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Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

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Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#331

Post by nerdkid93 »

dheera wrote: post #167
marssaxman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really are not plenty of places in the US where you can live a good, urban, non-car-oriented life, and you can tell that is true because the ones which do exist tend to be very expensive, showing that they are in high demand. You clearly do not desire an urban lifestyle, and I won't try to change your mind about that, but those of us who do want urban living generally don't find that our choices are either plen…

Not to mention safe urban areas. Most US urban areas are relatively high crime, and even if you don't encounter actual crime you are made to feel unsafe by a bunch of drug addicts in hoodies who yell racial slurs and other creepy dudes who approach you unsolicited, in contrast to urban areas of e.g. East Asia which tend to be extremely safe. Boston is about the only city in the US that I feel mildly safe walking arou…

> relatively high crime

You mention crime in regards to safety within a city, but there is a study floating around Twitter that factors in traffic fatalities in suburban and rural areas, and the dangers of cars make suburbs and rural areas MORE dangerous that urban areas! Take a look at this article detailing urban vs rural deaths: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-rural-a...

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#332

Post by JoshTriplett »

bluGill wrote: post #322
JoshTriplett wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't modern technology grand? See also pasteurization, canning, pickling, and many many other technologies that help food last longer. Why should people care what something is "supposed to" do? Many kinds of food are "supposed to" spoil quickly, but we've gone to great lengths to overcome that. (For clarity in case there is a nomenclature difference here, UHT milk is shelf-stable liquid milk that's entirely equivale…

UHT milk does not taste like fresh milk. Sure it is safe for months, but it isn't good for months. I once was at a farmers place - when they were done milking the cows in the morning they brought milk in from the tank for breakfast - ever since then I can't drink store bought milk as fresh milk tastes so much better. (the milk was also unpasteurized, I believe fresh was the key to taste but I'm not sure)

I'd argue the difference between UHT milk and standard pasteurized milk is much smaller than the difference between either and fresh milk, and most people don't buy fresh milk (or want to).

But in any case, it's good that multiple options exist.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#333

Post by JambalayaJim »

jjav wrote: post #257
apendleton wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> if there's demand for residences with parking spaces, developers will build them That's somewhat optimistic. In the absence of rules, developers will maximize their profit above all else. Apartment units are far more profitable than parking, so they'll just build the maximum units with no parking. I lived in such a neighborhood once. Result is 50 unit buildings with 4 parking spots. And the result of that? People d…

Why isn’t a parking space specifically attached to a residence than bought it? That’s the reason for the fights right there.

Letting the developer maximize profits also lets residents choose residences without parking spots, to save money.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#334

Post by JambalayaJim »

bsder wrote: post #191
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should decrease housing costs as well. The rules in my area are two spots per bedroom - mandatory. But my building is in uptown Dallas and the main draw to the area is that people work in the area and walk to work. So many people don't own cars or are only a one home house hold. And because it's a highrise parking spots are expensive. Like $50k+ each. And that goes directly to the price of housing in rents. Meanwh…

> Meanwhile, even at the busiest our garage is more than half empty. Unfortunately, that sounds like the spaces are close to being properly priced in the market? Getting more utilization would require the price come down, and the price decrease may not increase the overall revenue immediately. You would need cheaper nearby parking in order to force the price down. If there is no cheaper parking nearby, then the marke…

The price of a car itself is significant, there may well be zero utilization in an area where residents simply don’t own cars.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#335

Post by rtkwe »

mkaic wrote: post #100
rtkwe wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think underground metros, while expensive to build, solve this, because they are always more convenient compared to any traffic-ridden area. A bus can get stuck in the same traffic as the cars, and bikes taking over any significant portion of American commuting in the near-term feels laughable to me — we are quite culturally different from the Dutch :P

I would love to see metros in every reasonably sized city but it's going to run into the built in sprawl problem of US suburbs making it very expensive to run lines out to the outlying suburban areas at high enough density to make them viable. Best work around option I suppose is to build them out to the edges of the city and build a big park and ride infrastructure.

I've long thought of the issues with public transit in the majority of US cities as being trapped at a local maximum where we're forced to implement inferior solutions because we're so far into the car infrastructure getting people to abandon their suburban homes to move to a more dense less car dependent urban structure until the underlying shape of cities would adjust to denser clusters again if they ever did.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#336

Post by JambalayaJim »

bsder wrote: post #193
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My jaw hit the floor when I learned that some cities actually apply parking minimums to redevelopment of downtown properties and not just stuff like new surburban strip malls, to the point that some projects have bought adjacent buildings and demolished them in favor of parking lots. Maybe it's true that the r/fuckcars crowd likes to throw the term "carbrain" around a little too freely, but this kind of ass-backward…

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…

>And yet, I know of no malls that ever gained residence areas within walking distance

How is that even possible?

Here in the Greater Toronto Area, practically every large mall has at least a few high rises. Some malls are even constructing residential units directly on top of the mall. Even a larger strip mall will generally have some medium sized apartment buildings nearby.

Downtown Mississauga has dozens of high rises up now right next to its biggest mall. Those buildings have completely changed the city's skyline.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#337

Post by neilkk »

bsder wrote: post #212
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The youngest person who was able to drive when gas was a quarter dollar a gallon is now in their early nineties.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#338

Post by JambalayaJim »

mattmcknight wrote: post #104

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 id…

The idea is that if parking lots are built, they should be at the very least well utilized. We have a big problem of shopping centres over-building parking. For example, optimizing for everyone being able to always find a spot even at peak holiday seasons. As opposed to optimizing for having that parking lot being ~90% full for most of the day.

The fact that your home garage and work parking lot are also empty most of the time is also a huge problem. It makes cities much larger than they need to be, and serving public transit across them impossible.

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#339

Post by JambalayaJim »

bluGill wrote: post #125

The problem I have is most cities have plenty of green parks already. In a few places they could use a new park, but in general there are far more parking lots (often 50% of a city is parking lot!) than there is need for green space. Much better is tear up a parking lot and replace it with a building that lets people do something in the city other than pretend they are in a rural area. Nothing wrong with rural areas…

My area could very much use more green space

Re: Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

#340

Post by n_ary »

Mawr wrote: post #201
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shopping centers are a bad example for this, because if you buy stuff, you somehow have to take it home, and carrying a carton of 12 liters of milk, 2 10-packs of toilet paper, a bag of frozen stuff and shower curtain rod, all of that in your hands on a bus, is well.. a pain. Also, at least over here, most shopping centers have underground parking. The "historic city center" and all that crap... that I understand...…

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.

> Reality in a lot of european cities is fundamentally different to most of the US.

I am not sure about which european city you are in. Here in Germany, there are more cars than people. Infact, there is so much parking shortage that, people walk 10 minutes away to park their cars, because the streets are already full.

Also, I don't know anyone going to store daily, most people shop en-mass over the weekend, mostly Saturday afternoon. Only people I see regularly on the malls near me are just retired oma/opa but they also shop like every 4-5 days.

That being said, while at least in the city I am in, has the most connected and excellent public transport, somehow I have to take a reverse de-tour by bus on my way to work, because bus routes are not often straight forward and there are only specific limited routes I can take, unless I can find a place near some U/S-bahn station(immensely difficult these days due to housing crisis).

If I had a car, I could reduce my daily commute to work by 2.5h, but then again, I don't have strict on-site requirements, so it doesn't matter.

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