> Pretty good chance that's not true Or a 23.5% chance that's not true...
In response to a “guarantee”, that’s a lot. “I guarantee this plane won’t crash” = 23.5% chance of dying?
The real question one should be asking is how much of that is by choice?
Plus the "within 1 mile" standard seem a little low, that would mean that every single urban grocery store would have multiple competitors within a 2 mile radius which is totally unrealistic though, apparently, is quite common.
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…
The alternative was bankruptcy. And as the market for street parking vaporizes over the next couple decades, this may end up being a great deal.
How will it be a great deal? For 65 more years Chicago will be on the hook for paving and otherwise not using two lanes worth of road on a huge number of roads. If self driving cars become incredible over the next 20 years, the city goes to all robot cabs and no private vehicles, etc. they will still have to keep those parking spaces or pay the parking vendor for them. For this year the city will be paying $20+ million and it's not getting even the ~24 million it would previously have gotten, so roughly a net -45 million for 2018 alone - and even not counting the money paid by the city the leasing company will have made back its entire purchase price by 2020, leaving 60+ years of pure profit.
Chicago got taken so hard that it's now the canonical example of how not to do this kind of thing.
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 pre…
I agree that this will be the case, I thought you were arguing that private car ownership will virtually disappear. We are already in the situation you described. Sure, maybe use of public transportation and Uber type services will go up some, but I can't see anyone who has a private car in their driveway using Uber or public transit in anything other than unusual circumstances (need to go to airport, need a designated driver, you are on vacation it business travel, the car is in the shop with no loaner, etc), just like the majority of people I know do today. Admittedly, I don't live in a city center, but unless housing prices decrease substantially, I don't see the influx to dense metropolitan areas necessary for the kind of mass transit you're envisioning.
This will still be a sour deal. What a waste of urban space to just leave empty parking spots due to the fees for repurposing them.
Presumably as the market for parking goes away the owners of it will find a more profitable use for the space.
The ones in buildings and lots, sure, or they'll just set prices lower than street parking. The whole thing is still going to hurt the city by making it not worth going into. I know of "destination" specialty stores that have closed because adding an extra $4+ of parking to the cost of going there to shop made it not worthwhile. I personally was part of a group that used to meet for dinner at different restaurants every week, but Chicago restaurants got dropped from choices because an extra $8-10 on a meal gets you a much nicer (or less expensive) meal in the suburbs with free parking.
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 Ge…
Yes, you are correct, diversity and segregation are two different things, which is why I broke them out.
My original comment was to explain how the statement, "Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries . . . " is incorrect.
>...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. The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty: > an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states…
I'm not sure ergodic is what you're looking for here. Ergodic is like a gas particle in a box. Over time, it'll have been at every position in the box. Non-ergodic is like a house of cards. Eventually, it'll collapse and stay down.
Let there be a gas particle in a box. Now cut the box in half and if the gas particle can exist in all remaining space in the box, the box has had an ergodic transformation.
Non ergodic:
Let there be a car on a major highway in a city. Now cut the roads on the highway in half (say for construction). Congestion results and consequently the cars never again move as fast as before. (equivalent to your house of cards)
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…
Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling. Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.
The lack of parking may be an effort to solve a chicken and the egg problem. While some zoning restrictions call for parking per unit, some high traffic areas are calling for less parking per unit.
If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest.
By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.
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 o…
I wonder if you've ever even been to Saint-Denis?
Segregation in France is absolutely nothing like what you see in America where, outside three or four major cities, different races, no matter how rich or poor, are absolutely cordoned off from one another and do not ever attend the same schools [1]. If you actually go to Saint-Denis you will find everything from Russian Jews to Moroccan Muslims to Nigerians to good ol' fashioned ("from before Napoleon took over the world") French families. It's an extremely diverse hood, the kind you'd only saw 30 years ago in America's largest cities.
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 just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's. However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem. People ge…
Talking about modes of transportation that work well based on countrywide population density is silly. The US's population density is massively skewed by Alaska and everything from Kansas to California being almost completely empty.
Most east coast cities have actually decreased their population density considerably since 1930.
In major cities, its already more convenient not to own a car, even if your stuck using mass transit. The area where that is the case will expand enormously once a chauffeur driven limousine is cheaper than standing-room-only mass transit. There's no way I'd drive up to San Francisco and deal with parking when I can be driven up there and dropped off for the same money. Even twice the same money would be a good deal.
But buses will be much cheaper to operate too, so they wouldn't be standing room only. A city that had only buses and no private cars would have a very fast and efficient transportation network.
Why will buses be much cheaper than they are now? Because they are driverless? I think that's one small part of the calculation that goes into fare prices.