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

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#361

Post by mjevans » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

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…

Sim City's sort of on the correct solution track here.

The REAL solution is going to look way more like Azimov's Caves of Steel style city.

  * High speed people mover beltway / sidewalks
  * No cost access to this transit
  * A Theme Park like utility corridor system

Plus high speed (freeway like) bypass routes around / through the city which can exit into mega parking structures (much cheaper at large scale than wastefully cramming into a normal building's footprint) as external interface buffers between 'car land' / intercity transit, and 'pedestrian land' / intracity movement.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#362

Post by taeric » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:08 AM UTC

microtherion wrote: post #280

Sharlin wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Or Letzigrund in Zurich, with a capacity of up to 50,000 people for concerts, and absolutely zero street parking available: https://goo.gl/maps/kPye3VdVB9ZLpPsx8

I'd love to see how they manage parking.

I'm also a little curious on how to compare capacities. Per wikipedia, it is only 25k for sports. 70+k for teams is common in many of the other stadiums I looked at. That said, I don't exactly know that many stadiums. Very intimidating to see how large many of these places are.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#363

Post by mock-possum » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:12 AM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #260

mock-possum wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Yeah maybe so. I wfh and only do a couple of road trips a year - tolls are inapplicable, I barely ever need to pay for parking, and of course there’s occasional maintenance costs but I just cannot imagine those adding up to anywhere near $10k, that’s off by an order of magnitude in my experience. If I spent more than a grand on my car per year, I’d be doing it wrong, in my book.

Maybe if you buy a really expensive car, and you drive it all the time, and it’s really expensive to maintain / repair - I guess. But like - aren’t you choosing an expensive route, in that case? The person I was replying to made it sound like doing away with cars altogether was the reasonable option, rather than what seems like a no-brainer to me: just keep a less expensive car. I suppose that’s a luxury (ha) I can afford?

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#364

Post by jjav » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:19 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #309

majormajor wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute. Higher density enables mass transit. Moreover, work from home is a thing now. One person lives near their job, the other works from home, no commute. > build more transit This is putting the cart before the horse. The suburbs aren't dense enough to justify a transit route and if you install one there it will just go unused. First you have to rezone all the low densit…

> Moreover, work from home is a thing now. One person lives near their job, the other works from home, no commute.

This works great as long as neither has to ever change jobs to either a different location or one with a different WFH policy.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#365

Post by heartbreak » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:22 AM UTC

wizofaus wrote: post #320

iso1631 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK we build houses without enough parking and the whole area becomes horrendous. The idea I get from reading about US "pro housing" people is that if you don't provide parking, people will still have a car and still park. In reality in the UK every patch of open space, including pavements (sidewalks) become car storage facilities. housing estates with 4 bed houses with just 1 car parking space (plus a garage w…

In all honesty, why is a 4-bedroom house with only a single dedicated car parking space a problem? Is it because families that have decided they must have multiple cars parked close to their home all the time are leaving them parked in public locations that other people value and want to use? If so, it sounds like those parking locations need to be charged for. Said families may then rethink whether they really need…

It’s four different families in one house.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#366

Post by gooseyman » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:39 AM UTC

runarberg wrote: post #304

Reubachi wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's currently very little incentive to pedestrianize actual problem cities from all concerned parties. Because pedestrians are still largely able to bike, walk, bus etc just fine. And drivers are largely able to commute/park just fine. We need to be honest that the folks most concerned (rightfully so) with urban car congestion are wealthy upper class people who moved TO the cities for their upperclass nature. Sho…

Your class narrative is not a real world scenario. In many countries (including USA and EU) working class people are pushed out of the cities and into suburbs or satellite cities as the inner city prices are simply to high and they cannot afford rent. This is doubly true for people with kids or otherwise large families. If they still work in the city, they are simply forced to commute. Thankfully many cities have ade…

I don’t have the stats, but would be very surprised if the number of airbnbs, short terms, and vacant apartments was more meaningful than the number of wealthy folks moving in. But if it were the case, it’s somewhat fair to assume it’s the wealthy that own those properties. So I think you agree with GP more than disagree.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#367

