The force that shapes everything around us: Parking • Hacker News Board

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#181

Post by mjmahone17 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:15 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #173

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s mostly because of zoning. If you separate retail from offices from housing, you force people to have cars to get around. Which then requires large parking lots and wide roads to deal with all the cars, in a big feedback loop. Those who can’t drive (about a third of the population are too young, too old, or disabled) are just forced to make do. Not to mention how difficult it is for the poor. Owning a car is real…

You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute. Once people start forming families, "live next to work" is likely to be very unrealistic for one of the people involved, assuming they both work. One person gets a new job across town and the other doesn't? Setting aside whether or not most people would want to move anytime that happened, there's no longer a single answer. Start throwing kids in the mix and it gets eve…

Allowing infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do. All it costs is rezoning: if they then increase taxes on the now very-desirable-to-build land, it’ll be a huge net win, with cheaper utilities and transport infra to maintain relative to the tax base. Sewers cost roughly the same per mile regardless of if you’re serving 1,000 or 10,000 people.

This becomes really obvious when you look at where cities like Kansas City receive the most taxes vs where they spend the most: suburbs cost Kansas City huge amounts of money that the inner walkable city neighborhoods subsidize, despite the per-capita tax returns being lower in the more dense neighborhoods.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#182

Post by adolph » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:20 PM UTC

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #30

There's an interesting interview with a designer of SimCity, where he discusses parking: 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 bl…

> 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. . . . So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground.

All the new HEBs (Texas grocery store) that I've seen are built above their parking garages with a smaller amount of parking at store level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-E-B

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#183

Post by ghaff » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:24 PM UTC

niam wrote: post #177

ghaff wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I think everyone I know who lives in Boston/Cambridge owns a car because they either commute/visit to friends out to the suburbs or do regular weekend activities like hiking or canoeing out in the suburbs/mountains--which can also involve specialized transportation for car-camping etc. You can work around a lot of this but a lot of people don't want to if they can afford it. I don't live in the city but I'd…

You probably interact with the types of people who are more likely to spend time in the suburbs, by dint of living in a suburb. "Affording" a car in Boston is stressful as hell even beyond the cost, and I wouldn't recommend it. My friends who both live and work in the city don't own cars. I ditched my car when I moved into city limits, and ride an EUC, bike, or train to work. The suburbs would have nothing for me if…

I'm actually even further out than the conventional suburbs. But, yes, I mostly know people in the city who routinely do hiking and paddling activities that practically require owning vehicles and who routinely get together with friends well outside of city limits. I think most of the people I know who own a car in the city have a dedicated parking space.

So, yeah, city people I know have made a deliberate (and expensive) decision to live in the city but maintain the flexibility to drive elsewhere without a lot of friction.

People naturally gravitate to lower friction. If activities like getting outside of the city/transit coverage is expensive/a pain you mostly just don't do it.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#184

Post by kdmccormick » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:28 PM UTC

niam wrote: post #177

ghaff wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I think everyone I know who lives in Boston/Cambridge owns a car because they either commute/visit to friends out to the suburbs or do regular weekend activities like hiking or canoeing out in the suburbs/mountains--which can also involve specialized transportation for car-camping etc. You can work around a lot of this but a lot of people don't want to if they can afford it. I don't live in the city but I'd…

You probably interact with the types of people who are more likely to spend time in the suburbs, by dint of living in a suburb. "Affording" a car in Boston is stressful as hell even beyond the cost, and I wouldn't recommend it. My friends who both live and work in the city don't own cars. I ditched my car when I moved into city limits, and ride an EUC, bike, or train to work. The suburbs would have nothing for me if…

This is overly black and white IMO. For the million or so of us who live in the "first ring suburbs", e.g. Somerville, it's common to own a car for out-of-the-city trips, but use walking/biking/transit for day to day life and going out on the weekends.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#185

Post by LeoPanthera » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #30

There's an interesting interview with a designer of SimCity, where he discusses parking: 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 bl…

Is it wrong that I think I would enjoy playing Sim Parking Lot?

