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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

#21

Post by extralego »

burfog wrote: post #3

It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure, commercial areas don't have households but they still need parking. Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very litt…

Talk about gridlock! Literally and figuratively...

I don’t think anyone is missing your point, but it sounds terribly short-sighted.

For one, what’s good for business is commonly catastrophic to other systems. An effort to prioritize here is critical.

For some reason, baby-boomers have an odd propensity for ignoring more systematic, hollistic concerns brought by the shift to dependency on automobiles. I think I can speak for most of my millenial peers when I say it seems maniacal.

And I am getting sick of feeling guilty for blaming “baby-boomers”. You people just don’t know when enough is enough.

Of course, you’re also responsible for gutting the safety nets and other civil structures that the victims of failed businesses rely on. Again, gridlock. Drop it already. At least you ahve a business.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#22

Post by cozzyd »

lozenge wrote: post #17
ebikelaw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a weird argument that nobody wants to take the bus or the train because it's too crowded. Very Berra.

It just means there aren't enough bus routes or busses on the route.

Or the buses are too slow because there's too many cars in the way.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#23

Post by cmurf »

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…

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 particular as men came home from the war, and women weren't doing as much factory work. Kids wanted out of the house all day long. Cars were many things to people but it was the hyped technology of that era and making everything bigger, including all the available infrastructure was a "good thing". You'd see gas stations on every corner.

Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system.

One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars.

This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#24

Post by halbritt »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #16
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…

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…

Too real.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#25

Post by 55873445216111 »

cozzyd wrote: post #20
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…

Yeah taxis don't have sufficient capacity. You'd just double the cars on the roads. Autonomous buses on the other hand could make a dent (since the primary cost of buses in rich countries is labor).

I'm curious about this. How do you arrive at the conclusion that autonomous taxi adoption results in a doubling of the number of cars? Do you have a link?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#26

Post by Semirhage »

I’m from Italy, and until I lived in America for a while I’d never understood just how massive the US really is. I lived on two coasts, in two states that were both much larger than my entire country! People like to point to Berlin or Paris as model cities, but they’re population centers in countries that could fit inside Texas without making a splash. I’m not saying that US car culture is entirely healthy, or that it couldn’t benefit from more and better public transport in major cities. I’m always annoyed though, to see these conversations on HN ignore the sheer size of the country in question. Of course it’s spread out, it’s enormous!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-reme...

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#27

Post by seanmcdirmid »

cozzyd wrote: post #20
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…

Yeah taxis don't have sufficient capacity. You'd just double the cars on the roads. Autonomous buses on the other hand could make a dent (since the primary cost of buses in rich countries is labor).

I mean, both can exist. The middle class in Beijing use taxis/didi fairly ubiquitously, poorer people use the subway and buses more.

Autonomous taxis could also easily caravan reducing their capacity disadvantage over autonomous buses.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#30

Post by microcolonel »

burfog wrote: post #3

It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure, commercial areas don't have households but they still need parking. Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very litt…

Also, the idea of comparing "parking spaces per acre" and "households per acre" is kinda silly in the first place. Des Moines households are generally larger than parking spaces. A typical parking space, plus its corresponding lane space in a lot, is about 15m². The average Des Moines apartment is about 67m², and the average household population in Iowa is ~2.4. So even ignoring non-rental housing, you can see how this comparison is kinda bogus, since (like-for-like) apartments are naturally at least five times larger than parking spaces (and non-rental housing is usually even larger), and somewhere between one and two parking spaces per household is easy to justify even if you're only looking at residential space: when it comes to commercial areas, parking charges and volumes are clearly set to ensure availability, so in order for fees to remain reasonable, considerably more parking than "makes sense" must be provisioned.
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