I spent the first decade of my career in that industry, working on the hardware and software inside parking meters. It gave me invaluable exposure to embedded devices, RTOS, electronics, mechanical design, UX, and wired/wireless networking. Everybody else I graduated with in college took tame gov't and enterprise jobs, which would have bored me to tears.
The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
251–260 of 683 posts
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I just measured that stadium on a map, corner to corner it is 1.3km. That is 20 minutes even at conservative elderly person walking speed, and the stadium is in the middle so for everyone it will be less than 10 minutes walk.
If you are about to sit for few hours and shove hotdogs + sugary drinks down your throat the 10 minute walk will do you good.
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#253>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…
Ithaca, New York is another similar-sized town (population ~31K) that closed some blocks of its downtown "Main Street" (State Street) to make a very pleasant pedestrian business district. This happened in the 1970s.
The pedestrianized portion of State Street was part of a New York state highway -- highway traffic was re-routed to be on parallel one-way streets, separated by 2 blocks, that bracket the district.
The somewhat scattered wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Commons) has some of the backstory. (I lived there in the 90s and I think it's exaggerating the downturn in those years, but whatever.)
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not go all the way to the source of the problem to make it realistic? E.g., NIMBYism https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-st...
And the root cause of NIMBYism is the public goods dilemma. Everyone would benefit if more housing were built, but nobody wants more built near their land. The solution is not as simple as "Just stop electing NIMBYs!" because NIMBYism is a Nash equilibrium.
> nobody wants more built near their land
Absolute nonsense.
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think many people are truly anti-car activists. Just that we need to redimension their absolute centrality to so many policies and budgets. I'm involved in pro-housing politics and it's just amazing how many people are like "well, ok, sure, people need a place to live and all, but let's think FIRST about where to store the automobiles. If that works out, then I guess we can build some housing". They don't say…
I think it's not just about storing the vehicles, it's also about making your life miserable in a 2 hour commute going to a 3 hour commute. There IS more space in the united states, believe it or not.
Since there is more space, you'd expect that the market would allocate more of it for parking where needs be and that you don't need the government dictating parking minimums.
Also, not all space is equal: even in the US, well-connected space with lots of amenities like the downtowns of cities is not infinite.
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#256Parking is impactful but is ultimately shaped by human preferences that are revealed by the choices people make. For example, you can live in NYC car-free, but many (most?) people move out to the burbs once they have a family, partially because lower density + car enables better family life. What works well for a single-and-dating young professional, doesn't work as well for a dad. If ample parking makes family life…
> Parking is impactful but is ultimately shaped by human preferences that are revealed by the choices people make.
This is completely untrue. It is shaped by the profit-seeking behaviors of car manufacturers.
In general, when you think a phenomenon is due to "the choices people make" (especially in the US), it probably is not.
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#257Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike. A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
What's funny about this is the Netherlands has some of the BEST roads I've ever driven on. They also have some of the best sound-damping on their highways and bridges. Wonderful to see tax dollars actually going into transit infrastructure.
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#258I haven't had a car since 2015 and I don't plan on getting one. It's a waste of money, time and energy. If a country as big as china can have a solid train network. Why can't we? What does our biggest competitor do that we can't do?
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#259There'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…
The excess of cars in cities is bad enough, but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets.
Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many people are dependent on them. You can't ignore that. There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities, but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. We have to ease toward a situation where their negative impact is reduced. Underground parking in new construction seems like an option, especially in cities like NYC where there is no need fear of scaring off developers. And in the case of NYC, there is precedent that goes back to at least the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, where apartment buildings do, in fact, have underground parking for the building's residents. And I suspect the costs were not huge. In many cases, the "underground parking" is merely basement level or even the ground level.
Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
ten thousand dollars??? Look I get that I probably don’t do cars the way other people do cars, but like - ten thousand a year? I spend maybe $800 on gas in a year. What are these people doing? Buying a new set of tires every Christmas? Yearly visits to a detailing shop or something?? I mean like no offense but if you guys were spending twenty thousand dollars annually on cars… that’s on you. You don’t need to live th…
Your number seems very you-specific. Back-of-the-envelope math, seems like you drive I totally believe that it is possible that these are indeed your costs but I'll give you a counter-example.
My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there. Insurance is about $1.5K so we're at $6.5K and that's a good deal for around here. If we drive into Manhattan on a weekday, it's about $50 to leave the car in a lot somewhere in Midtown. If I do that just once a month, that's another $600, so we're at $7.1K already. We actually don't put a ton of mileage on and it's a hybrid so our gas costs are about the same as yours. That's $8k. I am leaving out a bunch of other stuff (registration, inspection, tolls - can easily be around $10 to cross into or out of Manhattan, an occasional ticket, parking meters, etc.)
I think my car usage scenario is pretty light (wife and I both WFH) compares to most people but I can easily get to $10K for one car based on where we live. Some of this can be avoided (eg sit longer in traffic to avoid a toll road, go slow to avoid tickets, only go into NYC on Sunday when you can get a free spot more easily, could have bought a used car, etc.) - just making it obvious that you can EASILY get to $10K.