Dunkin' Donuts looks to fill another hole in South Boston

Here's the problem: if you own a car, you should need to have a space for that car.

"Too many people driving in the city" and "too many people owning cars in the city" are indeed linked issues, but solving one doesn't fix the other. In this case, there are legitimate reasons why a family of four might want to own a car - even two cars. And as long as they're not jamming the streets in perpetual rush hour during the work week, I'm inclined to let them.

But the non-solution of not providing parking while also continuing to issue far too many RPPs clearly isn't working, because it's created a situation now where spaces are saved by peoples' vehicles from 6 AM on Monday to 3 PM on Friday. Frankly speaking, it's stupid of people to continue insisting that we're building for car-lite and car-free lifestyles but then do absolutely nothing to discourage these supposedly car-free residents from receiving residential parking privileges and jamming too many cars into on-street real estate.

Here's the actual solution: build more off-street, structured parking. One parking space per unit. Then, offer everyone who moves into these units the choice to sell that parking space (or, if they're in an RPP-eligible unit, to sell their RPP rights.) This can be done as a transaction between two individuals, or as a transaction between renter and landlord. Once sold, the space purchaser becomes responsible for paying fair market value on the space from month to month and that cost comes off of the cost of the unit. This way, you treat the two separate issues - that people with cars are moving into units meant for car-free people and that car-free people shouldn't be forced to pay for a space they aren't using - as the linked but distinct problems that they are.

In fact, once it becomes clear that X spaces are consistently going unused, then we can revisit actually destroying those spaces as part of a coordinated scale-down. Not before.