In an effort to increase parking by 1.6% we should dissolve this local meeting hub beloved by over 600 people and directly benefiting 11 (other) local businesses.

I’m just going to put this here. The title is about bike lanes, but exactly the same logic works for things like this.

Business owners are largely fucking stupid. They might know a bit about the thing their business does, but they know shit all about how economics works, or how their customers think. They regularly overestimate, by quite a large margin, how many of their customers arrive by car vs other means.

They regularly oppose policies that extensive amounts of evidence say will benefit them. Sometimes that’s because their own experience is so far removed from that of their customers. Sometimes it’s purely out of small-c conservatism and fear of change. Sometimes it’s because they’re selfish pricks and the car parking spaces are actually mostly used by them themselves, and all the talk about how it’s necessary for “customers” is a smoke screen.

Even just a simple calculation about how long the average car park is occupied by a single vehicle and how many car parks there are per business, it would be impossible to operate at a profit if your high street business relied on people parked out front. It just doesn’t stack up.

To me, this makes no sense. Endeavours like this make a shopping district far more attractive for people to visit and they’ll likely spend money in other businesses. So it benefits everyone.

But I find it difficult to believe a shopper will skip visiting a place because they can’t get a park right outside instead of walking around a side street corner.

(And somehow they manage to tell the shop that they didn’t visit? Either shops are lying or the customer visited eventually, so what’s the issue?)

Car brains doing can brain things.