American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage
usa.streetsblog.org
usa.streetsblog.org
Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.
However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem.
People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car.
Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure.
Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished.
If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...
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.
Since it follows that NIMBYs are more anti-American than Russia, we MUST put sanctions on their ability to affect their fellow Americans.
I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.
Well, to be fair, if you are talking about a specific city in Europe then you should do the same here in the USA. London's american equivalent is NYC. You will not need a car here either.
It was just policy decisions in many cases.
Quite a few:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suburb#Post-war_suburban_expan...
I'm not sure this is a great test. (Though, yes, London does have a great transit system even though I've also taken cabs from time to time for various reasons.)
When I visit American cities and don't travel outside them, I very rarely rent a car and don't necessarily take cabs/Lyfts all that much other than getting from the airport. I'm usually staying/doing business in/eating in a relatively central location that often exists in cities that are otherwise fairly spread out.
To give just an example that I'm very familiar with. I never rent a car any longer when I visit Raleigh but I'd never claim you could live there without a car.
Most east coast cities have actually decreased their population density considerably since 1930.
Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.
This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted.
Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled.
It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century.
The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.
Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.
You baby-boomers need to speak for yourselves only and keep me out of it.
(Assuming you mean "modern" as in contemporary. If you mean the more canonical "modern", sorry for the react.)
- the media
— the capitalist class
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries, this makes me smile :-)
I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African. Even Wisconsin at 86.5% white is less white than most European countries. And Milwaukee itself is 40% black and 17.3% Latino.
The countries that come anywhere close to the US on diversity are predominantly the other countries in the Americas.
This has to be sarcasm, right?
If not, this view is very wrong because it views diversity in a manner that's purely and literally skin deep.
Which means there aren't a lot of people of any race who are culturally Japanese in Africa or culturally African American in Europe.
The category "white people in America" has that level of cultural diversity inside of it. It includes millions of first generation immigrants from all of those places. Plus millions of people descended from those cultures who over the past centuries have developed them into something uniquely American, melding them in a thousand cities with the cultures of all the other immigrant populations that have come here since then.
And we can't pretend that no country in Europe has ever sinned. Or any country anywhere for that matter.
Of course Asia is full of Asians; but they represent an incredible diversity of ethnicities. In some areas, they are geographically mixed, in others not.
Moreover, if you can bisect Asians into Japanese and Koreans etc. then you can bisect whites into Irish and German, Latinos into Colombians and Venezuelans, blacks into Jamaicans and Haitians etc. And if you're going to play that game then why aren't the racially segregated areas still internally diverse in the same way? Certainly they are as much as the countries that consist almost entirely of that category of people are.
My original comment was to explain how the statement, "Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries . . . " is incorrect.
Segregation is probably a more chronic problem there than it is or was ever here.
But Saint-Denis is not a rich neighborhood.
It's what the French call a "banlieue."
Literally translated, the word means "suburb," but
it has come to be associated with the depressed, mostly
immigrant neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city
where unemployment is high and opportunity scarce.
"If you look at the situation of people, you
understand the path they have taken to become a
terrorist or whatever you call it," Villain told
CBS News correspondent Vladmir Duthiers. "Exclusion
makes the terrorist, in my opinion."
.
.
.
The French government does not keep statistics
based on race or religion, but surveys have found
unemployment is as high as 30 percent in these immigrant
neighborhoods.[1]
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paris-banlieues-seeds-of-terror...
Segregation in France is absolutely nothing like what you see in America where, outside three or four major cities, different races, no matter how rich or poor, are absolutely cordoned off from one another and do not ever attend the same schools [1]. If you actually go to Saint-Denis you will find everything from Russian Jews to Moroccan Muslims to Nigerians to good ol' fashioned ("from before Napoleon took over the world") French families. It's an extremely diverse hood, the kind you'd only saw 30 years ago in America's largest cities.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-get...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/16/segreg...
If that’s the case then I disavow all things “modern.” Nothing exciting to me at all about putting up walls between me and the people I actually see in person.
Maybe this is why I deleted my facebook a few years back, call when a few texts become a back and forth conversation, push for meet ups, and don’t use Tinder. I really don’t want to live in a world where the majority of our human-to-human communications is tapping on glass.
Regardless, I like it. I think you're using it to describe businesses that do things like sell carbon credits or do humanitarian work?
If you give tuition money to a few poor kids via a non profit, you don’t solve the college debt and education accessibility problem, but it makes people who did it feel better.
