Parking was the ostensible focus of a fascinating, revealing exchange on our Community Page Cyborgology last week. In it, Tim McCormick—a research consultant (at Stanford Media X) who works in scholarly communication, new media, and publishing—took one of our most regular and prolific TSP bloggers, Nate Jurgenson, to task for his critique of “smart parking.”
In his original post, Jurgenson suggests that, in stark contrast to its laudable intentions, smarter parking could actually create more parking problems by encouraging people to drive around even more, since the annoyance of parking won’t be quite the disincentive it is currently. Jurgenson bases his critique on what he calls the “Robert Moses Mistake”—the unintended consequences of creating more and better freeways. McCormick, in turn, argues that Jurgenson doesn’t really know much about the impetus and ideas behind smart parking, its realities as a social policy innovation, or the actual research on parking and driving among urban planners and policy makers.
We love Jurgenson’s sociologically-inspired, counter-intuitive critique of smart parking, as well as McCormick’s careful point-by-point, empirical rejoinder. Without taking sides or giving away the details, let’s just say it was a great exchange, typical of the best of sociological research and thought. more...