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The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

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Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#321

Post by willio58 »

squidgyhead wrote: post #96

ClimateTown has a video about this today! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8

ClimateTown, along with Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, City Nerd, and the like give me hope that the message is getting out.

That being said, the more I watch these videos/listen to their podcasts the more I understand that city planners, specifically those in charge of managing traffic and parking, have been taught _incorrectly_ for decades. These content creators regularly say that if we want change we are going to need to go to city council meetings and speak up, but in reality what credentials do I have to talk about this stuff? It's my word as a software dev who consumes content about this against someone who's studied this stuff for years of their life. I don't personally blame the city planners, but I do think that car-centric planning has been engrained into their education fundamentally to the point where plans are made based on factors solely considering number of cars moving through traffic lights for example, vs. number of people crossing an intersection irrespective of mode of transportation.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#322

Post by mikrl »

brewdad wrote: post #208
mikrl wrote: post #11

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…

I don't know what you were doing wrong but Detroit has more available parking than just about any American city.

I must have randomly selected the 5 least suitable parking garages downtown then.

I was happy to burn gas for another few minutes to find one that… I could actually pay for… but the consensus of my passengers was to just go home.

This was at 4pm on a Saturday though, maybe you need to get parked before noon or something.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#323

Post by vel0city »

throw0101a wrote: post #298
vel0city wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what the average square footage of that Geoffrey location is, I'm not great at eyeballing that. But the average US SFH is what, almost 2,500sqft these days? I imagine these are less than that figure? EDIT: I just did some quick Google Maps measuring on that 159 Geoffrey St, I estimated about 60x20 floor plate, maybe less. Lose some space from the stairs, two mostly full floors and maybe a finished attic,…

Recently sold, 2700 sq. ft: * https://juliekinnear.com/toronto-houses/51-geoffrey-street/ Currently for sale in the same area: * https://www.properly.ca/buy/home/view/JHfk2xo4TU6BZrfBk2c3gw... Notice the 'high' prices: this is because this neighbourhood is in high demand because urban living seems to be cool again 'with the kids'. But back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s the prices were much, much lower because all the…

So I guess your point is you can buy just as much square footage in the city, provided an unlimited budget.

Nice to live in a world where a $2M house is a normal home price. I definitely don't live anywhere near that. So for me to live in that kind of an area, I'd probably need...a much smaller house and probably a shared wall.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#324

Post by davidw »

majormajor wrote: post #306
davidw wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rome is notable for having kind of not great subway infrastructure for a major European city because, among other problems, they tend to encounter a lot of archeological stuff whenever they dig there. And I'm not even talking about major cities. Where I lived in Padova, it has approximately 200K people in the same area that about 100K people occupy here in Bend, Oregon. Padova has way better transit than Bend does ev…

Is Bend gripped by housing issues and traffic as much as the Bay Area or NYC or wherever? The folks I know in smaller US towns simply don't have the same concerns about parking spaces as those in high-demand, high-population, central large cities. And comparing those cities to typically-small-to-medium-size Italian cities doesn't result in very actionable practical plans.

Bend has very serious housing woes. The housing crisis, at this point, has spread out from the epicenter type places like the Bay Area.

One of my best friends here got priced out and now drives in 40 minutes from a nearby town. That's bad for 1) him and his family 2) the environment 3) traffic.

If you ask people on Nextdoor, they'll probably tell you there's also a traffic crisis, but it's not true.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#325

Post by Arn_Thor »

yurishimo wrote: post #302
bugglebeetle wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands, but the US is a wildly corrupt country with very little in the way of actual representative democracy, which is the primary reason why this (locally) correct. In many other places, it is in fact possible to achieve these outcomes through state power.

