Urban Car Parking

The end goal here is that people who live in big cities give up their personal car. The journey there might involve this problem though and it depends on the city to enforce new rules.For example, my home town Hamburg (in Germany) is a bad example of too few parking spaces being policed correctly. At some point, the drivers give up searching for a free space that's still in a walkable distance from their destination and will park illegally, which leads to one of 2 lanes being permanently

You'd need to allocate more parking spaces then. You can have more roads if you have less parking.Also, having a car sit idle 95% of the time is not an efficient use of money. It's the same model as virtualization with servers (sharing unused capacity brings down the costs for everyone).Also, there's the tremendous amount of time wasted and hassle to park, especially in big cities that have multi-story parking garages. Especially with their "compact" parking spo

I'm not sure that the drive should necessary be away from cars. With the advent of driverless cars, there is a new option: shared cars. They provide the time-savings of point-to-point transit for the already time-strapped lower class, can (optionally) enable ride sharing for cost and congestion reduction, use the existing infrastructure, and with sufficient percentage of self-driven cars should provide throughput similar to busses ... all while eliminating the need for parking in city cente

Theres already an abundance of parking real estate, there's no need to make more. Look into the predictive analytics used by Uber or Citibike to see how wait times can be minimized. When freed from the redundancy of having to use an overbuilt one-size-fits all for everything, the energy savings will more than make up for a car having to drive two or three blocks from the parking lot to the pick up zone. Shit, I could go on.

Do they reduce parking usage at least?

You don't need atonomous vehicles to make this work. A good public transit system within the city, decent bike lanes and some park and ride options for getting in from the outskirts could be enough to make up for the reduced parking options.

Seems like an inability to store private vehicles for free on public property would reduce cars and traffic.

This is a major problem, actually. Cars sit parked more often than they drive, usually. Parking a car requires kind of a lot of space, like a parking lot or a garage. Car users also expect to have a parking space at their destination, which is another parking space. Added up, the land devoted to parking is a lot. That land isn't serving any other purpose either, it can't even be nature (no plants can grown and rainwater can't permeate into the soil). That land also costs m

I think you mean "cars in a city" instead of "street sweeping/parking"Once the density of people per square mile is over a certain point, the usage of cars contributes to a tragedy of the commons, inconveniencing many of the residents in the city for the benefit of few. New York has been one of the more aggressive cities in removing parking and closing down roads to car traffic and it has greatly improved the quality of life there for residents.London's Canary Wharf district is able to sup

Parking becomes mostly obsolete, freeing up huge amounts of central city areas.