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Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike. A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
For what percentage of people in rural or suburban America do you think "move to the Netherlands" is a realistic suggestion?
Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but the folks who need it (e.g., people with mobility issues, or families with small children). If you're able-bodied in an urban environment, you should be the last person to be driving around regularly.
I would love to see a LOT more of this in urban centers.
I live in a college town that is about the same size as Iowa City. Iowa City has taken the step of closing off their downtown and making it mostly pedestrian space. It's incredibly nice to explore the area on foot. Our city has considered the same idea but pedestrianizing our downtown has been so controversial when it has been discussed, it hasn't come up for over a decade- mayors are scared to death to touch it.
Part of the reason is poor past civic planning would make it very expensive to correct. The main conduit through the downtown business district is also the major East-West artery of town, making the street one of those dreaded "stroads-" a street in the sense that there is heavy commercial and residential presence, resulting in a LOT of local foot traffic and stops all day long; mixed with traffic that just wants to get through downtown to somewhere else. So half of the traffic is looking for parking and the other half is running red lights to get somewhere else as fast as possible.
There have been, predictably, many incidents involving cars, pedestrians and bicycles. But not one inch moved on what's become the 800lb gorilla. I don't think a solution is even possible.
Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
> live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors Doing either of those things makes your standard of living worse.
Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
I honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to do that. To me, it's only done out of necessity, and is a driving force in motivating people to get the hell out of that situation asap.
But the cool thing is, some people can choose that, if that's what they desire, even though I can't understand why.
Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike. A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
For what percentage of people in rural or suburban America do you think "move to the Netherlands" is a realistic suggestion?
Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
You're describing urban environments. A lot of people live in those places already. But a lot of people prefer to live elsewhere. Differences in preference is fine. What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but…
This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
I visited metro Detroit for the first time on Saturday and the parking situation was abysmal but this is perhaps understandable in a large city. I thought my small city in Canada was bad! We couldn’t even park downtown since it appears you need to book it in advance and the trip was somewhat spontaneous. I just ended up pulling over (by a no stopping sign ha) on a quiet side street and setting the GPS back to Windsor…
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/parking-lots-eat-american-...
> Detroit was, or is, Motor City. Its center can pull off another automotive-related nickname: Parking Central. Fully one-third of downtown Detroit is dedicated to letting cars do what they’re not designed for: standing still.
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
Source: https://bldgblog.com/2013/05/sim-city-an-interview-with-ston...