Or pay someone to plant a tree when you fly to offset the carbon.
One could always not give tuition money to a few poor kids. That fails to solve anything too.
I really dislike the knee-jerk, blanket dismissal of people who are trying to do small but good things.
"If nothing we do matters then the only thing that matters is what we do." - Joss Whedon
Basically, it isn't. The theory that everyone should do a little bit is based on the idea that if 1000 people each solve 0.1% of the problem then we solve 100% of the problem. Which in general isn't a bad idea.
The problem comes when somebody tries to sell it with bad math. Because then you have a hundred million people each solving one trillionth of the problem, which accomplishes effectively nothing. And worse than nothing, because then you have a hundred million people each thinking they've done their part and no further action is required, even though no one has made the slightest dent in the actual problem.
Also, what do you mean by “Guiltlessness as a service”?
Guaranteed by a public-benefit corporation.
Bonus: Now on the blockchain!
Before WW2, America was a culture desert. Europeans fleeing the war are the only reason NYC became an international culture hub.
Hip-hop is undoubtedly the most progressive Western art form. (Side note: hip-hop's genius appropriations of commercial symbolisms and it's will to collective empowerment directly underwrite and provide the language of the public engagement of today's millenials. It's influence is as deep as an ocean.) But while hip-hop is the only non-native wholly American cultural movement, it's American origins are a far cry from enlightment; more bound in shame. To say America created hip-hop would be an offense. Saying America stole it would be more accurate.
The actual artists out on the stage doing the music know exactly what comes from where. Culture spreads like that: someone likes a piece and adds it to their own, fusing two cultures. It's how we have American Chinese food that looks nothing like Chinese Chinese food. (the xenophobic policies that led to it is another matter)
You have a very narrow and stereotyped view of American culture. The whole of it is not a few white-majority cities in the north and one over-funded region in the west.
In my previous comment, please note when I say "hip-hop", I am not referring to music, but culture. Nonetheless...
I grew up in the south. My father was literally a clogger. I'm no stranger to folk. But, I am extremely skeptical of a lot of it's history. The mid-century folk-revival era did a real number on our conception of what's really there culture-wise. Behind the curtain, I am honestly afraid it's mostly puritanism, shame, and self-conflict. It's interesting but I think calling it a cultural movement is mostly romanticism. In terms of music, we could delve into details for days, and break down the whole history of hip-hop and jazz, and I do encourage that. There's a lot of good music there. But, I'm afraid it serves essentially the same end in terms of culture; a terribly familiar story. Hip-hop exhibits the whole of the cultural dynamic fairly explicitly, and is internationally renowned. Folk is mostly replicated in parody.
EDIT: Another thing to add... I think most people would be surprised how many contemporary folk musicians (young ones) would actually agree with me. They eventually are challenged with contending with things like: Did folk come from slaves? Or the working class? Or the fraught relations between the two? And is it reconcilable? Where did country music come from?
We may have fundamentally incompatible perspectives if you see culture and art as separate things. I grew up surrounded by hip-hop (Atlanta), but I know better than to sing along with the n word as a white person. This is because the experience of the music is inseparable from one's experience with its culture.
I am basically saying that the legacy of American folk is just too mysterious to nail down, and too precarious to draw conclusions from. I wonder if this would be the case without the mid-century folk revival, which amounted to a mass-commercialization of the white American south as a suffering working-class. The older field recordings in the Library Of Congress suggest the music was predominantly made by slaves. The old radio recordings from Nashville tell a slightly different story and seem to stitch together something of an art form, likely for the very first time. Then folk-revival was a massively commercial effort that made it all look very pretty. But the culture of it all still remains vague. Touring the south and studying it's history doesn't suggest much of any concern for culture in any higher sense. Literacy was surprisingly high but they mostly read the bible. Music seems to have occupied a space more like entertainment than cultural reflection. A likely theory is that it was very much a culture for slaves, but merely entertainment for white people. Hopefully this clarifies my comprehension. Hip-hop is a full embodiment in comparison; a whole new world of unmitigated expression.
Blues, Jazz and Ragtime all predate WWII — and all influenced pretty much everything you hear today.
You could even argue that Breakbeat is American given its roots with the Winston’s.
