Imaginons que le même homme ait choisi de prendre le vélo. Attaché-case sur le porte-bagage, il aura humé l’air vif, surfé entre les tôles d’acier agglutinées, coursé un moineau fou, été transpercé par cette lumière matinale du début du monde. Le critère qui nous a fait plébisciter la bicyclette, à mille lieues de toute préoccupation de modernité, est cette capacité de faire corps avec l’espace. Le vélo fend subtilement l’atmosphère, qui se referme derrière lui sans laisser un sillage à la traîne."

"Les cyclistes qui se croisent sur l’asphalte s’envoient un petit signe ou un sourire de connivence au-delà de toute considération sociale ou ethnique. Voilà un autre trait, moins anodin qu’il n’y paraît, qui distingue le vélo de l’auto : sur le bitume, les automobilistes sont concurrents, les cyclistes sont solidaires."

Or, in English:
"Let's imagine that the same man had chosen to take his bike. Attache case on the baggage-rack, he would have breathed in the live air, surfed between the tiles of stuck-together steel, tracked a crazed sparrow, been struck through by that morning light of the dawn of the world. The criterion that makes us choose the bike, a thousand years away from any preoccupation of modernity, is that capacity to find your body in space. The bike cleaves through the atmosphere, which reforms behind it without leaving a wake.

"Cyclists who cruise the asphalt let fly a little sign, or smile, of connivance beyond any social or ethnic considerations. One last trait, less anodyne than it might seem, that distinguishes the bike from the car: on the pavement, the automobiles are battling, but the cyclists are united."

http://www.worldcarfree.net/resources/free.php

My view of how to live 20 years ago -- subway to work, walk to as much else as possible. New view -- work and shop at home via the internet, walk or bike otherwise, transit when necessary (work meetings, large gatherings, social engagements). It could become possible.

And yet, you may say, people don't take the train. Of course! How could they? Have you ever tried to go from Boston to New York by train? Or from Ivry to Treport? Or from Garches to Fountainebleau? Or Colombes to l'Isle-Adam? Have you tried on a summer Saturday or Sunday? Well, then, try it and good luck to you! You'll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.

Fortunately, things have improved since then. According to Google Maps and the SNCF, here are the times for the French towns he mentions:

Ivry-sur-Seine to le Tréport: 2 hours 38 minutes by car, 3 hours 35 minutes by train

Garches to Fontainebleau: 1 hour by car, 1 hour 17 minutes by train

Colombes to l'Isle-Adam: 32 minutes by car, 52 minutes by train

In 1973, all of these trips would probably have taken at least an hour longer by train. The improvement of the Ivry-le Tréport trip is due to the RER B, opened in 1977. The Garches-Fontainbleau trip is due to the Metro Line 14, opened in 2003. The trip from Colombes to l'Isle-Adam was improved by the construction of a new bridge over the Seine and the reconstruction of the Ermont-Eaubonne transfer station last year.

I wonder how many of the politicians responsible for those projects read this article?

And remember, for some trips four people in a car is more efficient than any transit combination.

It may be more efficient, but it's significantly less safe.

Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalises the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for "living," a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

Treating driving in NYC like a luxury, which is what it is, is the way to go.

Here's an interesting essay on the idea of treating cars as a luxury that I came across recently:

THE SOCIAL IDEOLOGY OF THE MOTORCAR
André Gorz
http://www.worldcarfree.net/resources/freesources/ideology.htm

Maybe, but the MPG are higher, and the congetion impact smaller, on those camping trips upstate than they are driving the kid to a friend's house the next neighborhood over.

I advocate raising the price for this, too (for NON-local residents, that is) ...

Josh -- I'm not sure what a non-local resident is, but it seems like what makes the best sense is to charge everyone the same for on-street parking.

Why should you use the street space for free while your neighbor without a car does not?

I meant to mention renting. My family was between cars for a while and we considered ditching it and renting, ZipCarring, etc. instead. Like a lot of car owners in NYC (I think), it's not like I'm a car lover--my car's a device, not something I want to have in and of itself. What I want is what it enables me to do. Owning a car is a pain in the ass, parking or no parking!

But after we tried it for a while, we found that renting and ZipCar, where we are, anyway, does not yet live up to its promise or word of mouth. For the times we wanted to drive, the distance we were willing to travel to pick up, and our capacity desires (2 small kids, car seats, etc.), it required WAY more advance anticipation than we we able to pull off, or wasn't available at all.

Mind you, that's for us and our family situation. For others, I'm sure ZipCar et al are the solution right now. Which is great. And maybe someday it will be for us. Which would be greater.

