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The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

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Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#191

Post by AlanSE »

majormajor wrote: post #173
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s mostly because of zoning. If you separate retail from offices from housing, you force people to have cars to get around. Which then requires large parking lots and wide roads to deal with all the cars, in a big feedback loop. Those who can’t drive (about a third of the population are too young, too old, or disabled) are just forced to make do. Not to mention how difficult it is for the poor. Owning a car is real…

You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute. Once people start forming families, "live next to work" is likely to be very unrealistic for one of the people involved, assuming they both work. One person gets a new job across town and the other doesn't? Setting aside whether or not most people would want to move anytime that happened, there's no longer a single answer. Start throwing kids in the mix and it gets eve…

In fact, I have increasingly seen the pattern of adults who work from home but have a commute to drive their children in the morning / afternoon. That's 2-ways both times, for the record. It's often multi-destination.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#192

Post by sime2009 »

c4mpute wrote: post #142
TeeWEE wrote: post #5

Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike. A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.

The Netherlands do have huge bicycle parking lots and strict parking enforcement for bicycles. Bicycle parking is as bad as car parking over there. I'm glad I've only briefly visited there...

ha ha. You clearly don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#193

Post by adolph »

david2ndaccount wrote: post #109
damnesian wrote: post #23

>You could imagine a world in which streets were pedestrianized and where we planted trees and gardens and in what is currently space reserved for parking, and closed streets, outside schools, so kids can have places to play. I would love to see a LOT more of this in urban centers. I live in a college town that is about the same size as Iowa City. Iowa City has taken the step of closing off their downtown and making…

Part of the problem is you can’t just convert an area to a pedestrian area as people still need to be able to get there. You need to construct low cost parking garages around the area so people can still get there.

> Part of the problem is you can’t just convert an area to a pedestrian area as people still need to be able to get there. You need to construct low cost parking garages around the area so people can still get there.

From what I've seen pedestrian area conversion typically includes perimeter parking.

A interesting case similar to conversion to exclude cars, is the conversion of very old places to have cars. Guanajuato, MX was built up in the 1500's. For the majority of the old town residences and businesses alike are inaccessible by car. The city did convert some major roads, creeks and mines to roads, but parking for many is relatively distant.

[Edit, update from state to city of Gto]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanajuato_(city)

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g150799-i726-k1701090-...

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#194

Post by EricDeb »

kibwen wrote: post #106
elijaht wrote: post #51

I live car-free in NYC. A large appeal of NYC to me was not having to park. I don't ~mind~ driving, but I absolutely hated having to deal with finding parking when I lived in other cities. Parking generally makes me feel stressed (competition for free spots), or makes me pay (using something like SpotHero makes it easy to find a spot, but costs me). It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college…

Sold my car years ago and moved to Boston. I'll never go back to live anywhere that requires me to own a car. I bike or walk everywhere, and what makes me hopeful is that biking infrastructure in Boston (and neighboring cities like Cambridge) has improved dramatically in the years since I've been here and just keeps getting better. Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. B…

I dislike car culture, but owning a car is not that expensive unless you own a newish one.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#195

Post by davidw »

sandworm101 wrote: post #188
mjmahone17 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Allowing infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do. All it costs is rezoning: if they then increase taxes on the now very-desirable-to-build land, it’ll be a huge net win, with cheaper utilities and transport infra to maintain relative to the tax base. Sewers cost roughly the same per mile regardless of if you’re serving 1,000 or 10,000 peo…

>> infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do No. That is a radical change in needs and services. Cars don't need sewage treatment and fresh water delivery. Parking lots don't need school systems and health care. Just saying that a parking lot can be converted to houses ignores the radically different local and external needs of human reside…

Compared to the same amount of services further spread out, infill is far cheaper, and tends to generate a lot more tax revenue compared to the infrastructure needs. Here's a sort of simplified, but real-world example that uses snow clearing:

https://bendyimby.com/2021/03/24/snow-and-financial-producti...

Something like sewers are more complicated, but the basic equation is that you're adding things in an area that's already served by infrastructure and often pretty good infrastructure at that, rather than adding in kilometers of brand new infrastructure for relatively low-revenue uses.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#196

Post by hughesjj »

CalRobert wrote: post #67
josephcsible wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are unfortunately some people who say that we should abolish suburbs and force everyone to live in a city like that.

Who is saying this? At most, what I've seen is people saying we should not be forced to build _only_ this type of dwelling in a given place.

I'd go one further and say it's wrong to assume the most inefficient, expensive, and socially isolating form of infrastructure shouldn't be expected to be the default. I get land capex is cheaper and distributed population is great for defensive posture against nuclear attacks and pandemics, but that doesn't mean that denser suburbs, small towns with strong centers, or indeed cities are less desirable than suburbia or rural areas by any means.

Life naturally fills the ecosystem it finds itself in to carrying capacity. The sustainable limitations here are financial, ecological, and regulatory. I think we're hitting up against those constraints right now. Unless they want to pay us more money, we're going to have to sacrifice the environment or car centric regulations to continue growing. If we decide to just stop growing, then we either need changes in regulations to further disincentivize growth or allow a ton of suffering to happen.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#197

Post by hughesjj »

ehaliewicz2 wrote: post #95
2023throwawayy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing to download an app, and saying "you need to book in advance" are not the same thing. Just because you didn't want to deal with it and didn't do research ahead of time doesn't mean "We couldn’t even park downtown". You didn't want to, and that's fine.

Plenty of cities get away with garages that don't require an app. Don't normalize shitty things like that.

An app is easier to maintain and enforce than meters, and I don't need to carry coins or go back to the meter to add time. I'm all for them but prefer a web interface with Google checkout, or text messenging with a card on file.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#198

Post by david2ndaccount »

notatoad wrote: post #190
david2ndaccount wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem is you can’t just convert an area to a pedestrian area as people still need to be able to get there. You need to construct low cost parking garages around the area so people can still get there.

converting an area is hard, but a street is easy. we don't need to pedestrianize whole city centers, just pick the streets where it makes sense. cars don't need every street. people are perfectly willing to walk a block if that's their only option. if you close a street to cars, people will park on the next street over and walk. the street parking in front of a business is never enough for all the patrons of that bus…

This sounds like the worst of both worlds. We should ban on-street parking regardless.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#199

Post by pavel_lishin »

nradov wrote: post #169
pavel_lishin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am fully in favor of walkable neighborhoods and reducing the need to drive. But lack of parking is just not a stressor that most Americans worry about. Tell that to my local Facebook & Nextdoor groups.

You aren't looking at a representative sample. Spend some time talking to people outside of dense cities. Parking doesn't even make their top 10 list of concerns. Even in regions like the SF Bay Area outside of San Francisco proper there is abundant parking near most homes, retail, and workplaces. Now I agree that devoting so much valuable real estate to parking is rather wasteful and we ought to eliminate some of th…

I do not currently live in a dense city; I'm in the burbs.

I'm aware that this is a squeaky wheel situation, but I asked a question on a local group about a laundromat that's getting torn down - of the (last check) 38 comments on my post, approximately 5 have to do with my question, and the rest are people worrying about parking spaces if/when a small apartment building replaces it.

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