Rolling noise is the sound your car's tires make when they move on the road. It can get louder when you drive faster or when it's rainy or wet outside.
Urbanists are people who want cities to be easier to walk around and use buses or trains instead of cars. They think about how to make cities better for people, not just cars.
Car storage means the space where cars sit when they're parked and not being driven. Some people think this takes up too much space in cities that could be used for other things.
A public right of way is a place like a sidewalk or road that everyone can use. Sometimes, people who own nearby houses have to take care of parts of it, like clearing snow.
Alternate side parking means you have to move your car to the other side of the street on certain days so the city can clean the street properly.
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To the point of car noise, I think one thing I would love for listeners to pay attention to
when it rains, notice how loud the roads are. Same amount of traffic as a dry day. That's because
a lot of the noise that comes from cars is not the engine. It's the rolling noise
and rain and bad weather can accentuate that. Snow can have the opposite effect, of course,
but yeah, the noise was really striking. It's just so quiet. It was so beautiful.
Yeah, I just looked this up today that about 50% of the noise that cars make comes from
the tire. Yeah, certainly at higher speeds. I think once you get over like 30 miles an hour,
it really changes. So yeah, that's a big one. Yeah, noise. Okay, so this next one though is a
really big one. And that is what we hear at the war on cars and elsewhere in the quote-unquote
urbanist community. However you want to define that, don't call it parking, call it car storage.
Oh yes. Snow really highlights how much real estate we give for free and not really for free
because it's subsidized by our taxpayer dollars to the storage of private automobiles on public
streets. And people who park at the curb for free have all sorts of strategies of how to deal with
snowstorms. They have to park on one side rather than the other because the snowplows push the
snow to one side rather than the other. The snowplows push the snow to the right. So if you're a
savvy parker, you park on the left side of your street on a one-way street. They put their windshield
wipers up. That's my favorite. Like little antennae and then of course they have to shovel out their
cars at some point. And having been frozen in a few weeks ago, people on my block at least
were trying to be really kind of on it. They're like, I'm not going to get frozen in again like
that. I'm going to shovel my car out sort of as the storm is happening and as it just ends.
So as a homeowner, it's my responsibility to shovel the sidewalk in front of my house.
And it has to be at least four feet wide in order to comply with city regulations.
And I can be fine if I don't do that. You are responsible for the public right of way.
Yes. The sidewalk is a public right of way and it's just the way through a quirk of our laws
that individual homeowners and property owners are responsible for. But nobody tells drivers,
hey, you have to shovel the street. The city does that for them.
Yeah. And not only that, they normally have to move their cars so that the city can clean
the garbage off of the street. That's alternate side parking. Well, alternate side parking has
been suspended since- I think it's only been in effect for like two weeks this year so far.
I mean, it's just, they basically, so not only is there a lot of garbage everywhere,
but yeah, those people, they don't think, oh, I should be picking up the garbage that's under
my car because it can't be swept away. I was doing that too, by the way. I cleared out a lot of
garbage. And then, I mean, we do have to talk maybe quite briefly here about another sort
of disgusting thing. Yes. That's the dog poop. I did want to talk about a little bit more about
car storage, but the dog poop, it's like the entire social contract has got broken down,
ripped up and thrown out and left under one of the cars in the street.
I don't know what happened to dog owners that they feel like as soon as it snows,
they don't have to pick up their poop as if the snow is some magical solution that will
dissolve it into nothingness. It's one thing for there to be yellow snow everywhere. That's
saying directly to dog owners, pick up your shit. She literally said pick up your shit.
Eric Botcher, who's a city council member now, state senator in Manhattan, he also
put out stuff saying, there is no poop fairy, you are responsible. I've never seen, it's like,
if you wondered what New York City was like before poop or scooper laws, the winter is a good
picture into that. Yeah. Yeah. But back to car storage. Yeah. So a lot of urbaness
or activists, they will point to all of the cars covered in snow for weeks after the storm.
I mean, there were cars on my block for three weeks afterwards that still had snow on them
and around them clearly hadn't been moved in all that time and say, see, drivers don't need their
cars as frequently as they say, certainly not in neighborhoods like ours where most people
based on census data and other information, they are not using a car as their primary means of
commuting to work. They're using transit and they're really only using their cars for like
the Costco trip on the weekend or the Hamptons house or the Catskills or something like that.
I think there's another thing going on, which is that even the drivers who do use their cars more
than the vacation house trip, for example, when you limit the supply of parking, you make it harder
for people to drive. And so what happens is my car is snowed in. Sure, fine. But I also know all
the other cars are snowed in around the city. And then in fact, some of the parking spaces
are just giant piles of snow that the plows have pushed everything into the crews have shoveled
into empty spots. And you say to yourself as a driver, I could shovel my car out, but where
would I take it? There would be no way for me to park it in the space I normally park it in the
neighborhood I like to drive to on the weekends or on a weeknight or to work or whatever. And so I
think it's a really good natural experiment in the laws of supply and demand. We know, especially in
cities, that the number one indicator of whether or not a person is going to drive for their trip
is if they're going to have parking on both ends of their trip. And when there's snow and it limits
the supply, a number of people are saying to themselves, I know I won't have parking on the
other end of my trip, I might not even have it when I get back, because there are so few spots
opening up. So I think there's a lesson there for cities, which is just simply limit the supply of
parking. If you want to reduce driving, you know, a lot of people have pointed to all of the people
storing their cars and saying, this is why we should charge for on street parking. And we could
probably do an episode on whether or not that's a good idea in cities like New York. There are
parking permits in plenty of cities. I'm not really in favor of charging for parking in New
York, because I think it would add a level of entitlement to drivers that they already have.
It would just increase that entitlement, because they would say, oh, you want to put a bike lane
on my street, you want to put a bike rail on my street, you want to put in a bioswale. FU,
I pay $65 a year for parking or whatever, you know, whatever ridiculous low fee it would be,
even if it was $300 a year. I think the better trick is to just limit the supply. And snow
reveals that in a very striking way, not just the snow covered cars, but like it would be very
interesting to see our more kids walking and taking transit to school, because their parents are like,
I can't drive you, there'll be nowhere to park when I get back. That'd be a really interesting
thing to see. So car storage and rent.
About this episode
The discussion explores how snow reveals hidden urban issues, particularly the vast public space devoted to storing private cars on city streets. Snowstorms highlight the challenges drivers face, from navigating plows to shoveling out cars and sidewalks. The episode also touches on the noise cars generate, mostly from tires, and the social problems exacerbated by winter, like dog waste left uncollected. The hosts argue that limiting parking supply can reduce driving, as snow naturally restricts parking availability and forces people to reconsider car use. They also debate parking policies and the impact on urban life.
In our latest Patreon bonus episode, we get into what we saw in the wildly different cities we hit on our last round of book tour (Miami! Pittsburgh! Toronto! Phoenix!). Then, we discuss how all the snow we have gotten this year has revealed some truths about what cars do to our cities and what we can learn from it. It's a lot! (And it's not just sneckdowns.)
