91–100 of 389 posts
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The market is better at solving this problem than central planning.
Not when it comes to ADA requirements...
In fact, that ADA requirements came from laws from the federal government rather than from urban planning is pretty good evidence that the market (ie democratic legislation) is better at this than centralized planners of urban areas.
Before attacking the parking lots, fix the return to office mandates, the public transportation, downtown concepts, and physically collocated XY (shops or other) and the parking lot issue will solve itself, going after the symptoms without fixing the root cause is just moronic nonsense that will lead to at least “other” parking lots increasing their prices.
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
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The problem I have with the thinking in this article most of the parking lots are privately owned so saying 'tear them up and plant trees' is not something that can be implemented by the government. If mandatory parking requirements did go down, and zoning was increased, then the people who own it would willingly put forth the effort to make the space more useful. It would also help sort out what is considered "unuse…
It's easy, just charge all property owners for sales surface area. It messes with lots of things, water table, flooding, generates heat. All things that create cost for a community. That's how Berlin decided to tackle the issue.
For instance, this ordinance in NC says you need one parking space for every 300 sq feet of a store. So the average 30,000 sq foot grocery store would need 100 spots, at least.
Without getting rid of requirements like these the stores will not be able to remove spaces if they wanted. I very much like land value tax (which sounds similar in effect to what you are proposing) but you need the zoning flexibility first.
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/swansboro/latest/swans...
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?
Why tear up the asphalt? Wouldn't perforating it with bigger holes cut for the trees be a lot cheaper. Tree roots grow perfectly fine under asphalt and perforation will allow for air and water to reach the soil in a more distributed manner for better growth. Seems like it would be a much cheaper option.
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> having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. We're at a critical juncture here in the Twin Cities. The state DOT needs to re-build the interstate that cuts right through the entire metro area (I-94) for the first time since it was first built 50 years ago. There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and re…
> There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street. I'm afraid that this would wind up like Vancouver, which lacks freeways through the city and has pretty bad traffic as a result. Better maybe to tunnel it under if possible? That works well for Seattle, although we still have I5 to contend with that divides the downtown from Capitol Hill (there is talk of lidding the entire…
Lidding it would be great, but removing it would be better. There are loads of people who live in the suburbs north and south of Seattle and expect to be able to drive 20-30 miles each way day-in-day-out to commute. If the city continues to grow, this simply isn't tenable in the long run, because you can't grow highway capacity forever; they would no longer be able to do this, which would be good. Just rip the band-aid off.
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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 br…
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> having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. We're at a critical juncture here in the Twin Cities. The state DOT needs to re-build the interstate that cuts right through the entire metro area (I-94) for the first time since it was first built 50 years ago. There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and re…
> There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street. I'm afraid that this would wind up like Vancouver, which lacks freeways through the city and has pretty bad traffic as a result. Better maybe to tunnel it under if possible? That works well for Seattle, although we still have I5 to contend with that divides the downtown from Capitol Hill (there is talk of lidding the entire…
Definitely, the best case for cars is to have fast highways that bypass the city, but there isn't a lot of room with that given Vancouver's geography, so it's a lesser-of-two-evils. Beyond cars, public transit and cycling provide a better solution in my opinion anyway.
Regardless... the biggest traffic pain point in downtown Vancouver is the 3-lane (total) Lions Gate bridge.
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'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
That's an ideal state but is a real chicken and egg problem, the same problem that's soft locked US cities as car centric as they are, you can't mandate away car reliance without the public transit to back it up and transit will have low ridership if it's even slightly less convenient than driving.