American culture is vastly richer than many countries specifically because it is effectively an All Star team of traditions from everywhere. Thinking “American” is simply hot dogs and Hip Hop is to greatly undersell what has been one of the great cultural achievements in the history of the world. American culture is vastly diverse compared to, for example, France. You have Cajun/Creole in Louisiana, Tejano culture in Texas, cowboy culture in Montana, laid back “surfer” culture in California, Boston/Nee England culture, Chicago with it’s melange of Polish, Italian, African American. Where else in the world could you have sushi for lunch and watch a rodeo in the evening? To be clear, I am not saying American culture is “best,” I am just saying that to reduce American culture to Hip Hop is about like saying French culture is nothing more than Edith Piaf and baguettes. Americans even invented basketball and baseball — and most of the things I mention were in motion long before world war 2.
NYC was a culture hub long before Workd War 2. Read some de Tocqueville and learn a bit about American history before just engaging in a wholesale dismissal of America.
I am not prone to quoting Bono, but this clip is relevant: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O8aLAZ8SnvI
We've lost most of our knowledge about how to create civic spaces of value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.
A lot of it was transformed.
This has the taste of conspiracy, but I do believe you're right. There's a lot of money to be made this way.
I had not considered that planning cities like this
was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily
see how this is meant to breed a dependence on
corporate solutions.
I guess the angle I don't see answered is why would you need 'corporate solutions' say home surveillance solutions, private security solutions and other security & theft deterrence apparatus and solutions if you didn't have any hostile communities to be begin with?
Was this ever studied in the American or non-North American context? Are European cities and towns seeing a new found need for these things now, that were practically unheard of a few decades ago?
There's also a generic version of the word "community" that people throw around, that can mean almost anything: a town (which isn't automatically a community)... gamers ("the gaming community")... "the Native American lesbian sportfishing enthusiast community"... and so on. I don't mean that.
Anyway, something "community-hostile" would therefore be anything that creates separation and alienation. Among other types of separation, there's separation in the spatial realm, such as through sheer distance (things are far apart), or through side effects of physical barriers that are part of the infrastructure, e.g. walls built to block traffic noise, or streets themselves, especially when wide and dangerous; or through other physical barriers that are more subtle such as the windows of your own car, through which you can see, yet you could easily drive right past your friend coming the other way without knowing it, whereas that would never happen if you were both walking or on a bike or scooter. Well, you say, I can just text my friend on my phone. Exactly, and now you're dependent on the phone maker, the carrier, Apple/Google, etc. for that communication to take place.
Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system.
One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars.
This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!
Learners who are driving on a provisional license prior to passing their test must be accompanied by someone who has held a full license for at least three years. They must display an L-plate on the front and rear of the vehicle and cannot use motorways (freeways) unless they are accompanied by a licensed instructor.
It is my understanding that the British process is relatively straightforward by European standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Driver's ed at least used to be pretty common,in part because it gave a discount for the (expensive) insurance covering younger drivers. I don't see anything special about the typical driver's ed instructor anyway. It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex race car driver.
Furthermore, the typical system is that someone gets a learners permit first which lets them drive only under a limited set of conditions so they gain experience that way.
And, honestly, you gain experience by doing things not taking classes.
Sure, but "experience" doesn't have to mean you're out there on the highway with everyone else. You don't start scuba diving in the actual ocean. You get experience in a pool for a while first.
That way you try to bring the quality of drivers up to that of the instructor, not a cargo cult of family members who might be horrid at driving.
But somehow driving, and the daily experience of it is: fuck you, me first. And it shows. It's an adversarial system. I'm really impressed that it works as well as it does, despite being the #1 killer of teenagers, and 40,000 total deaths on the road per year.
So you end up with the current system which is fairly similar across states and countries with somewhat greater or lesser rigor depending on the particular place.
This is a common misunderstanding of what is really needed in driver education to improve the average driver. The average American driver really lacks a lot of skills and a clear understanding of optimal driving behavior. Driving on public roads should be optimized for safety, but most drive as if it ought to be optimized for speed.
It would be a good improvement if all drivers were required to take a Smith system or similar defensive driving course annually in order to retain their license.
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.
So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article.
1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.
Boulder has a city population of about 100,000 and a metro region population of about 300,000. Here are some random Street View locations from European towns and cities of a roughly similar size.
Reading, England: https://goo.gl/maps/yQaTTaWQJav
Bonn, Germany: https://goo.gl/maps/Pu9Ro28F4UH2
Caen, France: https://goo.gl/maps/ppgL2J8nsAJ2
Vicenza, Italy: https://goo.gl/maps/rMtCBEqC7vr
Click around a bit, explore the neighbourhood, get a sense for the place. Get the picture?
