American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage • Hacker News Board

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#231

Post by gok » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:39 PM UTC

cozzyd wrote: post #177

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...

It also had the benefit of moving the meter maids off the city payroll...

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#232

Post by blitmap » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

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…

I had not considered that planning cities like this was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily see how this is meant to breed a dependence on corporate solutions.

This has the taste of conspiracy, but I do believe you're right. There's a lot of money to be made this way.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#233

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:45 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #225

ghaff wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is what I saw when I randomly dropped the yellow man into the middle of Boulder, CO: https://goo.gl/maps/A9oKpnFQLpR2 Boulder has a city population of about 100,000 and a metro region population of about 300,000. Here are some random Street View locations from European towns and cities of a roughly similar size. Reading, England: https://goo.gl/maps/yQaTTaWQJav Bonn, Germany: https://goo.gl/maps/Pu9Ro28F4UH2 Cae…

Pearl Street is the main drag. It's essentially a college town although a fair bit of tech has moved in. It's actually pretty walkable but Boulder is very protective of open spaces and conservative about growth generally so you're not going to see anything like a dense urban core. Somewhere like Ithaca NY isn't that different.

Of course, you wouldn't want to live in Boulder without a car. Pretty much the whole point of being there is to get into the mountains.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#234

Post by gruez » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:47 PM UTC

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...

source: a few cherrypicked tweets

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#235

Post by alain_gilbert » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #225

ghaff wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is what I saw when I randomly dropped the yellow man into the middle of Boulder, CO: https://goo.gl/maps/A9oKpnFQLpR2 Boulder has a city population of about 100,000 and a metro region population of about 300,000. Here are some random Street View locations from European towns and cities of a roughly similar size. Reading, England: https://goo.gl/maps/yQaTTaWQJav Bonn, Germany: https://goo.gl/maps/Pu9Ro28F4UH2 Cae…

This is what I saw when I randomly dropped the yellow man into the middle of Boulder :P https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@40.0181872,-105.2785854,2a,75...

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#236

Post by gruez » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

black6 wrote: post #29

21 wrote: post #19

> Parking is also extremely expensive to construct and maintain. Say what? It's a fucking concrete slab. Maybe they mean expensive in land cost.

Extremely expensive compared to an undeveloped lot...

when your benchmark is $0, everything's expensive by comparison.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#237

Post by ghaff » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:49 PM UTC

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #132

ghaff wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 art…

Oh I agree. Maybe for a few years after school if I had a job in the city I could imagine a handful or two of cities that I might forgo owning given the various options like Zipcar and Uber available today. But long term? I'm not sure there's any US city other than NYC/Manhattan where I wouldn't. (And I wouldn't live there.)

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#238

Post by wozniacki » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:52 PM UTC

blitmap wrote: post #232

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…

I had not considered that planning cities like this was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily see how this is meant to breed a dependence on corporate solutions. This has the taste of conspiracy, but I do believe you're right. There's a lot of money to be made this way.

  I had not considered that planning cities like this
  was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily
  see how this is meant to breed a dependence on 
  corporate solutions.

Could you elaborate on this?

I guess the angle I don't see answered is why would you need 'corporate solutions' say home surveillance solutions, private security solutions and other security & theft deterrence apparatus and solutions if you didn't have any hostile communities to be begin with?

Was this ever studied in the American or non-North American context? Are European cities and towns seeing a new found need for these things now, that were practically unheard of a few decades ago?

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#239

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 8:55 PM UTC

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #211

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, the US is about average diversity compared to other countries. I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African. Even Wisconsin at 86.5% white is less white than most European countries. And Milwaukee itself is 40% black and 17.3% Latino. The countries that come anywhere close to the US on diversity are predominantly the oth…

You're musunderstanding segregation and ethnicity. For instance, Milwaukee is widely regarded as the most segregated city in America. Their overall population total isn't the issue; its that neighborhoods within the city are overwhelmingly uniform. Of course Asia is full of Asians; but they represent an incredible diversity of ethnicities. In some areas, they are geographically mixed, in others not.

Diversity and segregation are two different things. If you had a city that was 100.0% Vietnamese then there would be no "segregation" within that city but it also isn't particularly diverse. And adding an equal number of Hawaiians wouldn't reduce the diversity even if there was 100% segregation between them.

Moreover, if you can bisect Asians into Japanese and Koreans etc. then you can bisect whites into Irish and German, Latinos into Colombians and Venezuelans, blacks into Jamaicans and Haitians etc. And if you're going to play that game then why aren't the racially segregated areas still internally diverse in the same way? Certainly they are as much as the countries that consist almost entirely of that category of people are.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#240

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:03 PM UTC

vilmosi wrote: post #208

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Overall, the US is about average diversity compared to other countries. I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African. Even Wisconsin at 86.5% white is less white than most European countries. And Milwaukee itself is 40% black and 17.3% Latino. The countries that come anywhere close to the US on diversity are predominantly the oth…

> I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African This has to be sarcasm, right? If not, this view is very wrong because it views diversity in a manner that's purely and literally skin deep.

When people talk about diversity, the diversity they want is typically cultural, but race and culture are strongly correlated. There aren't a lot of ethnic Africans who are culturally Japanese or ethnic Europeans who are culturally African American.

Which means there aren't a lot of people of any race who are culturally Japanese in Africa or culturally African American in Europe.