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Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

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Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#61

Post by jamil7 »

verve_rat wrote: post #41
cassepipe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that you like your way of life (and that you are probably not given credible alternatives in your city) but please do consider the environmental and social costs of such a way of life: A car centric life is not sustainable for the planet. You've probably seen that propaganda around here but in case you missed it, here is some documentation : https://www.strongtowns.org/

>A car centric life is not sustainable for the planet. How so? If we waved a magic wand and all cars became EVs powered by renewable energy, what would be unsustainable?

The fact that they’re still vastly less efficient than mass public transport, bikes or just walking.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#62

Post by burkaman »

xnx wrote: post #25

Much easier to let farmland go wild than tear up parking lots and destroy any chance of recouping the embodied energy of asphalt for something useful. Most farmland is in support of animal agriculture (boooo) and wouldn't make economic sense if farms had to pay municipal rates for the water they use.

I understand what you're saying, but it sounds like a kind of sunk cost fallacy. If a parking lot has been sitting empty for years and nobody has any plan to do anything with it, maybe it's time to tear it up. The bad decision to build it in the first place has already been made, we can't undo it by waiting and hoping. You can at least recycle the asphalt to get a bit of use out of it.

Rewilding unnecessary farmland is also a good idea. As usual in these conversations, there's no reason we can't do both.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#63

Post by Steltek »

travoc wrote: post #22
wtp1saac wrote: post #4

Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread. In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but h…

Parking minimums are required by cities because underparked development projects dump their parking problems on the surrounding neighborhoods. These types of externalities shouldn't just be hand-waved away in the name of "urbanization." The lack of parking creates real problems for residents, police and businesses in growing cities every day.

Vastly outweighed by the problems of parking minimums:

* Increased housing costs

* Decreased housing supply

* Increased air pollution

* Increased traffic

* Increased noise pollution

* Increased water pollution, stormwater usage

* Decrease in community and neighborhood cohesion

If a person feels they need parking, they can pay for it. They don't need society to force parking to be made available to everyone, whether they want it or not.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#64

Post by CuriousCosmic »

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #39
wtp1saac wrote: post #4

Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread. In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but h…

I think urbanizing core metro areas is actually key to protecting rural areas. I was sitting in a coffee shop in a small town and I overheard a conversation next to me. Two elderly men were talking, and one of them made a comment to the effect of, "I like a rural town, so I try to vote to keep it that way." Two or three decades ago, this town really was a small farming town, but the population is growing and the town…

> I think urbanizing core metro areas is actually key to protecting rural areas.

It really is. Some subruban and rual places are starting to get this as well. A common theme among the ones that get it is to provide density bonuses (i.e. if you allocate large blocks of conservation space, you can build more densely). The result is that you get the same overall density in an area but the people are living much closer together and not sprawling out and building over the natural environment.

I personally think most of them are too conservative with their approaches (often setting upper limits on density even with the bonuses) but the general approach of "build dense to limit the impact on rural spaces" is progress.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#65

Post by coldpie »

bagels wrote: post #57
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about city owned and maintained on-street parking. I think we can agree that the sane thing to do is charge for it and let the market set the price. If home owners or developers want to build their own on-site parking, they're welcome to. Personally, I'm sick of having four parking spots in my garage tacked to my rent despite being a one car household. Or did I misunderstand, and you feel on-street fre…

If your neighborhood or development is the one with no parking and you are not in a walk-able city, you are trading dollars for the stressful situation of trying to figure out where to park, getting in to conflicts with neighbors over parking, and getting your car crashed in to or vandalized. I tried it, I didn't like it.

So how do you get from a non-walkable city to a walkable city? We can't remove parking minimums because everyone needs a car because it's not walkable. But we can't take out the parking lots, because no one walks, because there's too many parking lots between the places people want to go. And we can't put in dedicated bus lanes, because that would reduce parking, which we need because buses are too slow. How do we break the cycle?

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#66

Post by CuriousCosmic »

smallerfish wrote: post #8
falcolas wrote: post #3

I'd rather they put in an indigenous meadow. Trees are awesome, but so are open green spaces that maintain themselves.

What herbivores are you going to deploy to allow the meadow to maintain itself? Going to fence them in or let them run wild in town? In 99%+ of east coast US environments, grassland will become forest naturally (over time), even with the deer population as it is.

Why not do controlled burns? That's historically how most grasslands and meadows that didn't support large grazing populations stayed that way.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#67

Post by e_i_pi_2 »

I'd even go a step further and set a maximum amount of parking in a given area to disincentivize driving. As an extreme example, if a mall is only allowed to have 5 parking spaces then they'll need to design around supporting public transit. So many places in the US are almost impossible to live in without owning a car - you might have bike paths if you're lucky, and in many places there aren't even sidewalks

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#68

Post by apendleton »

jrockway wrote: post #46
Swizec wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rules in my area are two spots per bedroom - mandatory Wait am I reading this right that a 3-bedroom family home would come with space for six cars ? How many families have 6 cars that's insane O.O Sounds like a regulation someone long ago thought would for sure prevent anyone from building anything. No way they actually wanted that much residential parking ...

I don't think there's a good one-size-fits-all rule. A 3 bedroom unit could be 3 couples living together and splitting the rent, or it could be 1 family, or it could just be 1 person who wants an office and a gym. The rule should probably be "1 space for car owned", like when you go to buy a car, you have to prove that you have a place to park it.

Just restrict who can park on the street. Then if people want to park a car, they'll need a residence with a space, and if there's demand for residences with parking spaces, developers will build them, minimums or not. The issue with minimums is that they require building spaces above and beyond demand, but markets should do just fine at making sure demand is met, as long as there are barriers to externalizing it.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#69

Post by apendleton »

travoc wrote: post #22
wtp1saac wrote: post #4

Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread. In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but h…

Parking minimums are required by cities because underparked development projects dump their parking problems on the surrounding neighborhoods. These types of externalities shouldn't just be hand-waved away in the name of "urbanization." The lack of parking creates real problems for residents, police and businesses in growing cities every day.

This is solvable with parking permit programs. Make street parking in those surrounding neighborhoods resident-only. And then people considering living in the "underparked" neighborhood who need parking will have no alternative but to select units that include parking, or live in another neighborhood (and if enough people opt not to live there, developers will include more parking to satisfy demand). This is a problem regular markets can fix: governments don't need to require developers to meet (or often, exceed!) what people actually want.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#70

Post by housebear »

Does anyone have an idea of what it would roughly cost to purchase an unused parking lot, tear it up, dispose of the asphalt waste, re-soil, and plant 30 or so trees? Is this something some enterprising person could start a kickstarter for just as a public experiment? Is it even possible with zoning requirements or the like?
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