but it’s not included with an apartment/condo/town home purchase).
• Lease a spot in a public parking lot.
• Lease a neighbor’s parking spot.
• Lease car time on a car share.

Street parking shouldn’t be free anyway. Free parking limits developments from building parking! Why would they build an expensive spot when there’s plenty of “free” parking instead. Even post-sale you’ll see the effect of free street parking. Look at your neighbor’s garage. Do they park their car in there or do they use it for storage and instead park on the street? Free street parking is free real-estate.

The problem of “not enough street parking” can be solved by internalizing the price of parking. For example, San Francisco adjusts meters up and down until spots are between 60% to 80% filled. Price adjustment also signals the true cost of driving to the driver of the car rather than spreading their choice’s cost across everyone in the city/county/state.

Street parking also takes up space that could be used for protected bike lanes.

I agree! I’d rather street parking not exist. See the thread on Japan’s zero street parking strategy for their solution to parking (spoiler: it doesn’t include parking minimums).

However, a small side note. You don’t necessarily need protected bike lanes if your streets are slow enough, which is often a desirable feature of residential neighborhoods. The oft-cited Netherlander’s civil engineering calls them “fietsstraat” (cycle street). San Francisco calls them slow streets.

Not necessarily. The easiest thing to do is remove or severely limit parking minimum laws, like Washington state’s recently passed SB 5184. No infrastructure to build nor required enforcement. This one step removes parking’s negative externality, it didn’t cost a single dollar, and it can go into effect immediately. Building good public infrastructure is important, but it’s not the only thing we can do.

You’re being downvoted but what you’re raising is a common argument point. I’ll put in some effort here to explain what Japan’s system is trying to achieve. Let’s start with a simple concept: someone has to build and pay for each parking spot. That is, it’s impossible to order a parking spot to have it delivered and maintained to you for free.

If you have a home that you bought, then it was included in the price of the home. That garage and driveway was built on land you paid for and poured by the developer.

If you don’t have a driveway, then you’ll park on the street. That street was bought and paved by the developer or the city. Each year you’ll pay taxes to cover the expense of maintaining that street spot (sweeping, drainage, chip sealing, etc).

These two cases present the same utility: a place to store a car. The difference is in how it’s priced: one is internalized and one is externalized. You directly pay to repair your driveway but you don’t directly pay to repair your street spot. Your neighbors, no matter if they drive or how many cars they own, pay for your street spot when it needs a repair.

Japan’s system is designed such that the general public is not burdened with your choice to drive. Your choice to drive is yours to make, but it’s not something that you get to externalize onto others. If you wish to drive, then buy that extra lot of land and put a driveway on it. Heck, make it extra wide so you can park your daily driver and your fancy classic for nice weekend days. Do what you wish with your property.

there’s no good way to actually ensure that an address has a parking space.

Japan enforces their system through registration. A permit is needed to buy and register a car. These permits are issued by officers who will measure your private parking space. A dealer will not sell you a car larger than your space nor will you get tags for your car without sufficient space.

States in the US also have registration but don’t require proof-of-parking to register a car. The change to adapt to Japan’s system would be to make a proof-of-parking permit a requirement to register a car.

And what do you do with large families? Or people registering multiple cars at the same address otherwise?

Each car gets a permit (it’s a sticker on the window). If you have a two car garage, then you can get two permits for each spot in that garage to stick on your two cars.

It’s very similar to permitted street parking in the US. Typically you’ll get issued X number permits per house that you can affix to your car’s bumper. Japan simply takes parking permits a step further by including your car’s size and requiring a permit before registration rather than issuing permits post registration.

There’s no limit in Japan (that I’m aware of) regarding how many permits a household can get. If you have a four car garage, then you can get four car permits. Or if you only have two garage spots, then you can lease two spots from a neighborhood parking lot to get to your ideal four car permits.

It won’t work in the U.S. because people still have to drive everywhere anyway. Go over to a friend’s house? Get fucked I guess.

Japan has metered general-public parking lots and there are not restrictions preventing a friend parking on your property.

This is not too dissimilar from HOA developments in the US. Most HOAs require owners to put their cars in their garage and disallow cars sitting in the driveway, but are fine with guests temporarily parking in the driveway. They’ll also issue a limited number of daily permits for guests to use in a neighborhood lot.

Parking mandates are some of the most egregiously bad laws on our books.

