Your professor is teaching a class on urban studies. Write a post responding to the professor's question. Express and support your opinion and contribute to the discussion in your own words. An effective response has at least 100 words.
Dr. Farid Rahimi
A number of cities have begun removing on-street parking in central areas and giving the space to wider pavements, cycle lanes and outdoor seating. Supporters point to studies showing that shops on such streets do better, not worse. Critics answer that those studies come from a handful of unusually walkable cities, that older and disabled customers depend on nearby parking, and that traders' own experience should count for something. Should cities remove central on-street parking? Why?
Lena
I would remove it. The consistent finding is that shopkeepers overestimate, often by a factor of three or four, how many of their customers arrive by car. If policy is made from their impressions rather than from counts of who actually walks in, we are protecting a customer who is largely imaginary at the expense of one who is standing outside in the road.
Ollie
The overestimate is real, but I would be careful what follows from it. Being wrong about the average customer does not make a trader wrong about their own shop: a hardware shop selling heavy goods and a coffee shop are not in the same position, and a policy applied to a whole street averages over exactly the differences that matter to the businesses in it.