41–50 of 683 posts
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> live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors Doing either of those things makes your standard of living worse.
That's your opinion, sharing a wall but being able to walk or bike easily to everything I need it a huge boost to my quality of life.
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Just out of curiosity - how big of an issue is parking in rural US?
It's an issue when it takes 10m to walk to the Walmart entrance from the parking lot. (This is intended as humor)
The best take on this topic so far I've seen has been from "Not Just Cars": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZh7A7qTPo
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Detroit, as the capital of the auto industry, has far more parking than just about any other city I've ever been to. There are huge, multi-story garages right on the main thoroughfare downtown. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/parking-lots-eat-american-... > Detroit was, or is, Motor City. Its center can pull off another automotive-related nickname: Parking Central. Fully one-third of downtown Detroit is dedicated t…
That’s what I thought! But all of the five or so garages we tried cost $20-40 flat with no ticket machines or anything, and I wasn’t willing to download/fight with an app to walk around for an hour. Next trip will be more planned for sure. I was impressed with the highways though. Definitely a motorists’ dream to get around the various suburbs.
Just because you didn't want to deal with it and didn't do research ahead of time doesn't mean "We couldn’t even park downtown". You didn't want to, and that's fine.
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> it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
Nope. This is why pedestrians die. Force cars to go slower in cities. They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall. Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on…
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…
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Nope. This is why pedestrians die. Force cars to go slower in cities. They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall. Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on…
If you want to make pedestrians safer, you can do that without having to make driving miserable, by building elevated pedestrian walkways.
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You're describing urban environments. A lot of people live in those places already. But a lot of people prefer to live elsewhere. Differences in preference is fine. What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but…
> it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
All of this will make driving less pleasant and convenient, the cost of making walking safer and easier. As it is driving is "artificially" easy, the consequence of decades of it being prioritized very highly. It needs to come down somewhat.
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You're describing urban environments. A lot of people live in those places already. But a lot of people prefer to live elsewhere. Differences in preference is fine. What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but…
> it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
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> share walls with their neighbors I honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to do that. To me, it's only done out of necessity, and is a driving force in motivating people to get the hell out of that situation asap. But the cool thing is, some people can choose that, if that's what they desire, even though I can't understand why.
There are unfortunately some people who say that we should abolish suburbs and force everyone to live in a city like that.
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> it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
No, it is the correct approach. It is somewhat a zero-sum game at least in urban centers. Driving is cheap because free and cheap parking is widely available, and car speed is prioritized over other factors including pedestrian safety. Some of the huge volume of parking has to be given over to other transit modes, which will increase demand and eventually price for what remains. Urban speed limits need to be lower, p…