They increase housing costs significantly; land isn’t free and cars structures are expensive to build. This is a punitive for those who are trying to make ends meet, or those who are unable to drive. Why would you force a blind man to pay for a two car garage when you’re also disallowing them to drive? Doubly so when you don’t allow them to sell their unused parking to their neighbors. Oh, and parking minimums significantly reduce our housing inventory. Parking reform alone can boost home building by 40% to 70%. If you haven’t noticed yet, we have a bit of a housing crisis going on.

These laws also increase public expenditure because a car is used as transport from A to B. If A is your home, where is B? Pushing parking onto private developers is why in US there are, on average, 6 parking spots per vehicle. That’s 5 car spots in your downtown and on your streets that you pay for, be it taxes or increased grocery prices, that sit empty most of the time.

Parking mandates are broken. So broken that it’s the #1 campaign item for Strong Towns. We must remove parking minimums or we’ll continue to pave over our downtowns and create insolvent cities.

Hear, hear! San Jose Bike Party is great. If you’re anywhere near a BART station or Caltrain, drop in sometime. South bay nights are great in the summer.

Technically it’s a CUI: Cycling Under Influence. BUI is used for boating.

Interesting question regarding scooters though. VC 21200.5 says “bicycle” but I’m not a lawyer. I’m sure a cop with a vendetta would cite things like missing reflectors rather than understand legal nuances.

Wow, that’s great! Heck, it’s petty amazing considering how car addicted Australia is. I was touring Australia last year and it felt like I was rolling around Los Angeles at times.

Melbourne’s street cars are cool though. 😎

Yeah, there’s a lot of pots that are coated and it sucks. However, the tests and methodology are not tied to them. It’s more about how to select different stoves and pots (e.g. lid or no lid?) than a particular product pick. For me, I didn’t even buy a new kit. All I did was learn how to optimize my existing kits.

Regarding temperature, I luckily haven’t had too much of an issue. Gas gets to sleep with me or hang out in my jacket if it’s that cold out. No need for white gas stoves, yet! Maybe someday if the very high mountains call to me.

It’s very common to close dining rooms for drive-through only. It’s so common that fast food places are trending to no dining room at all. E.g.

https://www.tacobell.com/newsroom/taco-bell-defy-concept-opens-june-7-one-of-the-most-innovative-drive-thru-experiences-yet

That’s probably a bug when translating forms or the ranger’s intent. Our rangers deeply understand the meaning of “paving paradise,” hence there’s limited parking at trail heads. Car details on permit forms are there so rangers can tow away parking abusers instead of cutting down trees to make a bigger parking lot.

Traditionally you’d write “N/A” or “NONE” if you’re being dropped off or hiking through. I suspect that detail got lost in translation to the digital format by making all fields as required.

All that said, thanks for being thoughtful and not driving into a national/state park when it’s not necessary. Rangers and us like-minded folk appreciate it.

Requiring a car to eat is ableist. Wheelchair user? Not allowed in the drive though for liability reasons. Blind? Epileptic? Not allowed to drive at all, thus not allowed to buy food because the dining room is closed in the late hours.

There are great alternatives to Jetboil and other heat exchanger systems. Some systems are also cheaper and much lighter. I highly recommend checking out Gearskeptic’s Backpacking Stove Efficiency series.

Cool. I’ll be in London in a few months. Are the express trains nicer or are they the same sets as the local, but faster?

BART trainsets are uniform. No special airport trains.

It has been a long time since I’ve been to Tokyo. Narita trains are nice but I never managed to catch the express. Even so, the local is still really nice. :)

It’s the same situation with BART. The surcharge only applies when using the airport stations. No extra charge if you’re passing by.

FYI, airport surcharges are very common. Across the bay at Oakland has an airport surcharge. Sydney has them too, which I was happy about because Melbourne doesn’t have a train (AU $25 for a bus ticket, which was sold out) nor did Hobart. I recall AREX in Incheon also having a significant fare jump for the airport stops.

For argument purposes, BART is $0.18/mile (19th Oakland <> Berryessa). That’s still pretty high for regional public transit, which is mostly due to BART’s high farebox recovery. That high recovery is now a problem with the whole pandemic and subsequent slow return of ridership.

It appears they changed the article contents? I looked and couldn’t find anything about making a parking fee or gas tax. Only that the state is removing a 1% grocery tax and is giving each county the option of keeping or removing the tax.

Maybe there’s another article or meeting minutes?

They do, if you know where to look.

About 20% of drivers in the US are unlicensed. Car dependency means you can revoke someone’s licences all you like and they’ll still drive anyway (because they need to).

Your #1, urban planning with viable car alternatives, is necessary to make driving a privilege again. Until then people will drive, legally or otherwise.