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Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

danrodricks.com

211–220 of 389 posts

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#211

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…

> There are at least four parking spaces for every car

What's the original source for that statistic?

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#212
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always ass-backward. People forget that one of the reasons why the malls became so popular and helped collapse the old downtowns was, you guessed it, lack of free parking . With malls, you could come into a boundary and spend a significant amount of time in a walkable arena with lots of different stores. You knew there would always be parking except possibly at Christmas. Downtown? Not so much. And you proba…

But, in turn, "within walking distance" is exactly what is rendered impossible by a system in which every significant center of economic activity is required to have square miles of parking around it. It's sort of like a social form of obesity; it's clearly not quite as poisonous as the most vocal detractors say, but the sheer bulk does make it harder to move in what we might consider an optimal way. Also, for what i…

> Also, for what it's worth, you're citing "carry quarters" as some kind of dystopic microaggression

Uh, yeah, it actually WAS. Quarters were a non-trivial amount of currency (a little under a gallon of gas) back when downtowns still existed and parking meters took them.

There is a reason why "meter maids" were hated so much.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#213
post #98

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…

Honestly, having lived in Vancouver as well as many cities that _do_ have highways running right through town, I didn't miss that in Vancouver at all. Traffic will suck both ways, and at least Vancouver avoids having ugly, loud highways along its waterfront and through most of its downtown. 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…

One of the reason I passed on a townhome in Wallingford with a really good view was because of the tire noise on the ship canal bridge. I’m not sure the other bridge is any better though. A tunnel under it all would be ideal.

Whenever I visit Vancouver, I find the traffic horrible compared to Seattle. It’s like…no I don’t want to drive here (to be fair, I don’t want to drive downtown Seattle either, but there is so much more going on in downtown Vancouver that it’s hard to avoid).

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#214
post #65
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here is what I see taking shape across a number of cities:

1. A big micromobility boom. This describes a number of phenomena: the e-bikes are perhaps the most visible since they add a lot of power to a bike commute and make it easier to justify doing big distances by bike. But equally, the docked bikeshares have found a foothold in many places big and small, and those help extend transit range quite a bit while creating an institutional platform for bike-friendly streets: the bikeshare services will always lobby for whatever makes them the best option.

2. The "unbundled car". This is something Tony Seba uses in his discussions on disruption: the car bundled a large number of services into one solution: "get in the car and drive." Many of those solutions have transitioned to online, delivery, etc. So the car's raison d'etre is diminished today and diminishing further as we develop more alternatives.

3. The future rebundling of transport as a service. The first step in this was the reshuffling of taxi/delivery drivers to gig economy labor. This was probably too early and too reliant on zero interest rates, but one of the things that always courted investment in these businesses was that robotics could take over and perform self-driving. And while it's still not an evenly distributed phenomenon, Waymo exists. I have it on my phone. Waymo itself may not be the last word in how self-driving tech is deployed, but the tech will increasingly realign "cars" with "transit" by lowering the cost of professional vehicle operation. In the current US market, there's been a shortage of bus drivers, and scheduling them is a large pain point for deploying transit. You can't drop driver quality because of the liability involved in operating huge vehicles. Private autos have gotten away with a legal hack that normalizes poor driving by making the individual an owner-operator and blaming them for their inevitable failures. So the economics will work out that cars and fixed-route mass transit are still competitive, but you will get more mobility per dollar invested by adding self-drive to your transit system, because then high-quality driving and scheduling scales and you can flood the streets with both big and small transit vehicles. Therefore, in the future, city buses will run more frequently on more routes and at later hours.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#215
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anybody need to buy 12 liters of milk when the store is 5-10 mins away on foot? Reality in a lot of european cities is fundamentally different to most of the US.

Because I don't want to go to store every two days, and the prices in local small stores are higher than in a larger, discount store. I buy a pack of milk, and I'm good for a month.

The big box discount store (which demands that customers buy in bulk to save money, and because it is so far away from you that you can ONLY visit it once per month) is as much a product of US style suburban sprawl, as car-dependency is.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 with…

I think Boeing threatened to pull out of Seattle if WSDOT did not improve freeways, some years ago -getting stuff in and out of Everett is really important to them. If I-5 was torn down and only left with surface streets, what's left of Boeing would pull out and go to Kansas or some place.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#217
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 grid life in the US with large roads and few commercial streets really suck imo. I dream of going back to Europe but can’t unfortunately…

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#218
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered moving to an urban area?

Have you considered paying the full cost of living in a non-urban area via taxes?

I haven't considered that. Do you have any data surrounding tax increase on urbanites caused by suburbanites? (If I understand your point.)

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can build new soil on top of contaminated soil to bury it. Here’s a permaculture site in an old rail bed in nyc that has nasty stuff lurking beneath many layers of new soil[0]. Not really sure if trees uptake heavy metals. 0: https://youtu.be/UqyK_9iybD8?si=rx7iCjsTu1Zn6YbO

They won’t, but certain fungi will break them down.

How does fungi break down the heavy metals?

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#220
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have experience living in any variety of urban areas in first world countries outside of the US? Have you been to many cities in the US? I don’t think you can possibly have done either of these and still think the US has any urbanism. And literally all most moderate urbanists ask for is “please lower regulations so that the free market can build what some of us want and I can actually have a choice.”

>Do you have experience living in any variety of urban areas in first world countries outside of the US? The vast, vast majority of Americans have never even been outside the US (except maybe to Canada, and possibly Mexican tourist spots), let alone lived outside the US in a first-world country, and this includes the OP and most people on HN. It's why reading comments on urbanism on forums like this is both entertain…

Most Americans on hackernews have never been outside of the US? That strikes me as a near impossibility. Evidence?
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