I agree with everything about the high / hidden cost of parking.

The video makes me cringe a bit though. There's an idea among a lot of Seattlites that Green Spaces are what's needed to alleviate the ugliness of cities. What I think is needed though is well designed, well built urban spaces. James Howard Kunstler sums it up pretty well.

See 11:05:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZ…

We also pay the hidden costs of electricity, rent, renovations, advertising, workers wages, etc, with every transaction. All of those other costs are part of doing business as well and like it or not, in our society ease of access via automobile is a factor in whether people come to a business.
Until you get to a density with a functioning mass transit and walkability such as Manhattan, you're going to be dependent on the car. Simply eliminating parking (or road capacity a la SDOT on 99) to make it harder for customers to get to a business is a recipe for hurting the businesses without changing the impact of the car on our society.

True that, @1.

The good news is that these gimmicky reclaimed parking space "statements" are small enough that their creators are paying attention to use activation, learning that it's not enough to make "space" -- people need reasons to want to be there.

And by being out in the street, these things are emphatically not interrupting the building-scape in the way that Seattle's lust for pocket parks and setbacks and "open space" interruptions habitually does.

You are misinterpreting Speck here. He's talking about parking LOTS, while those Vancouver hippies are taking over street parking spaces. Street parking is beneficial, for its traffic-calming and segregating effect, in addition to the provision of parking (which is, still and always, essential to the functioning of a commercial block). These curbside parks trigger an emotional response in the jews-harp-twangin', suspenders-and-waxed-mustache-wearin' Urban Farmer types, but they don't actually do anything for the street. They're the opposite of the street, the opposite of the city. Bringing the rural into the urban necessarily pushes more of the urban further out. These well-meaning people are (in a very small way, it's true) damaging the urban fabric they think they're building.

What Speck is talking about is parking LOTS, which should, of course, have buildings on them instead.

@1 is 100% correct, as is @2 (and, I should point out, even Manhattan is full of curbside parking everywhere, as is every city everywhere).

I was disappointed when the taco truck moved out of the lot pictured above. Their mulitas were really tasty, especially when they started putting in guacamole instead of avocado.

A bunch of Seattle artists took over street lots here about 2-3 years ago for a day. All over town. It was fun.

Agreed about the need to design better cities. However, I'll counter with the idea that there are many, many EMPTY residential lots all over the city that are just growing weeds and blackberries... these should be converted to food gardens post-haste, and guarded by people living on site in tiny houses.

@4 disagree with your point that parklets don't do anything for the street. In my neighborhood, some have actually added streetlife to blocks that were once nothing but an a narrow sidewalk to shuffle down.
Of course, the parklets I'm talking about are basically impromptu patio seating and plazas, and not useless patches of curbside grass.

@2 the difference between parking and the other "hidden" costs that you reference is that those costs are set by the market (well, electricity is a pseudo market) and paid for by the ultimate users (i.e. restaurant customers pay for restaurant overhead costs like electrity used by the restaurant), while parking that is mandated by zoning artificially increases the supply of parking and decreases the supply (this increasing the cost) of other, more efficient uses of the land. Ultimately this oversupply of parking spaces results in underpriced parking with externalities or subsidies being paid by nonusers to maintain the market imbalance. Previously we decided that it was good policy to legislate this outcome--but we can and should consider whether this policy should be changed taking account of other externalities that results from car overuse versus the cost of upsetting dependencies and expectations that the current policies have created