Parking Bombs: Destroying Downtowns for Cars | Hacker News Reader

Parking Bombs: Destroying Downtowns for Cars

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47 pointstcskeptic37 comments

I agree with the article's overall thesis, but the example used -- Hartford, CT -- wasn't convincing. Having lived in Hartford and knowing quite a bit about the history there, I think the proliferation of parking was just another symptom rather than the cause of the urban decline.

The downtown core had already fallen into decline when the Interstate got punched through and when most of those parking lots got created; the Interstate (I-84) was a very conscious form of "urban renewal."

The elephant in the room is the phenomenon usually called "white flight" -- there was a sort of positive feedback loop created by the introduction of the automobile after WWII, where people who could afford cars discovered that they could live outside the cities where there was more room, and as they did so the urban core areas become less desirable places for people with means to live. This fed on itself, until the urban core areas became economic and racial ghettos, and the surburbanites started demanding big freeways so they could get in and out to work more easily. Those freeways were constructed by bulldozing the ghettos, sometimes with ill-concealed racism.

That pattern was a big part of what occurred in Hartford, which until very recently was a place that people from the surrounding areas just didn't go except to work, buy drugs, or catch the occasional Whalers game (and not enough of the latter). That is starting to change, or so I've heard, but slowly.

But it's not like the parking lots caused the decline; the parking lots were only created after things had already started to go downhill. They represented a sort of coup de grace to cities, since they oftentimes involved bulldozing beautiful buildings the likes of which will probably never be rebuilt, but they were a predictable effect after the people with money and influence departed for the suburbs.

Parking is also one of the lowest-overhead ways to generate income from a property. Low cost to get started, and very little in the way of operating expenses and maintenance.

Its all nice and good to point out the problem that parking causes in terms of the development or destruction of any downtown, however unless the lack of parking is compensated for by having an excellent public transit system (like Portland) simply removing parking or not starting to address the issue is a recipe for disaster.

Take Los Angeles for example, there are way too many parking structures and lots all over downtown. Unfortunately there isn't really a way to get into downtown unless you are withing 5 miles of it. And you don't really want to live in that area. Even the SF Bay area for that matter, yes there is BART and Muni, but unless you live in the city (for the most part) BART is quite useless if your area of interest is more than a mile outside the sliver that BART services (ignoring all the other problems BART has), and Muni is a joke during rush hour, not to mention the combination of BART + Muni + anything else that you use gets to be pretty pricey.

Unless the issues of public transit are addressed properly, nothing will fix the parking problem or the congestion problem or the gas usage problem or the pollution problem to mention a few.

> unless the lack of parking is compensated for by having an excellent public transit system.

That is the key. If public transit system was destroyed or never developed a city would have to either build parking facilities or build a public transit system. It all comes down to these questions:

   - "How do we expect people to get downtown?"
   - "How do we expect people to get around downtown?"

The approach a city takes will mostly answer these questions.

If nobody lives downtown and they have to commute from distant suburbs, it could make sense in the short term to start building parking spaces. The city is eventually transformed into an "office city". Everything closes down at 5. It is hard to even move around the city, so office workers would just go to lunch some place nearby their office, then quickly get in their cars and escape to the suburbs. That is not a city that I would like to live near or go to. But that is what a lot of American cities have become.

If many people live downtown or near downtown area, then it makes sense to invest in a public transit system. This also helps people move around the city. It opens an opportunity for evening, and weekend businesses, for entertainment and tourism.

This is also a chicken and egg problem. A city could decide to encourage building residential areas downtown to attract different segments of populations there. But that is a long term solution. It takes many years to revitalize a downtown neighborhood, especially if it is a high crime area, has a lot of abandoned buildings, and most of all, a bad reputation.

> "That is not a city that I would like to live near or go to."

Then for your own sake don't come to Seattle. You just described this city's downtown to the letter.

Sure, that describes downtown, but we have Capitol Hill and Fremont etc to make up for it.

Well, what cities do now is make parking the first n stories of a building, and then build the rest of the structure on top of that as normal. Over the last 5 years, I have watched many of the parking lots in my neighborhood become parking lots with condos on top (and retail stores below the parking).

This seems to be the best of all worlds -- the parking doesn't take anything away, it just makes the buildings 5 stories taller. Why anyone would drive their car in a major city, though, is beyond me.

Now if only the roads could be moved underground and replaced with parks (and a bicycle path); that would be really nice.

I wish more cities would build connecting mass transit/parking garages on the outskirts of the city. When I live in Boston, I used to drive into Alewife all the time and then take the Red Line into Cambridge or downtown. Now that I'm in the Bay Area, I'll usually park at Daly City and then BART in when I have an occasion to go into the city.

Now if only BART covered more than that narrow corridor near downtown...

Some major cities still lack adequate public transportation, like Seattle and Los Angeles. I live in the latter, about 10 miles from downtown due to cost (about $600-$700 cheaper on rent) and I have to drive in because public transportation would include taking light rail to subway to bus and tack on an extra hour to my commute and cost literally hundreds a month. Far cheaper and faster to drive, even with the abysmal LA traffic.

