71–80 of 683 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want to make pedestrians safer, you can do that without having to make driving miserable, by building elevated pedestrian walkways.
And how do I walk in to a shop from this walkway?
I wonder who he means by "us"?
I guess, in this modern world, making "us" crazy doesn't require going very far...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s what I thought! But all of the five or so garages we tried cost $20-40 flat with no ticket machines or anything, and I wasn’t willing to download/fight with an app to walk around for an hour. Next trip will be more planned for sure. I was impressed with the highways though. Definitely a motorists’ dream to get around the various suburbs.
Needing to download an app, and saying "you need to book in advance" are not the same thing. Just because you didn't want to deal with it and didn't do research ahead of time doesn't mean "We couldn’t even park downtown". You didn't want to, and that's fine.
There’s a giant parking lot with 10,000 spaces and 2 are free. There is ‘no parking’ unless you want to drive around for 2 hours.
For enough money you could probably get a permit from the cops and a security detail and park wherever you wanted, like in a city park. There is still ‘no parking’ in parks.
Within parameters that apply in the majority of cities I’ve tried to park in, there was no parking. In future I’ll download the app, book a spot and bring my phone charger and then I’ll be able to access the parking.
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.
Density and diversity are opposing forces. Since diversity is now the absolute highest value in western culture, density can never be anything other than dysfunctional or a lament.
I think you need to go one level deeper: People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks shapes everything. Cars, and thus car parking, come about because of this need. Even before cars existed, roads and parking (such as hitching posts and stables) still existed because people needed to move. And even bicycles (electric or not) need parking too. There are startups dedicated to creating automated bike…
this topic is a bit of a rabbit hole. Yes, roads have always been there. Massive car infrastructure and parking has not. Looking back in time, most people would actually walk for most of their daily life. That reflected in how cities and villages were built. This layout has only changed after we started adopting cars as default mean of transportation (mostly 1930s and later, with some exceptions).
Horses and carriages were a practical requirement, since walking all day one way to visit the grocer was unrealistic.
I think you need to go one level deeper: People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks shapes everything. Cars, and thus car parking, come about because of this need. Even before cars existed, roads and parking (such as hitching posts and stables) still existed because people needed to move. And even bicycles (electric or not) need parking too. There are startups dedicated to creating automated bike…
> People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks shapes everything. Cars, and thus car parking, come about because of this need. This is not true. Every city in the US used to have a robust public transit system. No cars or parking lots needed. You can hitch 2 horses per car space, and 10-20 bikes in the same space. Those pre-car public transit systems were bankrupted by artificially low fares, and b…
That WAS true, but that's not the reality that's shaping planning now. Further, many central business districts have been eroded by cars + big box suburbanization, so that many of those essentials are only obtainable in areas that never even had transit or didn't exist when transit was still a thing.
In the past, I had the good fortune to live car-free for many years in a US city with a working transportation system. Not having to account for the car was actually liberating, despite having to plan my adventures a bit more carefully to align with said transit systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it is the correct approach. It is somewhat a zero-sum game at least in urban centers. Driving is cheap because free and cheap parking is widely available, and car speed is prioritized over other factors including pedestrian safety. Some of the huge volume of parking has to be given over to other transit modes, which will increase demand and eventually price for what remains. Urban speed limits need to be lower, p…
> It is somewhat a zero-sum game at least in urban centers. Driving is cheap because free and cheap parking is widely available, and car speed is prioritized over other factors including pedestrian safety. I've never seen an urban center where "free and cheap parking is widely available", or one with a speed limit above 25.
Another factor is that urban speed limits vary widely in how much they are actually limits. Research is clear on the fact that road design has at least as strong an influence on driver behavior as posted limits do. Without rigorous enforcement & given the wide streets common in these places, driver behavior tends towards interpreting the limit as the minimum speed they are entitled to, rather than the maximum to be attained only when safe.
And finally neither I nor anyone else here know what you've seen so that's a very silly limit to place on the conversation.
Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike. A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
Yet a heck of a lot of people have cars there. Private car ownership in the Netherlands is around 590 per 1000 population. It's within 10% of Germany on cars per 1000 population and on percentage of families that own a car. The Netherlands stands out for its excellent biking facilities so that people who cannot afford a car are not screwed like they are in many places, and people with a car don't have to use it is as…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet a heck of a lot of people have cars there. Private car ownership in the Netherlands is around 590 per 1000 population. It's within 10% of Germany on cars per 1000 population and on percentage of families that own a car. The Netherlands stands out for its excellent biking facilities so that people who cannot afford a car are not screwed like they are in many places, and people with a car don't have to use it is as…
Yea but the cars are smaller and transit isn't designed exclusively around moving cars from one place to another. I can't even bike in my city because I'll get ran over. Comparing the numbers directly doesn't make a lot of sense.