However, I doubt that, FOR ME, renting a car would reduce my mileage driven that much. I'd take the same long-haul trips which put on the bulk oof my car's miles. What it would probably reduce are the shopping/entertainment jaunts of a few miles at a time that I now take in my "free" car. That might add up to a few hundred miles a year? But again, YMMV.

Sounds reasonable to me. And remember, for some trips four people in a car is more efficient than any transit combination. Although the point is well taken that if the car is owned rather than rented as needed, it will be used wastefully for other trips as well.

In any event, this is a small minority point of view. The majority are either in the entitlement or crime camp or both -- my car is an entitlement, your traffic and use of parkign in my neighborhood is a crime.

I can't speak for you, but I put maybe 4,000 miles on my car average a year. Either long trips outside the city or short trips within the outer boroughs. As they say on the Internets, YMMV -- in this case literally.

Anyway, I never said my neighbors weren't using their cars, I said they weren't using them daily. So we agree on that. What they're not doing is driving their cars twice a day in insane traffic to and from an extremely congested Central Business District. The trips you describe are what I said: "those trips for which public transit is less convenient." When I go to Greenpoint, I drive (unless I bike there). When they extend the G line, I'll take the train. Better options, better choices.

Likewise, I drive to visit relatives whom I could, theoretically, visit through a combination of subway to train, to their driving to pick my family up from a train station--but it would take literally three times as long. I don't want to give up the driving options, but I would gladly pay more to subsidize the alternatives, especially when the side effect (in this case, parking) carries a benefit for me. (And I would not drive to work in Manhattan even if I had a guaranteed free parking space on both ends.)

Which again goes to my general point. A policy of de facto forcing people to give up cars is a non-starter. But what we can, and should, do, is offer better alternatives, and discourage driving in places well served by transit through things like congestion pricing. And we can price both the driving and parking of cars to reflect (and subsidize) their social costs, in ways that ultimately have benefits all around (even--gasp!--to drivers).

Bottom line: treating driving in NYC as an entitlement is foolhardy. Treating it as a crime is a pipe dream. Treating driving in NYC like a luxury, which is what it is, is the way to go.

What you're advocating, then, is cheaper parking for you (and therefore for everyone else in your situation). As I said before, parking is the big cost of owning a car in NYC, and therefore reducing the cost of parking will make it easier for people to own cars. The Slopers who garage their cars out on Linden Blvd. somewhere will simply move to more convenient parking closer to home, and in general, because you've reduced the cost of car ownership, you will increase demand and put more cars on the streets, maybe not necessarily in Park Slope, but in Brooklyn as a whole.

Now maybe you can get around to responding to my original question: as public policy, why is satisfying your desire for economizing on parking worth increasing the death toll concomitant with increasing motorcar use?

Slopion, you may be right that more cars don't necessarily equal more commuting trips, but there are more ways to use a car than driving to work. Once you have invested the money into buying a motorcar, registering it, and insuring it, the trips are pretty much free. Your cohort of car owners who commute by subway? I would imagine they're using their motorcars once a week at the minimum, for shopping trips, visiting relatives, or just going to Williamsburg to gallery-hop. I bike to work, but I've nonetheless put 12,000 miles on my car in the past year just in leisure driving. To assume that your friends are paying thousands of dollars a year for a mere couple trips to Philadelphia or Cape Cod in their personal vehicles is a little ridiculous.

Josh, I agree with you up until the end. But I also believe that local residents should be paying a lot more (through parking permits) to park on their local streets. If I'm keeping my car on a city street, the city should be getting me to pay extra money toward the maintenance of that street, for improved transit, etc.

As for more parking = more cars = more car use, that may be true in much of the world, but that certainly doesn't gibe with my experience in New York City. In my neck of Brooklyn anyway, I know plenty of car owners, and none who drive to work rather than take the subway. And I don't think it's because we're superior to all the brainwashed slack-jawed Americans who are fooled by billions of dollars in advertising. It's because we have better options (good subway service), so we rationally choose to utilize them and use our cars for those trips for which public transit is less convenient.

Moreover, in addition to the lack of curb cuts, favoring it over off street parking improve the street frontage because of fewer garages/surface lots.

Who here suggested providing more parking for FREE? I advocate providing A LOT more OFF-STREET parking - But not for free...For the right price. Furthermore, On-Street parking should ALSO cost a helluva lot more than it currently does. I advocate raising the price for this, too (for NON-local residents, that is) ...

Park(ing) Day, I believe, is a protest against the amount of space cities dedicate to the automobile at a broad level, and not a protest against on-street parking per se.