I've been to Seattle and didn't see any problem with the public transportation. Those buses with trolley poles are cool!

(The reality is that not every city has the population and demand to have a Tokyo-like subway system. Sometimes, buses are enough.)

I lived in Seattle for 6 years, 2 of which were completely car free. It's possible, but you're swimming upstream. I'm now in NYC, and it is far easier.

If it's within three miles or so on each end, you could also try riding a folding bike to and from the train station.

> Now if only the roads could be moved underground and replaced with parks (and a bicycle path); that would be really nice.

That was the Big Dig in Boston- it worked, but it was really expensive.

I mean the surface streets. Although you would have to call them something else after moving them below the surface :)

Woulda been cheaper to raise the city!

IF you can build underground. Here in South Florida, going down isn't a good idea, unless you like the idea of a personal sub for commuting purposes.

I am, however, seeing more parking garages being used down here.

It doesn't necessarily have to be under ground.

Parking within buildings is still lousy because it is very hard to build buildings that have the necessary doors and ramps for car access and still have any space left over for an active-use ground floor. Without active uses at sidewalk level, the streets are dead and you might as well drive everywhere anyway.

This isn't that hard to do. Many of the new condo and coop buildings in NY suburbs have a simple driveway that leads down a ramp to the parking garage (below ground). The ground floor is used for retail space like a coffee shop or deli, floors 2-X are used for condos, and all parking is underground.

Ideally, cities should be structured so that automobiles are used on special occasions, not for day-to-day transportation. I have the good fortune of living in Cambridge, MA where I can be car-free.

It's tricky to do, though, and I think in the US, only NYC has really come close. Even in Cambridge and Boston, most people still drive, partly because the transit takes a really long time from many parts of the city. And in San Francisco, an absolutely tiny city geographically (about 6 miles across), it's not much faster to take Muni than to walk at a brisk pace (Muni averages 8 mph).

Yes, it is tricky to do. The way I pulled it off is that when I moved to Boston, I ditched my car. That way, the places I started going to were all T-accessible. If you already live in Boston you probably have places you go that aren't served well by the T. It ended up working out fabulously for me, and I wish other Americans eventually have the car-free opportunity that I do.

Metros (e.g. Paris) & bikes (e.g. most cities in the Netherlands) seem to work very well. Bikes are 5 times faster than walking, 2/3 as fast as a car and metros are even faster (but you have the problem of getting to the metro station).

Greater Boston is kind of a special case, because although public transportation is terrible, the historical preservation groups have a lot of pull. Historical preservation groups don't like parking lots anyway.

People who say that usually have no kids.

To be fair, kids grew up just fine without cars for almost all of recorded history.

They had wagons. And no downtown.

People didn't travel much. When they did, single men used a horse, and families used a wagon.

They didn't have wagons. Only businesses that needed to haul things, or the very rich, could afford the space and money to keep animals in cities. Everyone else just lived in places that were compact enough that it was practical to walk everywhere.

For the record, I have no kids.

The lots seem to me a symptom rather than a cause. Parking lots are a low-intensity land use, and as a given downtown revives, the lots go down under the new buildings or (at an intermediate stage) onto the first few floors.

Did anyone else notice that employment % actually went up quite a bit after the parking lot boom? And the loss in population is consistent with less living space.

  Before: 114,400 / 162,180 =  ~71%
  After: 106,900 / 121,580 = ~88%

Based on that alone, I'd say Hartford is almost a better example of the opposite. Almost 30% unemployment is hugely damaging to a city, though it does open it up for factories to come in. I didn't read through to any of the linked articles for alternate explanations, though.

That seems to be ignoring commuters. Suburbanites often commute into the city, raising employment numbers while reducing the number of employed locals.

For instance (from wikipedia):

Manhattan is the economic engine of New York City, with its 2.3 million workers drawn from the entire New York metropolitan area accounting for almost two-thirds of all jobs in New York City.[139] Manhattan's daytime population swells to 2.87 million, with commuters adding a net 1.34 million people to the population. This commuter influx of 1.46 million workers coming into Manhattan was the largest of any other county or city in the country, and was more than triple the 480,000 commuters who headed into second-ranked Washington, D.C.[140][141]

Based on your method, Manhatten has ~200% employment rate. (Yes I noticed the numbers there seem to conflict slightly, but it gets the point across.)

Good point, hadn't considered that.

That said, wouldn't that generate a LOT of income tax for the city?

One way streets seem to have a similar effect. Even in an otherwise thriving downtown core, one way streets often have a dead, sterile quality to them, except for, and likely because of, the cars that rip through.

The before and after aerial view of Hartford reminded me of Glasgow - which is a rare example of a European city that has had a freeway/motorway driven almost right through the center.

A much structured and detailed argument against parking lots is done by Jane Jacobs in her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." She shows data, not just a hand-picked (bad) example.

An excellent book, and one that I've sadly yet to get all the way through.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Shoup goes into exhaustive detail on the effects of parking, specifically how the idea that parking should always be provided free of charge distorts the market for automobiles and city development. It's long and pretty dry, but the first few chapters at least are very enlightening.

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