American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage • Hacker News Board

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#171

Post by oblio » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:07 PM UTC

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…

Arguable. For every London in Europe, there’s 10 cities that grew 3-5-10x since 1945. After all, the postwar boom happened on both sides of the Atlantic. London, Paris, etc. are outliers.

It was just policy decisions in many cases.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#172

Post by intopieces » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:08 PM UTC

tajen wrote: post #116

narrator wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Re: Tinder. The #metoo campaign has helped a lot too, frightening men into never doing real-life courting. “There’s a place to do such things!”, we’ve heard, namely (paid) clubs, Tinder and other commercial places.

The men scared away from courting by the #metoo movement are exactly the kind that should stay out of the dating pool until they are ready to respect women. Good to hear the movement is working.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#173

Post by UncleEntity » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:10 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #139

ghaff wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Paying who enough exactly?

Dying malls get liquidated and repurposed if it's economically viable otherwise they just sit there as a giant husk of "what was" because it hurts no one for them to merely exist.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#174

Post by blt » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #42

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…

> Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. No matter how autonomous the vehicle, a tunnel of cars will never have the the same throughput capacity as a subway. For supporting the kind of dense cities that we need to in order to have a somewhat sustainable society in the long-term, that's crucial. Unless you're talking about fully autonomous subway systems, in which case t…

The NYC subway system is not autonomous. Every train has a driver. Autonomous subways do exist though.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#175

Post by CalRobert » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #150

justincormack wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The level that allows all cars to park at peak times is not the economically efficient level; that hugely increases the overall cost, as you cant use parking for any other use. Peak cases should have surge pricing to ration the space there are for efficiency, and the overall level should be less.

But they already mostly do. In far-out suburbs, huge mall parking lots aren't competing with anything else, there's plenty of space. And in downtown cities, parking garages are alreay expensive . $30-50/day in Manhattan, for example. (I would agree that street parking should match garage rates, and not be effectively subsidized, though.)

That seems pretty cheap. How much is rent on a similar amount of space? Remember all the space needed for accessing the spot, administration (if any), too! Or are there different rules for storing cars than people?

(Incidentally, there very much are different rules, and for the most part US cities have worked very, very hard to make it easier to add cars than people).

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#176

Post by hcs » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:15 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #121

jeremyjh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they might also actually be helping some people, or improving the environment, even if its very inefficient.

Slavoj Žižek makes a very persuasive argument against this sort of tokenism in "The Pervert's Guide to Ideology" . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJDgxH8aRGs

I watched the video but I didn't notice any argument against the practice, unless I synthesize "one should always feel bad about participating in consumerism", is that it?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#177

Post by cozzyd » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

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…

This is a tricky issue. The correct thing to do would have been to increase parking rates to something sane, which the private company did, but would have been politically difficult for the city. At the rates the city was charging before, and assuming there was no political way to raise them, it's possible it may have been a rational choice. Ideally it would have been a shorter timescale though...

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#178

Post by wool_gather » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:22 PM UTC

amptorn wrote: post #78

amelius wrote: post #28

Self-driving cars will solve the whole parking problem.

How? Being self-driving doesn't make a car take up less space.

Multi-car parking areas (garages, e.g.) could be compressed somewhat if humans no longer need to be in the space. (When the car drops you off and then goes and parks itself.) There's space used for fault tolerance, and just opening doors, that would no longer be necessary given a "perfect" driver. I bet you could get another 20% usage spacewise. And there might even be other efficiencies to take advantage of. Even now there are parking garages where cars are stored on top of each other using some kind of mechanical lift.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#179

Post by serf » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:24 PM UTC

intopieces wrote: post #172

tajen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Tinder. The #metoo campaign has helped a lot too, frightening men into never doing real-life courting. “There’s a place to do such things!”, we’ve heard, namely (paid) clubs, Tinder and other commercial places.

The men scared away from courting by the #metoo movement are exactly the kind that should stay out of the dating pool until they are ready to respect women. Good to hear the movement is working.

>The men scared away from courting by the #metoo movement are exactly the kind that should stay out of the dating pool until they are ready to respect women.

You're so wrong.

There is plenty of 'collateral damage' from folks that just want to avoid litigation more-so than they desire a relationship.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#180

Post by ghettoimp » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 7:25 PM UTC

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #74

jeremyjh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they might also actually be helping some people, or improving the environment, even if its very inefficient.

But they also are a cop out to not solve the real problem. If you give tuition money to a few poor kids via a non profit, you don’t solve the college debt and education accessibility problem, but it makes people who did it feel better.

Is it not... something?

One could always not give tuition money to a few poor kids. That fails to solve anything too.

I really dislike the knee-jerk, blanket dismissal of people who are trying to do small but good things.

"If nothing we do matters then the only thing that matters is what we do." - Joss Whedon