31–40 of 100 posts
I wish valet parking was more prevalent. Does the additional real estate space from efficient parking lots/structures justify the labor cost of providing free valet to customers? Of course, the real solution lies in eliminating personal car usage altogether (e.g. Uber)
> Of course, the real solution lies in eliminating personal car usage altogether (e.g. Uber) eg bicycles and walking
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I think it's pretty common to use downtown parking lots for events on weekends. I know DC also has "rush hour lanes" -- parking spots that turn into a lane of traffic during rush hour.
It also doesn't help that Philadelphia's property taxes are based on decades-old property value assessments, and instead of reassessing buildings, they just jack up the property tax rate. If you build a new building today, you'll get murdered in taxes. That's assuming you don't get murdered on the union labor, or murdered by the unions if you try to avoid using union labor. So in DC, there isn't as much residential p…
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It's impossible to have 'enough' parking spots. Induced demand shows that cars, like goldfish, always grow to fill the space they're given. It's politically difficult process, but just refusing to try to solve this problem (which leads to more New Urbanism-friendly locations) is often the right solution.
It is possible to have enough parking spots. It is impossible to have enough free parking spots.
Perhaps it's possible only when the margins of a business are as spectacularly high as those of Vegas casinos, so that the parking facility as a loss leader is still net profitable overall. There's also the invisible hand of capitalism, as casinos compete in the market of convenience: a casino without such a facility will lose market share to those that do.
On a closely related note, I read a very interesting piece about "curb cuts" in San Francisco. http://www.spur.org/publications/article/2008-06-01/eye-stre... The image showing the difference between Park Slope (without curb cuts) and a stretch of Dolores street in San Francisco (with curb cuts) is really eye-opening. It's a bummer, because a lot of SF really is small and walkable, but you know, we really do spend a…
Has SF ever been considered or even wanted to be considered a kid/family-friendly place? Watching from the sidelines, it's never seemed like a priority.
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It also doesn't help that Philadelphia's property taxes are based on decades-old property value assessments, and instead of reassessing buildings, they just jack up the property tax rate. If you build a new building today, you'll get murdered in taxes. That's assuming you don't get murdered on the union labor, or murdered by the unions if you try to avoid using union labor. So in DC, there isn't as much residential p…
Not sure what "city proper" means in this context, but something like 600,000 people live in the District, which is not a terribly large city. Very few of them live in grandiose buildings like you might see around the Mall. In fact, there are pretty strict height restrictions, which means there aren't any highrise apartments and vertical development is limited.
http://www.semana.com/nacion/articulo/en-medellin-se-cansaro...
Here we go with privatizing public resources and assets again. It galls me to hear moronic, self-serving corrupt things like "...the growing economic case for deploying our streets differently, for use by more than cars." In a capitalist predatory economy and society like ours public resources and assets should almost never be used for private purposes, especially not for private profit, gain, or benefit of any kind.…
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The city already owns the parking spots. No need to condemn anything. Just change the use. It isn't anti-car propaganda to point out that huge swaths of valuable public real estate are dedicated to providing free storage for empty cars, and to suggest that there are other uses that would be more beneficial to more people.
> The city already owns the parking spots. No need to condemn anything. Just change the use. OK, I'll be more explicit: I don't see any evidence that parking lots are special here. It sounds like you could build a park in the place of just about anything else and get the same benefit. It's not clear that this has anything to do with parking lots per se. > It isn't anti-car propaganda to point out that huge swaths of…
> How is that not an expression of anti-car sentiment? Are you not suggesting making it less convenient to drive cars?
Because it's not a sentiment, the anti-car idea here emerges straight from a rational cost/benefit analysis. There are many strong arguments for reducing the use of cars in cities - useful space lost to parking is just one of them.
Here we go with privatizing public resources and assets again. It galls me to hear moronic, self-serving corrupt things like "...the growing economic case for deploying our streets differently, for use by more than cars." In a capitalist predatory economy and society like ours public resources and assets should almost never be used for private purposes, especially not for private profit, gain, or benefit of any kind.…
Right. I wish people would stop leaving their metallic private property on the public road outside my house.