31–40 of 310 posts
> Parking is also extremely expensive to construct and maintain. Say what? It's a fucking concrete slab. Maybe they mean expensive in land cost.
Parking structures reduce the amount of land per car, but then you have to pay for the structure.
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…
Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered.
It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of a weird argument that nobody wants to take the bus or the train because it's too crowded. Very Berra.
It just means there aren't enough bus routes or busses on the route.
When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister.
There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks like 08:30-17:00 would set you back anywhere from £25 to £50 a day (about the same as half to a full tank of petrol or diesel). Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor of the traffic and paying for fuel
Understandably, as a result a lot of people use public transport. Sure its fairly decent in London, but thats only because people use it and pay for it so there are funds to reinvest into making it run effectively.
If suddenly the average US driver was looking at paying $100/day to drive to work (or $2000 a month), I am sure that they could handle sitting on a bus for $10/day and pocket the $90 change, while the public transit gets better and better as a result.
This is a solvable problem.
1 - https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_...
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…
The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2
Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking.
I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.
Until cities have a better alternative to driving than "use our terrible mass transit in our poorly-designed cities," this will remain a problem. American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it's dangerous. Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000 pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you're ri…
And so parking spaces are built which are never used.
The marginal cost of a parking space is low. The heuristic for structured parking has long been $10,000 per space. Over a 30 year building life cycle that's less than $1/day. Private surface parking is a few cents and on street public parking is nothing...and often so is even that expensive structured parking because the $1/day of capital costs makes parking a potentially lucrative business. This means that the most cost effective way to avoid scheduling bottlenecks is with capacity that far exceeds the average rate or median demand.
To put it another way, all that parking is what a working system looks like. Sure Des Moines might not need 1.6 million parking spaces -- but it's probably not far from what's necessary to provide required for reasonable livability at the density and geography [3] of Des Moines. Recovering all those parking spaces for development doesn't do a lot for Des Moines. It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower.
To put it another way, land use for parking in Des Moines (or other cities) largely reflects an economic equilibrium in the real-estate market. When there's too much, it gets converted to other uses over time...and when regulations are impediments, major local real-estate interests get those regulations relaxed/modified/removed. [4]
[1]: The size of the 'local' may vary, but it's much much smaller than Des Moines and difficult even down to the scale of on-street parking for a single urban block.
[2]: Based on the heuristic of 1/4 mile reasonable walking radius in urban environments.
[3]: Consider that the Des Moines river runs through the city and a parking space on one side of the river is not generally fungible with a parking space on the other side. The river complicates public transit by bottlenecking surface transit with bridges and subsurface transit with tunnels.
[4]: Institutions with teams of $600/hr real estate lawyers and fifty year investment horizons.
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…
I always thought it was weird how there is so much parking in the centre of US cities. When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute . In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister. There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks lik…
1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement.
2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations.
3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.