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Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

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Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#101

Post by adregan »

bloopernova wrote: post #28

Can we do the same with golf courses? I think it was George Carlin that said put affordable housing on golf courses? More seriously, if you have a brownfield ex industrial site, will trees etc grow ok there? Does converting brownfield sites to meadows or forests pose any risks to nearby humans?

Speaking of brownfield, you may (more likely not) be surprised to know that golf courses are pretty nasty places themselves. You can find soils contaminated with arsenic, mercury, and cadmium from fungicides.

So those rolling green links might not be the cheapest places to establish new housing when you include the remediation.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#102

Post by bertil »

stronglikedan wrote: post #31
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…

The US is urbanized...if you want it. There are plenty of places where people that enjoy living in urban areas can do so. However, to me, that sounds like an unenjoyable hellscape. Been there, done that. The beauty of the US is that people have choices, and aren't pigeonholed into someone else's idea of "enjoyable".

The most common criticism I hear against cities is that they are loud. Cities aren't loud; cars are loud.

You experienced a bad compromise of having high density of a city and the high car ownership of suburbia. Like a "stroad," a road that is trying to be a street, it doesn't work.

Try to spend a week in a place with walkable density and no cars: Amsterdam, Oslo, or closer to US, Disney Land.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#103

Post by tomcar288 »

I think he really hit the nail on head here:

"Part of this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.”

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#104

Post by mattmcknight »

I find this sort of logic absurd. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time"

So, if I have a two car garage in my house, a parking spot at work, and a parking spot at the local shopping district, how else is this going to work? I can't bring my parking spot with me. The idea that we should look at per existing car utilization as any kind of indicator is ridiculous. Now, if any of those spots is never used, that may be a good indicator- but it might be because a building isn't fully leased at the moment as well.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#105

Post by tomcar288 »

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…

you don't necessarily need to urbanize. just make things more walkable. Instead of having 1 large library or grocery store the size of a theme park, have 10 smaller ones in walking distance instead.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#106

Post by seanmcdirmid »

apendleton wrote: post #68
jrockway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In Japan you have to vouch that you have a parking space for your car. I think a similar rule would work for the states. However, it will cause a huge tension between the parking spot haves and parking spot have nots, without adequate equality will be seen (rightfully so) as a move to limit cars among those who can't afford parking spots for them.

For better or worse, the USA has basically made a contract with its people that "you have the right to a car, and because of that, we will provide really sucky public transit." That contract has to change before we start aggressively taking cars out of the system.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#107

Post by seanmcdirmid »

sfpotter wrote: post #96
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Creating I-5 was really contentious at the time. It destroyed neighborhoods. My family has lived in the area for several generations and my parents can attest to this. 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…

The only thing worse than having I5 is not having I5. There really isn't enough north-south corridors to replace it (15th, 99, east/west lake...really that's it), given that I5 is close to the water and a huge hill as it comes in across from UW. It is already non-viable to expect a 20-30 minute commute into the city.

We saw what happened when the Palestine supporters blocked off I5 a few weeks ago...on a weekend without a rush hour, people were stuck in traffic for hours.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#108

Post by avianlyric »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #79
coldpie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How does a freeway through a city improve traffic in a city vs building a freeway around a city (no need to bother with the expense of tunnelling under).

Cars on a freeway are either headed to your city as a destination, in which case the speed at which you deliver them into the city doesn’t make much difference, they’re always going to cause traffic when they leave the freeway. Or the cars are headed through the city, in which I would assume most of them would be just as happy to go around the city as go through it.

So if you get to pick between through and around, why would any sane city choose to put the freeway through your city? You’re just bringing noise and pollution into your city, putting a huge great impassable scar through your city, and forcing the people who live to drive everywhere because the freeway slice up the city into segments that you move between in a car.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#109

Post by seanmcdirmid »

_whiteCaps_ wrote: post #87
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I love that Vancouver doesn't have a freeway through the city - but they've also got a relatively good transit system. IIRC it's the equivalent of 26 lanes for cars.

Vancouver has some horrible stroads to make up for its lack of freeways. I wouldn't call it very nice, more like dystopian.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#110

Post by uoaei »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #79
coldpie wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Bad traffic is a good catalyst for spurring local commercial development, assuming zoning and other bureaucratic measures don't hamper the situation entirely.
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