American urban development happens on a scale that is simply incomprehensible to most Europeans. I spent a good ten minutes clicking around Boulder, looking for the city centre; it took me that long to realise that there wasn't one, at least not in the sense that I understand.
Of course, you wouldn't want to live in Boulder without a car. Pretty much the whole point of being there is to get into the mountains.
it's only sad because you went to a 7/11 expecting to get produce! I guarantee you there's a real grocery store within a few blocks.
Pretty good chance that's not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
"In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5% of Americans live in a food desert, meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas."
Or a 23.5% chance that's not true...
“I guarantee this plane won’t crash” = 23.5% chance of dying?
Plus the "within 1 mile" standard seem a little low, that would mean that every single urban grocery store would have multiple competitors within a 2 mile radius which is totally unrealistic though, apparently, is quite common.
In the predominantly hispanic areas around Phoenix there are tons of tiny shops serving the neighborhood -- it's a thing. Where I live now there used to be a few corner markets but now that gentrification is in full swing they are all gone and are being replaced with trendy restaurant/bars with the people presumably now shopping at the major supermarkets. There were probably more before they built the super-massive Ranch Market but I didn't live in this area then so can't really say.
I'd venture to say it has more to do with the cost of owning/operating a car, in Mexico (and much of Europe) they are significantly more costly than the US so the convenience of "shopping local" is different.
In reality it is the opposite. The vast vast majority of space in the US is reserved for the low density living.
Even the supposedly "high density" cities in the US are nothing compared to what they could be. Even places like New York have difficulty building enough housing to house everyone who wants to live there.
I just want a single city, in the entire world, where everyone said "hey, let's just allow building to be as high as anyone wants, and not put a single building restriction on anything".
The people who want low density living having an entire world to choose from. And yet that's apparently not enough for them.
As to your situation, it sounds like it's just not a good fit for your lifestyle. No one is saying that there's not pros / cons or that dense urban living is for everyone. If you want to grow all your own food and raise horses, NYC probably isn't going to be a great fit for you. Ditto if you want a garage full of cars that you work on and take out for leisurely drives all the time.
The issue in America isn't that everyone needs to be forced to live in high-density urban areas. It's that we've spent decades enacting bad policies that heavily discourage urban density while encouraging and subsidizing suburban sprawl. And it turns out that suburban sprawl is bad for the majority of people, and carries huge externalities that we're discovering we can't really afford, but it'll take many decades to reverse the damage we've done.
What makes it more difficult is that there's a lot of cultural value in America (some of it natural, some of it driven by anti-density propaganda) around being positive towards cars, driving, having lots of huge personal space, etc. And negative perceptions of density, public transit, etc.
Not an expert, that's just my read on the situation :)
Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it.
Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."
What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.
This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range.
> wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip
My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.
Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.
At first I just considered the parking hassles a "free-wifi tax" but then they added a second popular sandwich shop/bar next door and it just snowballed from there. Oh, and I lost the free-wifi benefit so now it's all just pure hassle.
The distance is related to the shopping habit. It’s neat watching people move to New York. At first, they continue their big, irregular shopping trips. Slowly, though, they switch to quick daily or every-other-day trips (+ delivery), and walkig to a store around the corner.
Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?
When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.
Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.
Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.
If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest.
By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.
But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends.
Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems.
You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.
The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty:
> an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states in its phase space.
Ergodic is like a gas particle in a box. Over time, it'll have been at every position in the box.
Non-ergodic is like a house of cards. Eventually, it'll collapse and stay down.
Non ergodic: Let there be a car on a major highway in a city. Now cut the roads on the highway in half (say for construction). Congestion results and consequently the cars never again move as fast as before. (equivalent to your house of cards)
def ergodic(f(),x):
return f(avg(x)) == avg(f(x))BTW, it looks like you've got a syntax error in your Python example.
Dying malls get liquidated and repurposed if it's economically viable otherwise they just sit there as a giant husk of "what was" because it hurts no one for them to merely exist.
Just because something exists doesn't mean the market is working. Central Park doesn't exist because it was "economically viable", some things are difficult to put in monetary terms and especially when it requires voters to get together to come to a concensus.
The empty mall lot owner can probably keep re-financing the land and using it as a piggy bank since property values are on a tear in the Valley...what do they care how little value it provides to nearby and prospective residents.