Post by wtp1saac » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:42 AM UTC

willio58 wrote: post #321

squidgyhead wrote: post #96

ClimateTown has a video about this today! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8

ClimateTown, along with Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, City Nerd, and the like give me hope that the message is getting out. That being said, the more I watch these videos/listen to their podcasts the more I understand that city planners, specifically those in charge of managing traffic and parking, have been taught _incorrectly_ for decades. These content creators regularly say that if we want change we are going t…

I think the primary difficulty is not telling planners this, but telling citizens. Most people are so ingrained to use cars in the US that any mention of transit or biking gets a pretty severely negative response, and I’ve seen this in people I know across conservatives, liberals, and even (dumbfoundingly) progressives/leftists. To do this well also requires more dense apartments and mixed use zoning, which similarly upsets many across the political spectrum.

I am somewhat hopeful the trends are angling towards proper cities, but my impression of those trends is that it is moreso forward thinking cities/planners trying their best against an extremely misinformed citizenry + our existing terrible infrastructure + under/misfunding + impossible bureaucracy. It’s going to take a lot of effort to get people to actually use alternatives, and I think those channels will only appeal to a very small bubble of urbanism focused leftists.

(side note: e-bikes are my personal urbanism bet; they seem good enough to vaguely navigate surface roads and even some stroad conditions, while being able to interface with old bike path networks, and can be easy to park in areas where cities provide bike racks. I’ve had a good experience with one, and no longer use a car for most trips)

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#368

Post by jjav » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:44 AM UTC

xyzelement wrote: post #260

mock-possum wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there.

Not really, the car doesn't evaporate on year 10. On a quick search I see 2013 Highlanders (you didn't mention a year but those are 10 years old now) selling from ~14K to ~20K. So looks like you'd get about a third of the purchase cost back when you sell it.

That's a 50K car though. If you like to spend on that, great. But it doesn't mean that owning a car has to cost that much. People who like to minimize car costs (like me) will buy a 5-8K used car and drive it forever, bringing the annualized cost down to just a few hundred dollars.

> I can easily get to $10K for one car

Certainly. Or 100K, or even more. I know someone who spends well over a million dollars a year in cars! The sky is the limit. But nobody needs to do that. If all one needs is a car for transportation, it can be had for under 1K a year.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#369

Post by CydeWeys » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:45 AM UTC

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #259

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…

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 peopl…

Just don't have any mandatory minimums, and allow developers to choose to add the underground parking if it makes sense for the building's use case.

> There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities

There's a lot wrong with cars in cities. They choke up the streets with traffic congestion and the sheer geometry problem of them means that it's impossible for even a small fraction of people to get around via cars in a large dense city like NYC.

Re: The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

#370

Post by runarberg » Tue, Jul 18, 2023, 1:52 AM UTC

gooseyman wrote: post #366

runarberg wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your class narrative is not a real world scenario. In many countries (including USA and EU) working class people are pushed out of the cities and into suburbs or satellite cities as the inner city prices are simply to high and they cannot afford rent. This is doubly true for people with kids or otherwise large families. If they still work in the city, they are simply forced to commute. Thankfully many cities have ade…

I don’t have the stats, but would be very surprised if the number of airbnbs, short terms, and vacant apartments was more meaningful than the number of wealthy folks moving in. But if it were the case, it’s somewhat fair to assume it’s the wealthy that own those properties. So I think you agree with GP more than disagree.

As the price of rent/mortgage increases, this becomes irrelevant. I may be wrong about AirBnB but if low income people are priced out of a city, and middle income people move in instead, however the price of housing is such that after rent/mortgage payment the middle income folks have about the same disposable income as the displaced people, the dynamics end up being the same, and the only difference to the class dynamics is that low income workers can now blame gentrification for their struggles.

The only rich folks in the gentrification scenario are still the landlords, and honestly I don’t think they are moving to the city and complaining about too much parking. (though I admit I agree with GP that they are probably the ones that are complaining about congestion and lack of parking)