The force that shapes everything around us: Parking • Hacker News Board

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#241

Post by pavlov » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:35 PM UTC

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…

> “Reduce the need for shopping and entertainment commuting and build more transit so that more routs have practical non-car options and you reduce the need for traffic and parking, but that's realistically an incredibly expensive proposition for many cities.”

These American cities are like the 600-lbs person who contemplates a lifestyle change but laments that it would be incredibly expensive to eat vegetables instead of fast food. “I need so many calories at my weight, it’s just a fact, they’re not cheaply available from that fresh stuff.”

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#242

Post by gruez » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:35 PM UTC

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…

>Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. Between my partner and I, we're saving $20,000 per year not owning a car (and that's assuming a generous expenditure on bicycle TCO). High rents mean nothing when considering how much you save on not needing to own a car.

$10k seems suspiciously high. Maybe that's because everyone is buying overpriced pickups/SUVs? If all you want is a vehicle, you can get this[1] which the site calculates the TCO at $33,858 over 5 years, or $6.8k. I suspect that if you buy used or keep the car for longer (eg. 10-15 years, the average car age is 12.5 years in the US), you can get that number even lower.

[1] https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla-hybrid/2023/le/?vehicleid...

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#243

Post by lazyasciiart » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:36 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #166

david2ndaccount wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many cities in the US are only usable by car. You can’t just leap from a car-based city to a non-car-based city, you have to provide transitionary options (also even car-optional cities still have parking garages).

What it takes is tearing down large swaths of current car infrastructure and the buildings surrounding it. Eg. Seattle tearing down the viaduct a few years back Which is what it took to turn American cities into car based to begin with.

That's not a great example, because Seattle spent kajillions of dollars on a ridiculous tunnel under the city to replace the viaduct AND THEN built a second ground-level highway on the newly available delightful waterfront space. Seattle's way of getting rid of the viaduct is a colossal waste of money and years of work for a terrible shitty result that is 1000% car based. A giant failure.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#244

Post by nradov » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #199

nradov wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some people always complain about adding more housing in their neighborhoods. My point is that on a daily basis most people don't worry about parking. They just drive where they want to go and then park their cars. Outside of a few limited urban areas, no one sees parking as stressful or as a reason to avoid using their own cars.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#245

Post by tshaddox » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:39 PM UTC

nharada wrote: post #115

UtopiaPunk wrote: post #30

There's an interesting interview with a designer of SimCity, where he discusses parking: Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was bl…

I was curious how much bigger the real stadium parking was. SimCity: https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/simcity/e/... Real Stadium: https://i.imgur.com/KwT1T53.png

That looks like a pretty far distance to walk from the furthest parking spots to the stadium. Do these stadiums have some sort of "mass transit" system to move the people from their cars to the stadium?

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#246

Post by 0_____0 » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:42 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #216

jimbob21 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am surprised that this was surprising to people. Cars are much bigger than people, of course you'd need bigger parking lots than seating space

> of course you'd need bigger parking lots than seating space There is a tacit assumption in your statement. Of course you don't need vast parking lots around stadiums, and there are plenty of real-world sports arenas that don't have those (some examples [1][2][3]). The parking that there is is structural, and most people simply use public transit to reach these places, which are often located in moderately densely b…

Even in US cities, stadia often lack massive surface parking lots. Giants stadium and Fenway are examples that do have some (very expensive) parking but are also on top of transit.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#247

Post by ProfessorLayton » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #211

davidw wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>> adding things in an area that's already served by infrastructure Unlike in video games, "adding" load to infrastructure can cost more than running new lines. Everything from pipes to power lines have finite capacities. If a city sewer system is at capacity, as many are, dropping some more people into the middle (replacing a parking lot with houses) will require possibly ripping up the old sewer/water/power lines t…

Everything from pipes to power lines also have a finite lifespan, and many cities are succumbing to crumbling infrastructure as the low density suburban tax base isn't covering their costs, and is unsustainable in the long term.

Yes it costs a lot in absolute terms to rip up and expand a sewer lines in Manhattan, but that doesn't mean it costs more per person being served by that infrastructure.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#248

Post by ZitchDog » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:49 PM UTC

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…

I live in Iowa City - thanks for the shoutout! I can confirm - I work downtown, it's great. Boulder has a similar concept.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#249

Post by davidw » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:50 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #233

davidw wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incredibly expensive proposition for many cities I lived in Italy for a number of years. It is a poorer country than the United States in a lot of ways, and yet they manage this quite well. It still comes back to zoning and parking: by allowing denser development, you can plan transit routes that serve a lot more people, some of whom don't even own an automobile.

The largest cities in Italy are quite a bit smaller than the largest cities in the US, so it's a very different situation. Rome's metro area is about 4.3 million people. San Antonio's is about 2.6 million. San Antonio also has far more relaxed car-based commutes than the Bay Area or LA as a result. If you dropped Rome's three subway lines in San Antonio you wouldn't get rid of that many car trips, especially since th…

Rome is notable for having kind of not great subway infrastructure for a major European city because, among other problems, they tend to encounter a lot of archeological stuff whenever they dig there.

And I'm not even talking about major cities. Where I lived in Padova, it has approximately 200K people in the same area that about 100K people occupy here in Bend, Oregon. Padova has way better transit than Bend does even if Bend is much more well to do in many ways.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#250

Post by MandieD » Mon, Jul 17, 2023, 8:51 PM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #44

tekla wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. This is why pedestrians die. Force cars to go slower in cities. They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall. Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on…

If you want to make pedestrians safer, you can do that without having to make driving miserable, by building elevated pedestrian walkways.

Elevated/buried pedestrian walkways make walking harder for a lot of people. A wheelchair-accessible ramp that goes up 12 feet is going to add at least 100 feet more distance up and down - and still be painful for a lot of people with otherwise manageable foot/joint issues.

Pushing a stroller for the last few years, plus spraining my ankle a few weeks ago has given me a little taste of what trying to use sidewalks is like for people with even tighter mobility constraints, and this in an area that is relatively accessible without a car.