And in downtown cities, parking garages are alreay expensive. $30-50/day in Manhattan, for example. (I would agree that street parking should match garage rates, and not be effectively subsidized, though.)
(Incidentally, there very much are different rules, and for the most part US cities have worked very, very hard to make it easier to add cars than people).
So $30-50/day seems right, especially considering parking garages tend to be underground, no plumbing, etc., so the space is presumably cheaper than residential/office.
My employer, however, does not rent their parking lot out after hours. They might be able to make some money if they did, though.
My uncle runs a small parking lot in a central business district. He clears a very healthy living working 5:30-9 five days a week, plus events. When he is ready to retire, he can sell it for a couple of million dollars or pass it on to his kid.
Most older central city parking is like that... modest income to cover taxes and expenses to park the property for future speculation or security for loans. Newer ones are usually part of another development and are tax exempt or taxpayer funded.
The malls were very economically viable in the 80s and 90s. In my areas, malls whose bonds are getting paid off are in-filling the outer areas of the property and some lots with the current hot real estate hustle... hotels and giant gas stations.
The market can be inefficient. It's a construct of society and society can set some nonsensical rules. Heck, the market can be inefficient even under simple rules. It's easy to construct dynamical systems with different phases, some with equilibria and some without. Most economic analysis -- that whole supply/demand thing -- assumes an equilibrium to make the math easier.
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 riding something that can't be carried into a building with you, it's inconvenient at best to park it outside.
Just removing parking from new construction won't solve the problem, it will compound it. People still won't want to get on slow, crowded, uncomfortable buses or packed, unreliable, dirty trains. We'll just get more people driving endlessly around the block looking for parking and polluting the air, more accidents from drivers hitting people in the road, more sprawl as people shun the city so they can drive in the suburbs instead.
Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc.
Public transit needs a major overhaul, major investment, and a new attitude. It has to be about riders' comfort, convenience, and happiness, not just jamming people into routes as if they were statistics in a planning meeting.
New development should be aimed at walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, planned for people first, not cars.
All these things have to happen to solve the problem. It won't be easy, but unless we do something like that, we'll be living with the car problem for a very long time to come.
So it is accurate (although it sounds like a contradiction) to say that *"Nobody wants to take the bus because it is too crowded".
One of the issues in general with increasing Seattle-Bellevue throughput is having to bridge the lake. I-90 traded a separate bridge of dedicated express lanes, for HOV lanes combined with other traffic - so the under construction Link light rail can use that separate bridge. 520 is another option, but there's a toll since they just replaced the narrow 2-lane pontoon bridge with 4-lane highway that's suspended higher above the water.
Are there places that don’t call these a ‘bendy bus’? They are missing out on a great name.
And so parking spaces are built which are never used.
As a cyclist, I'd argue that most separated lanes as implemented are less safe than taking the main travel lane.
These lanes seem to be based around the idea that intersections don't matter for safety, and in practice they tend to greatly increase the number of problems at intersections.
In Austin, TX, where I live, the city had added several fully separated cycle tracks near where I live. The only reason I ever use any of them is if I'm stopping at a location on them. If I'm continuing further down the same road, I instead take the regular travel lane. I do this because so many drivers turn directly into the cycle track without checking for oncoming cyclists. This is despite the signs placed prominently on every one of these to look before turning. (In my view, signs like that are strong evidence that a particular location is dangerous for cyclists. They don't noticeably change driver behavior in my view, and seem to exist more for the city to cover their asses than anything else.)
I'm not the only cyclist who has a problem with these cycle tracks either. A friend of mine has additionally pointed out that the city tends to put the cycle track on the downhill side of the road, but not the uphill side, which is exactly the opposite of what they should do because cyclists go much faster downhill than uphill.
If I had to guess, I'd say the problem comes from politicians and bureaucrats who are not cyclists being the driving forces behind the construction of these lanes. You don't need to talk to too many cyclists before you'll hear my views about cycle tracks.
I'm okay with separated facilities when done well, but the vast majority I've seen are poorly designed and amplify problems.
I saw a really good example of an unsafe bike lane when I lived in Kent, wa. As you say the planner had put it on the downhill side of a 45 mph main thouroughfare dropping 500 feet in 1000 feet. It had a lot of great twists and turns for drivers to cut using the bike lane. And there was nothing on the uphill side.
Meanwhile I could bike a mile south and drop the same elevation by rolling through quiet neighborhoods with school zones and no traffic. It boggled my mind how none of the planners thought to redirect bicycle down this route instead of the most dangerous downhill they could find.
