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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

#161

Post by wool_gather »

oneplane wrote: post #106

Maybe it's just me, but in larger cities, cars seem like an incredibly inefficient and impractical idea to transport people inside those cities. Maybe just dump the cars outside when you want to get in? Or just don't own cars and share them as a stopgap until a better solution is put in place?

You're absolutely right, and this is the problem. In aggregate, they are horribly inefficient. At the level of the individual, they're generally much much faster and convenient than other options (i.e., public transit), even accounting for traffic. So -- in game theory terms -- many people defect.

One of the reasons is frequency. Depending on time of day, a subway or bus may not come for 10 minutes. A car is basically infinite frequency: when you want to go, you go right away.

The other is more direct routing. To get to my favorite bookstore, about 5 miles due north, on transit takes an hour because I either have to take the rail into the city center first and transfer (or take one of the most infrequent and slow bus routes in the system). It's maybe 35 minutes by bike or car, as long as it's not rush hour. I don't own a car, but I can't say I wouldn't be tempted some days, if I did.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#163

Post by extradego »

rainbowmverse wrote: post #129
extradego wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an opinionated view of American culture, and I'm daily surrounded by other musicians, artists. These are the topics we discuss. I am opinionated as a result. In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture . Nonetheless... I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history.…

>> "In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless..." We may have fundamentally incompatible perspectives if you see culture and art as separate things. I grew up surrounded by hip-hop (Atlanta), but I know better than to sing along with the n word as a white person. This is because the experience of the music is inseparable from one's experience with…

Culture generally has a parental relationship to art. The art is of the culture but the culture is not of the art. I think we agree on that, but I totally see where you're coming from here because I am suggesting something else with folk.

I am basically saying that the legacy of American folk is just too mysterious to nail down, and too precarious to draw conclusions from. I wonder if this would be the case without the mid-century folk revival, which amounted to a mass-commercialization of the white American south as a suffering working-class. The older field recordings in the Library Of Congress suggest the music was predominantly made by slaves. The old radio recordings from Nashville tell a slightly different story and seem to stitch together something of an art form, likely for the very first time. Then folk-revival was a massively commercial effort that made it all look very pretty. But the culture of it all still remains vague. Touring the south and studying it's history doesn't suggest much of any concern for culture in any higher sense. Literacy was surprisingly high but they mostly read the bible. Music seems to have occupied a space more like entertainment than cultural reflection. A likely theory is that it was very much a culture for slaves, but merely entertainment for white people. Hopefully this clarifies my comprehension. Hip-hop is a full embodiment in comparison; a whole new world of unmitigated expression.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#164

Post by UncleEntity »

lazyjones wrote: post #91
angarg12 wrote: post #2

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…

But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US…

> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots.

Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#165

Post by ghaff »

stretchwithme wrote: post #10

Once automated vehicles take over (eventually), most people will switch to taxis. Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle. So the need to park will be greatly reduced. Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. Parking will be built underground for off peak storage of vehicles, allowing the repurposing of surface parking spots. Maybe agricultura…

>Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle.

People say this but it's very unclear it will be the case. Especially outside of places where the environment (salted roads for example) take a toll, most of the cost of owning a car is ultimately distance, not time.

A lot of factors could make pay-per-use fleet cars a bit cheaper or more expensive than owner but it's not clear that the economic difference will really be all that great.

I also see people expecting drastically cheaper prices than Uber but the overall costs (including those associated with getting the car to you) are still going to be 50 cents a mile or so.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#166

Post by dominotw »

kartan wrote: post #36
angarg12 wrote: post #2

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…

Yes. I had the same experience. Visiting Mountain View, I was surprised at how walk hostile is. It took me 10 minutes to just pass one of the buildings surrounded by a huge parking lot and move to the next. To go from Intel offices to the Computer History Museum takes a really long walk cross kilometres of parking space. The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minut…

You can use an electric unicycle to get around easily.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#167

Post by wool_gather »

UncleEntity wrote: post #164
lazyjones wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US…

> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" s…

Out of curiosity, do you have a sense for whether the restaurant's patrons are driving from other parts of the city, or from the suburbs?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#168

Post by walshemj »

angarg12 wrote: post #2

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spac…

America has a lot of land and in the developed world you wont get planning permission for residential property with out of street parking

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#169

Post by CalRobert »

UncleEntity wrote: post #164
lazyjones wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US…

> What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" s…

Are you unable to pay a business for a place to store your car? What's the problem, exactly?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#170

Post by extradego »

vanattab wrote: post #77
extradego wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> throughly modern American You baby-boomers need to speak for yourselves only and keep me out of it. (Assuming you mean "modern" as in contemporary. If you mean the more canonical "modern", sorry for the react.)

Are baby-boomers some how too old to be allowed to consider themselves as part of our contemporary society?

I wish. You people are a disgrace.
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