American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage • Hacker News Board

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#241

Post by hoorayimhelping » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:08 PM UTC

wool_gather wrote: post #196

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand this argument. The automobile is much younger than the country. Cars became broadly used about a century ago, the 1910s-20s. How many U.S. cities do you imagine there are that were created after that? Or even that, due to cars, dramatically changed their size relative to the overall population?

>How many U.S. cities do you imagine there are that were created after that?

Quite a few:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Post-war_suburban_expan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#242

Post by GW150914 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

wool_gather wrote: post #196

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't understand this argument. The automobile is much younger than the country. Cars became broadly used about a century ago, the 1910s-20s. How many U.S. cities do you imagine there are that were created after that? Or even that, due to cars, dramatically changed their size relative to the overall population?

Created, or built-up, expanded, and for more heavily populated? The US population has more than tripled in that same period, and the percentage of those people living in rural areas dropped precipitously.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#243

Post by notahacker » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #240

vilmosi wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Trust me, if it's culture you're interested in, Europe has more established cultural differences between white peoples from completely different language groups within small European countries than between African Americans and non-African Americans, and we didn't even have to impose Jim Crow laws to achieve this.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#244

Post by wozniacki » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:25 PM UTC

ende wrote: post #153

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other.” Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries, this makes me smile :-)

Right behind France and it’s Parisian suburbs, no monsieur?

Absolutely.

Segregation is probably a more chronic problem there than it is or was ever here.

  But Saint-Denis is not a rich neighborhood.

  It's what the French call a "banlieue."

  Literally translated, the word means "suburb," but 
  it has come to be associated with the depressed, mostly 
  immigrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city
  where unemployment is high and opportunity scarce.

  "If you look at the situation of people, you 
  understand the path they have taken to become a 
  terrorist or whatever you call it," Villain told 
  CBS News correspondent Vladmir Duthiers. "Exclusion 
  makes the terrorist, in my opinion."

  .
  .
  .

  The French government does not keep statistics 
  based on race or religion, but surveys have found 
  unemployment is as high as 30 percent in these immigrant 
  neighborhoods.[1]

[1] Les Banlieues: Searching for the seeds of terror

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-banlieues-seeds-of-terror...

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#245

Post by crazygringo » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #175

crazygringo wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Well, at $5/sq ft/mo. for average real estate (Manhattan, e.g. a 600 sq ft apt is $3K/mo), and if a parking space is 180 ft, then that's $900/mo., or $30/day, plus overhead/access.

So $30-50/day seems right, especially considering parking garages tend to be underground, no plumbing, etc., so the space is presumably cheaper than residential/office.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#246

Post by stretchwithme » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:28 PM UTC

dsnuh wrote: post #183

stretchwithme wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to explain your commute. We don't have cheap automated cabs yet. People can't chose an option that they don't have.

My point is that I don't think many people would take that option even if it were available. I know I wouldn't, unless the costs to own and operate a private car went up drastically, and even then, I see it as more of an augmentation than a replacement, i.e. maybe I own a single car instead of two, and use cabs for most trips. There are some realities I think get overlooked. For example, I have a family of six, plus…

You can keep your minivan. Or you just hire a vehicle that has the room you need only when you need it.

Uber already is pretty fast. I just used it in upstate New York north of Albany and there was hardly any wait. Any wait that exists will go down once robotic vehicles becomes dominant.

And pricing will also be important to make that happen. People who want less than 5 minutes wait can pay more, but that will be pretty reasonable priced. It's cheaper to pay for a vehicle to wait for 5 minutes or even 20 than it ever could be to make it wait for 3 hours or 12 hours.

And that IS essentially what we do when we have a vehicle on constant standby. We are paying for the fixed costs of having it wait around all the time. There's a daily cost to tie up that capital. It's 1/30 of your monthly payment. And an hourly cost.

In any case, individuals will be able to choose the option that suits them. And go back and forth. Some days you may value immediate pickup and you could rental a vehicle by the day. Other days you may not care and want to save money. Or you use your vehicle to care around tons of stuff and it's better for you to own. It's all good.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#247

Post by astura » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:30 PM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #134

ghaff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. Driver's ed at least used to be pretty common,in part because it gave a discount for the (expensive) insurance covering younger drivers. I don't see anything special about the typical driver's ed instructor anyway. It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex ra…

The important thing about driver's ed is that it's a /professional/ teaching the foundational experience (they also typically use a custom car where the instructor has limited controls in the passenger's seat in case things are going really wrong). That way you try to bring the quality of drivers up to that of the instructor, not a cargo cult of family members who might be horrid at driving.

And the big thing is dangerous misinformation and misconceptions get passed down without professional instruction - you see it all the time.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#248

Post by burfog » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:32 PM UTC

ebikelaw wrote: post #4

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…

Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving b…

You underestimate the loss.

It isn't just that businesses lose customers when the parking is full. People don't want to drive there and then have to turn back, so many won't take the risk. The lots may only be 70% full, but the chance that they might be 100% full is enough to make people go elsewhere. Customers expect dependable service.

It's the same with operating hours. If you make your hours completely random, with a decent chance of being closed when customers show up, nobody will bother to make the trip.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#249

Post by icantdrive55 » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:34 PM UTC

narrator wrote: post #46

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…

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…

I think you are overthinking the Bay Area?

The Bay Area was built when America was great.

Jobs were plentiful. You could be a hippie, work a chit job, or union job.

You bought a house, and had three kids. People were more spiritual. People didn't know about other cultures because we didn't know about them.

They just built homes.

One of the priciest places to live is Marin County. In the 70's, it was mainly blue collar workers. Before that it was a vacation spot for San Francisco residents. Now--the price of a average home is far from the reach of most Americans.

My point is they just built a bunch of single family homes without much planning.

Tech took off, and made the place some utopia?

You all came here, and look at the place.

In all honesty, I'll be glad when tech money dries up. The traffic is just terrible. Along with too many people who didn't fit the part of a tech worker are homeless now, or have to live with a bunch of strangers.

Re: American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

#250

Post by rdiddly » Sat, Jul 14, 2018, 9:35 PM UTC

wozniacki wrote: post #238

blitmap wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Theft and other crimes seem to increase the more you remove or disrupt community. In other words, it's not about hostile communities, but the absence of community. In the absence of community, the default is hostility. Or, community is the establishment of non-hostility. Almost by definition. Community is people with common interests in a common location doing favors for each other and looking out for each other. When you have that, crime decreases.

There's also a generic version of the word "community" that people throw around, that can mean almost anything: a town (which isn't automatically a community)... gamers ("the gaming community")... "the Native American lesbian sportfishing enthusiast community"... and so on. I don't mean that.

Anyway, something "community-hostile" would therefore be anything that creates separation and alienation. Among other types of separation, there's separation in the spatial realm, such as through sheer distance (things are far apart), or through side effects of physical barriers that are part of the infrastructure, e.g. walls built to block traffic noise, or streets themselves, especially when wide and dangerous; or through other physical barriers that are more subtle such as the windows of your own car, through which you can see, yet you could easily drive right past your friend coming the other way without knowing it, whereas that would never happen if you were both walking or on a bike or scooter. Well, you say, I can just text my friend on my phone. Exactly, and now you're dependent on the phone maker, the carrier, Apple/Google, etc. for that communication to take place.