This also shows that planners often try to make dangerous roads less dangerous, when they instead should often instead push for cyclists to take entirely different paths than drivers. The planners are thinking like drivers, wanting to take the most direct route, when in my experience cyclists will gladly take a less direct route if it's much safer.
Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are closed for construction or eliminated completely, the city has to pay the private company for those spaces as if they were being used. Want bike lanes? Don't forget to account for the paying for all those eliminated parking spaces. Pedestrian only areas? See above. Ride sharing cutting into driving? Guess they'll have plenty of empty space to pick up and drop off in - unless there's a way for the parking meter company to charge for that couple of minutes in a parking space.
But it's not all bad - the city only has to put up with it until 2083.
http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-...
Chicago got taken so hard that it's now the canonical example of how not to do this kind of thing.
Bids are opened 12/1. Aldermen get invited on 12/2 to a briefing that day, where they get limited information and no details. 12/3 a finance committee meeting is held to get an ordinance to accept the bid into process - what they'll be voting on is provided only during this meeting. The finance committee passes it with no significant scrutiny. The full council vote is scheduled for 12/4, and requests to see the city's numbers and financial analysis of the deal are rejected.
When you look back at the deal, to me and an awful lot of other people it looks like one of two things: either most of the people involved on the city side were utterly incompetent, or someone(s) were nicely taken care of in some way.
Edit; autocorrect
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_...
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.
1+ hour away is fairly common in London, even on public transport. Not only is London itself pretty large, but it has a big catchment area for people coming in for work from elsewhere.
Buses can be made safer and cleaner and more comfortable with investment. Would I prefer to drive in my own car in my own space? You bet I would. But the difference in price is not a few dollars, it in the order of £60 a day which is £1,200 a month. Not worth it. That £1.2K would be better spent paying down a mortgage
I think that in the US, the problem is that most public transit is absolute garbage[1], and so people who have only lived here don't realize that it can actually be superior to a car for commuting if the people are willing to provide the funds to government and insist on using it to build a world-class public transit system. Therefore, public transit rarely improves, and so it's perceived as "the poor person's option" because it's extremely slow compared to driving, and generally absolutely filthy.
[1] To make things worse, the employees of the transit systems seem to generally be told that the systems they're supporting already are "world-class", and "the envy of the country", so they feel like there's no room for improvement.
Most cities are laid out in a hub and spoke system, pulling from suburbs into downtown, but most employers are in office parks in a ring outside the downtown area. A public transit commute may mean nearly an hour into downtown, than another hour to the suburbs, followed by a long walk. In other cities, public transit is only available at certain hours: my parents, for instance, can only catch a bus to work before 7 AM and then won't have a bus back home until after 5 or 6 PM.
I live in large dense city in the US (Los Angeles). I live a 15-20 minute car ride from work. The city is going to be doing some construction on my route and have asked the businesses to encourage their employees to take public transit, walk, bike, etc. during the construction. I looked into taking the bus, which for the first time in my life, is a reasonable walk from my home. It would increase my commute time (one way) from 20 minutes to 50 minutes! Sorry, but I don't have an extra hour I can take out of my day for that. It would be better to just work from home, but my employer won't let me do that for the duration of the construction which is supposed to last a year or two.
EDIT: For about a month, my office was at the Santa Monica end of the train. (Like literally right next to the train stop.) Sadly it no longer is. Even then, a coworker decided to take the train once from his place in Pasadena. His normally 45-60 minute commute increased to an hour and 50 minutes taking public transport. Sorry, but he'll just drive instead.
Los Angeles may be large, but it is NOT dense, even by US standards.
Right now my outrageous urban rent and taxes are subsidizing your driving privileges. Real estate for garages instead of housing/retail and road lanes for cars over pedestrians/cyclists. Those costs need to be passed on to the suburban drivers and not the car-less city dwellers.
Unfortunately the political will for gas taxes is null and we'll be left with draconian measures like car holidays and congestion tolls which won't alleviate the need to provide car infrastructure for peak demand, which is artificially high due to the distorted market.
Yes, please please please let's get the government OUT of the housing market, and let's get rid of those building height limits that disallow anything above 6 stories, even though rent is in the thousands of dollars for a studio.
You should be allowed to drive your car and live in whatever low density place you want. Can you offer the same thing for me, by allowing the market to produce high density living as well?