It also took 40+ years. After WW2, NL was on a course to model American cities. There are some places that still harken back to that time. Dutch people also really like to drive, which nobody seems to talk about! But now the trains have been privatized, the ticket prices jacked up, and gas taxes are absolutely bonkers right now. If we’re lucky, maybe the trains can be brought back into more direct government control…

Ask every Dutchman to look at British rail and ask themselves “do we want that?”. If the answer is no, they’d better fight to reverse rail privatization

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#326

Post by mjmahone17 »

Someone wrote: post #264
Reubachi wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's currently very little incentive to pedestrianize actual problem cities from all concerned parties. Because pedestrians are still largely able to bike, walk, bus etc just fine. And drivers are largely able to commute/park just fine. We need to be honest that the folks most concerned (rightfully so) with urban car congestion are wealthy upper class people who moved TO the cities for their upperclass nature. Sho…

> Because pedestrians are still largely able to bike, walk, bus etc just fine. I don’t see how that’s true for most cities in the USA. For walking, in many cases, there isn’t even a sidewalk for pedestrians to use. If there is, crossing stroads is way more difficult (large distances between crossing opportunities) and dangerous (e.g. no pedestrian islands halfway) than needed.

I recently needed to book a hotel in a medium-sized town. There is a shuttle I need to get to leaving on one side of the road, and three different hotels on the other side, immediately across from the shuttle stop. I can’t book any of those hotels because this “Main Street” is 6 lanes, there are no crosswalks for 1 mile in either direction, and the sidewalk on the 3-hotel side doesn’t exist (the only way to get to any of those hotels appears to be to drive).

Whereas if I was in a car I could turn left from the 3-hotels’ lot into the lot where the shuttle is stopping in under 1/4 mile. It’s absurd when you can drive for 1/4 mile or walk for 2.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#327

Post by colonwqbang »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #314
tivert wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets. Not just more expensive, but enormously more expensive. The aesthetic priorities of a video game probably don't map well to real life.

A quick web search puts local underground parking garages including necessary street alterations at about 1.7x the cost of surface parking, per parking square. Not sure if that falls within the purview of enormously more expensive.

That doesn't sound reasonable. The figures I found say it's 2.5-30x the cost.

https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-parking-garage

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#328

Post by drivers99 »

dahwolf wrote: post #228
throw0101a wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh the Urbanity recently visited the Netherlands and did a profile video, "The Fascinating Human-Scale Urbanism of Dutch Suburbia": * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImFJ7KKjAo > Cars are pretty popular ways of getting about in the suburbs and rural areas. But how much are cars needed on a day-to-day basis for day-to-day errands? I don't think any is saying that they are not useful (at times), but you can have them…

I'm Dutch and I want to push back against the glorification of our infrastructure. To comment on that video specifically: Yes, fully on board with the narrower streets, "hiding" parking, having some shared public space like playgrounds. These are all good things. But there's a flip side to this coin. This isn't necessarily a desired "way of life", it's what naturally evolved due to severe space constraints. I specifi…

> I'm Dutch and I want to push back against the glorification of our infrastructure.

The same channel (Oh the Urbanity) just came out with another video yesterday explaining why we should try to use more examples than just Amsterdam and/or The Netherlands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIcwzqRlZ68

The funny thing is I think they address your point about density. Many places (in NL) are less dense and still have infrastructure, and other places are more dense (in other countries) and could support the biking infrastructure but don't.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#329

Post by runarberg »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #259
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…

The excess of cars in cities is bad enough, but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets. Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many peopl…

To do a reality check of a big large scale and expensive solution to a particular problem it often helps to observe existing solutions, and how they fair in city (or state) policy.

For parking this solution is public transit, and in many cities in USA and Europe it fairs rather badly. Bus systems are often underfunded and cities quite often settle for a minimal viable system, a system so dismal that it only marginally reduces parking proliferation.

A policy of underground parking—being infinitely more expensive—will realistically yield an even worse outcome than the public transit policies of most cities today.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#330

Post by hdl »

vel0city wrote: post #323
throw0101a wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently sold, 2700 sq. ft: * https://juliekinnear.com/toronto-houses/51-geoffrey-street/ Currently for sale in the same area: * https://www.properly.ca/buy/home/view/JHfk2xo4TU6BZrfBk2c3gw... Notice the 'high' prices: this is because this neighbourhood is in high demand because urban living seems to be cool again 'with the kids'. But back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s the prices were much, much lower because all the…

So I guess your point is you can buy just as much square footage in the city, provided an unlimited budget. Nice to live in a world where a $2M house is a normal home price. I definitely don't live anywhere near that. So for me to live in that kind of an area, I'd probably need...a much smaller house and probably a shared wall.

And they are priced like that because there is a limited supply... because they are illegal to build in the USA...
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