Much of Buenos Aires is beautiful, even some of its parking facilities.
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| Beautiful? |
My understanding of the workings of Buenos Aires parking is superficial and based mainly on walking around its central areas. I learned a few things from the
Rosario conference but I am still a novice on Latin American cities and their parking.
So this post does not pretend any great expertise. Instead, I offer some visual impressions, comments and some questions.
There is a lot more to be said, so if you know Buenos Aires please share your insights via the comments!
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| A beautiful facade but parking inside. Hmm. |
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| Not so beautiful ... |
Lots more below. Scroll down.
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| Most blocks we walked down seemed to have at least one commercial public garage, even in leafy Palermo quite a long way from the central commercial area. |
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| On-street parking seems mostly to be free of charge, with predictable results. |
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| Once consequence is illegal parking attendants, like this one in Palermo Viejo. I watched him operate while eating a delicious lunch of asado. I am not sure how common this is in BA. |
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| But I also saw some areas with parking meters (saw both single-space meters and pay-and-display). The standard on-street price seems to be 1.40 Pesos per hour. One peso is about 25 cents US. |
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| Short stays in the nearby commercial garages cost a lot more than 1.40 per hour. Presumably, this is a recipe for a lot of 'cruising for parking'. | | | . |
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| Various inner-city parks and plazas have local government parking lots under them (like Seoul and Taipei). Even the enormous boulevard, Avenida 9 de Julio, has a parking facility beneath. |
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| I didn't see many vacant lots used for parking but there are a few. These and the ubiquitous commercial garages made me wonder if there may be property tax anomalies that make the parking business an attractive use of inner city spaces. |
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| An impressive network of segregated two-way cycle ways is taking shape. I imagine parking has been an issue with some of them. |
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| This monstrous surface lot is in the new but very central riverside area of Puerto Madero. Sadly, I also spotted various big box stores set amid oceans of parking from the toll road heading northwest through the outer suburbs. |
@transeunteba tweeted a response to this post (I have expanded the abbreviations):
ReplyDeleteBA definitely has a ton of parking attendants generally in areas with lots of bars/restaurants or near an event/game/concert
Buenos Aires has very liberal parking regulations for buildings and even on-street. A couple weeks ago the city opened up 40,000 new, free on-street spaces in the neighborhoods that were previously part of through streets. There's a disconnect between the traffic congestion which irks the daily lives of commuters and how bad policy decisions are the cause.
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