I recall some sort of economic study that suggested rents would drop by hundreds of dollars per month if parking minimums could be eliminated. (No time to find it right now, sorry.) I'd take that, as right now my apartment gives me two parking spots that I can't do anything with. (A previous apartment manager complained when I used the spot for storage. Cars only, I guess. Renting to others would not be practical, either.)
In reality there are bubbles of population density in any country where large amounts of people congregate to live and work - we call these "cities". It is in these cities where public transport makes sense. If you need to go somewhere in the middle of nowhere, then drive (just the same as we do here in Europe - you dont need to cover every route with public transport)
The availability of space doesn't, in itself, make things scattered away.
Likewise, the majority of people commuting to (eg) Manhattan don't drive to work.
When someone in Houston says that they drive to work, the comparison isn't to someone working in Central London. It's to someone who lives who works in the outskirts of Birmingham.
I think the US is too car dependent. But from my experience, outside of London the UK is pretty terrible too.
I get this as well. I hear Americans talk about driving into town for work being hard, and they're literally talking about somewhere like San Francisco, and I think why on earth would you even think that was a reasonable thing to try to do? That's obviously a stupid idea.
I'm quite familiar with going into Boston from the exurbs, in part because I commuted semi-regularly for about a year.
I do often take the commuter rail if I'm going in 9-5ish and can always get a seat because I'm near the end of the line but...
1.) It's not cheap, it's about $30/day between the train, parking, and the subway on the other end.
2.) It tends to take longer.
3.) The real kicker is that I have very little flexibility on the other end. There's basically one train mid-afternoon I can catch, a number at evening rush hour (which can be very crowded), and a few later.
4.) So basically if I have an evening event or just need to go in for the morning I drive, even if just to the subway parking though that fills up extremely early so I need to leave by 5:50-6am or so.
Congestion charge applies only to a small part of London and all those car parks have season tickets at something like -70% discount.
If traffic and fuel costs were such a hassle, nobody would drive to work except a few maniacs, generally cars are chosen for convenience / because public transport is slower and annoying in various ways.
Honestly, this number seems reasonable to me, when you consider that people could be parking at a) their home, b) their work, and c) at any number of other places (restaurant, grocery store, mall, etc). Not to mention, each household may have more than one car. It's probably too high in aggregate, but we don't park by average, we park for specific means, and if the lot at the grocery store is full, or at our work, or at home, we consider that to be an inconvenience and want more spots.
The only way to change this is to move away from the 1-2 car-per-family model we live in right now.
You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-private vehicles (which includes things like taxis and Uber). But having fully utilized parking is the worst of all possible worlds.
Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very little room for surges. Business is impacted when the availability of parking isn't 100% reliable.
It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least.
Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of transportation mode.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste...
Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many?
I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.
It isn't just that businesses lose customers when the parking is full. People don't want to drive there and then have to turn back, so many won't take the risk. The lots may only be 70% full, but the chance that they might be 100% full is enough to make people go elsewhere. Customers expect dependable service.
It's the same with operating hours. If you make your hours completely random, with a decent chance of being closed when customers show up, nobody will bother to make the trip.
I don’t think anyone is missing your point, but it sounds terribly short-sighted.
For one, what’s good for business is commonly catastrophic to other systems. An effort to prioritize here is critical.
For some reason, baby-boomers have an odd propensity for ignoring more systematic, hollistic concerns brought by the shift to dependency on automobiles. I think I can speak for most of my millenial peers when I say it seems maniacal.
And I am getting sick of feeling guilty for blaming “baby-boomers”. You people just don’t know when enough is enough.
Of course, you’re also responsible for gutting the safety nets and other civil structures that the victims of failed businesses rely on. Again, gridlock. Drop it already. At least you ahve a business.
Congratulations, you've just created an unsolvable traffic light network, and magicked all-day gridlock out of thin air.
This is a multivariate optimization problem. We need to consider the repercussions of heavily over-provisioning parking.
One of the reasons is frequency. Depending on time of day, a subway or bus may not come for 10 minutes. A car is basically infinite frequency: when you want to go, you go right away.
The other is more direct routing. To get to my favorite bookstore, about 5 miles due north, on transit takes an hour because I either have to take the rail into the city center first and transfer (or take one of the most infrequent and slow bus routes in the system). It's maybe 35 minutes by bike or car, as long as it's not rush hour. I don't own a car, but I can't say I wouldn't be tempted some days, if I did.
