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American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

usa.streetsblog.org

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Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#131

Post by Sharlin »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #48
smallnamespace wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's. However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem. People ge…

Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit. I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take…

To a large extent it’s about path dependency as well. You simply aren’t going to fit car infrastructure in a dense urban area whose streets were originally made for horses and pedestrians. It’s not like several European cities didn’t try though, in the heyday of car-oriented urban planning from the 50s to the 70s. Insofar as those attempts succeeded they are now being undone in favor of transit and walkability.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#132

Post by ryanwaggoner »

ghaff wrote: post #107
wild_preference wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.

Significant sections of a number of US cities are quite walkable: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, parts of Denver, Chicago. As well as smaller cities like Boulder. It's certainly true that newer US cities tend to be more spread out but if city walkability is a priority for you, examples exist.

Very, very few cities in America are walkable enough to enable the average household to not own a car without it being a hardship [1]. You can probably count them on one hand.

So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article.

1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#133

Post by lisper »

If you think about it, it has to be this way. The whole point of parking is that it has to be available on demand, which means you need to build enough capacity to satisfy peak usage at the destination. If you had full parking utilization, people have to queue to park, and that would defeat the purpose of getting to your destination quickly.

You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-private vehicles (which includes things like taxis and Uber). But having fully utilized parking is the worst of all possible worlds.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#134

Post by mjevans »

ghaff wrote: post #69
cmurf wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more . Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in partic…

>Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. Driver's ed at least used to be pretty common,in part because it gave a discount for the (expensive) insurance covering younger drivers. I don't see anything special about the typical driver's ed instructor anyway. It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex ra…

The important thing about driver's ed is that it's a /professional/ teaching the foundational experience (they also typically use a custom car where the instructor has limited controls in the passenger's seat in case things are going really wrong).

That way you try to bring the quality of drivers up to that of the instructor, not a cargo cult of family members who might be horrid at driving.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#135

Post by ghaff »

PebblesRox wrote: post #128
jjeaff wrote: post #123

This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends. Cut any of…

Even on Black Friday many mall parking lots are far from full. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/27/highlights-fr...

I'm not sure how much that tells you. There are plenty of moribund malls around. I'll probably be able to find plenty of parking outside JC Penney or Toys R Us at the one near me any day of the year. There are other local malls I'm not going anywhere near after about mid November.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#137

Post by ryanwaggoner »

lisper wrote: post #133

If you think about it, it has to be this way. The whole point of parking is that it has to be available on demand , which means you need to build enough capacity to satisfy peak usage at the destination . If you had full parking utilization, people have to queue to park, and that would defeat the purpose of getting to your destination quickly. You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-priva…

It's partly an information availability problem. Parking usage patterns tend to be based around factors other than availability, which leads to more extreme peaks and valleys than are necessary. If people could see what the mall parking lot was like at any given time and decide when to go based on whether parking was likely to be available, you could probably make the lot half the size. You already see this in many places around traffic; people in LA seem to plan their lives around when the freeways are known to be backed up.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#138

Post by hartator »

narrator wrote: post #46
erikpukinskis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations. This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Softwa…

The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Rela…

Might it be you just getting older.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#139

Post by ryanwaggoner »

ghaff wrote: post #135
PebblesRox wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even on Black Friday many mall parking lots are far from full. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/27/highlights-fr...

I'm not sure how much that tells you. There are plenty of moribund malls around. I'll probably be able to find plenty of parking outside JC Penney or Toys R Us at the one near me any day of the year. There are other local malls I'm not going anywhere near after about mid November.

Yeah, malls are dying, and they're almost certainly not paying enough for the value of all that empty parking. Land value tax!

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#140

Post by gok »

fencepost wrote: post #96

If anyone in city government is smart Chicago is going to have no real choice but to go against this trend because of its utterly atrocious parking meter deal 10+ years ago - or they're going to have to take that glut of spaces and make them free parking to try to get out of the deal. Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are…

The alternative was bankruptcy. And as the market for street parking vaporizes over the next couple decades, this may end up being a great deal.
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