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#186

Post by AlanSE » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #165

davidw wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think many people are truly anti-car activists. Just that we need to redimension their absolute centrality to so many policies and budgets. I'm involved in pro-housing politics and it's just amazing how many people are like "well, ok, sure, people need a place to live and all, but let's think FIRST about where to store the automobiles. If that works out, then I guess we can build some housing". They don't say…

It’s mostly because of zoning. If you separate retail from offices from housing, you force people to have cars to get around. Which then requires large parking lots and wide roads to deal with all the cars, in a big feedback loop. Those who can’t drive (about a third of the population are too young, too old, or disabled) are just forced to make do. Not to mention how difficult it is for the poor. Owning a car is real…

I hope/believe that we are near a tipping point. There is a very large and very substantial neighborhood premium based on what's around it, but the zoning is the same everywhere so the competition was legally restricted to greenways, sidewalks, parks, and HOA facilities. Even in the suburban US, it is a VERY desirable feature to be within walking distance of a park where young children can play. This has created a strange effect, where people (let's be honest, affluent people) accumulate a collection of aspirational wheeled items - strollers, bikes, weird electric skateboard-like things, and other wheeled things for the kids. These are coupled local government parks and spaces where people can ride a bike JUST FOR FUN. I mean it very seriously that greenways outright avoid any turns that might be useful for economic life. Riding bikes on the roads is mostly for the true anti-car zealots.

I've been ready to buy a house for few years, but I've realized I'm no longer happy with the whole package. I want to realistically be able to walk or bike to get a dinner, coffee, or groceries. Yet, city centers (in the south for sure) tend to offer the most dangerous roads for doing this, and unhealthy environment, and poor social atmosphere.

I'm sensing that there are more people on the sidelines (who have remove jobs, after all) who are ready to buy into better neighborhoods. These people may not be willing to give up their cars, but there is negotiating space, and it is relevant that these are people who have economic clout to force the issue.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#187

Post by jefftk » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

BluePen7 wrote: post #167

kibwen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sold my car years ago and moved to Boston. I'll never go back to live anywhere that requires me to own a car. I bike or walk everywhere, and what makes me hopeful is that biking infrastructure in Boston (and neighboring cities like Cambridge) has improved dramatically in the years since I've been here and just keeps getting better. Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. B…

This is the same reason I moved out of the city. Rents are very high because they assume you can live there without a car, but as someone who frequently drove far out of the city I was paying for the worst of both worlds. I agree with your TCO assessment, thanks to pandemic/WFH myself and my partner were able to switch to sharing a car and we saw about 10k in annual savings.

> Rents are very high because they assume you can live there without a car

Rents are very high in cities because there's not enough housing for everyone who wants to live there [1] not because of an assumption about car ownership.

[1] Ironically, in part because of an assumption that people will have cars, which is one limitation on how dense housing construction is allowed to be.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#188

Post by sandworm101 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

mjmahone17 wrote: post #181

majormajor wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute. Once people start forming families, "live next to work" is likely to be very unrealistic for one of the people involved, assuming they both work. One person gets a new job across town and the other doesn't? Setting aside whether or not most people would want to move anytime that happened, there's no longer a single answer. Start throwing kids in the mix and it gets eve…

Allowing infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do. All it costs is rezoning: if they then increase taxes on the now very-desirable-to-build land, it’ll be a huge net win, with cheaper utilities and transport infra to maintain relative to the tax base. Sewers cost roughly the same per mile regardless of if you’re serving 1,000 or 10,000 peo…

>> infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do

No. That is a radical change in needs and services. Cars don't need sewage treatment and fresh water delivery. Parking lots don't need school systems and health care. Just saying that a parking lot can be converted to houses ignores the radically different local and external needs of human residents as opposed to parked cars. It is akin to those who say that office buildings should "just be converted to apartments" with zero insight re the difficulties of doing so in practice.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#189

Post by dublinben » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:31 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #64

SamBorick wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Every city in the US used to have a robust public transit system. Every major urban center, perhaps. No city in Montana (I'll go so far as to say the midwest, minus perhaps Chicago) has a "robust" public transit system. And even when we create a perfect 15 minute utopia, people will still need one-off transportation on a periodic basis to spots more than 15 minutes away. Doctor visits, specialized purchases, bulk o…

It took me less than a minute to confirm that Billings Montana did, in fact, used to have an electric trolley system 100+ years ago.[0] Just like nearly every other US city at one time.

[0] https://billingsgazette.com/streetcars/image_1048a3b1-20c3-5...

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#190

Post by notatoad » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

david2ndaccount wrote: post #109

damnesian wrote: post #23

>You could imagine a world in which streets were pedestrianized and where we planted trees and gardens and in what is currently space reserved for parking, and closed streets, outside schools, so kids can have places to play. 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…

Part of the problem is you can’t just convert an area to a pedestrian area as people still need to be able to get there. You need to construct low cost parking garages around the area so people can still get there.

converting an area is hard, but a street is easy. we don't need to pedestrianize whole city centers, just pick the streets where it makes sense. cars don't need every street. people are perfectly willing to walk a block if that's their only option. if you close a street to cars, people will park on the next street over and walk.

the street parking in front of a business is never enough for all the patrons of that business anyways, people are usually parking and then walking 1-2 blocks to get where they're going. removing the street parking in front of a business only removes the hope of finding that perfect parking space.