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.
is somewhat contradicted by
> Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant
This is the space constraint the article focuses on: if there's enough surface parking, it pushes destinations far enough apart that you need to move your car to go from one to the other.
Re: marginal cost, there are plenty of effects that impose additional capital and/or opportunity cost on converting between parking and not-parking uses - everything from long leases for companies that operate parking (10+ years sometimes) to basic constraints like "putting up a building requires a large chunk of up-front spending". Those effects make "economic equilibrium" slow-to-impossible to reach.
Have the car drop you off, then self-drive to an offsite parking, and then return when summoned.
This model would also support mobile "gear boxes" where you have activity-focused mobile storage pods of gear (think toolboxes for trade work, or a surfing/beach pod with your beach gear, or a biking/triathlon pod with all your triathlon gear), which I think will be a huge benefit once self-driving hits reality.
Rather than have storage units where you can't easily get to your stuff because of the side trip and annoyance of loading/unloading, you have modular storage that can be summoned to a spot and purpose needed.
That would reduce storage needs in urban areas as well, so you could further enhance density.
Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. Parking will be built underground for off peak storage of vehicles, allowing the repurposing of surface parking spots. Maybe agricultural robots will make use of them.
Cities will get quieter.
The increase in ride-sharing has already greatly increased congestion: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180316/issue01/1803...
And out in the boonies, some people will keep their personal cars, as it will take longer to get a ride.
Also, the average car size will shrink. Not only will we lose the driver's seat, but peak demand as people go to work may be met with even smaller one-seat cars.
You won't need a car that can handle your worst-case scenario for most of the time. Bigger cars will still be available, of course, because people do like to travel with their friends and family whenever possible.
All in all, it's a lot more likely that that most seats will be filled.
taking labor out of the equation it will become cost effective to be empty an even larger fraction of the time (presumably humans stop driving when they're not getting enough fares to be worthwhile). It may also be economical for these vehicles to never park (not only because parking costs money or might be far away, but because it increases latency) for large fractions of the day.
Cars in general are mainly used at both rush hours and are parked somewhere in between. Sharing cars won't magically change human behaviour.
Some googled "traffic by time of day" graphs: http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~cs1173/images/SATraffic3Intersection... and http://www.cmt4austin.org/Traffic_By_Time_of_Day.htm
Autonomous taxis could also easily caravan reducing their capacity disadvantage over autonomous buses.
No matter how autonomous the vehicle, a tunnel of cars will never have the the same throughput capacity as a subway. For supporting the kind of dense cities that we need to in order to have a somewhat sustainable society in the long-term, that's crucial.
Unless you're talking about fully autonomous subway systems, in which case those already exist - like in NYC.
The L train is actually fully self-driving and self-operating. The TWU has a contract with the MTA that requires them to hire someone to sit around and press a keepalive button every so often, though that doesn't make the train any less autonomous.
(The TWU has a history of striking these sorts of "deals" with the MTA - typically, they take the form of requiring the MTA to pay for the cost of any jobs that are eliminated due to technological advancements. In other words, it becomes more expensive for the MTA to introduce technology - even technology that's already been standard practice for decades elsewhere in the world - than to keep using older and more expensive systems.)
So at this point, we're talking about political barriers to self-driving trains, rather than technological ones, and "repurposing subways for self-driving car tunnels" has all of those same barriers, on top of being a dramatically less efficient way of moving people around.
But it will happen.
And there will continue to be people who choose to drive. I don't see a problem with that.
If anything, they will be much more capable than today's average driver, as those barely capable give up and take cabs.
They will certainly receive more scrutiny, as the number of cameras on the road will explode.
Seriously though, I don't see truly autonomous vehicles unless we acheive general artificial intelligence. I don't see that happening in my lifetime or my children's, but obviously I am not an optimist.
I don't know that driving skill will correlate with desire to drive or own a car. I think getting average Americans to give up their private vehicles and rely solely on public transportation or autonomous vehicles is a SV pipe dream.
There are some realities I think get overlooked. For example, I have a family of six, plus a dog that can't be left alone. How do I go about getting where I need to go in a fast and convenient way? Let's say I can't afford to live in the dense city center, and like most people, I live in the suburbs. Barring some huge shift in politics, infrastructure, and major advancement in AI, what is my motivation to give up my minivan?
Uber already is pretty fast. I just used it in upstate New York north of Albany and there was hardly any wait. Any wait that exists will go down once robotic vehicles becomes dominant.
And pricing will also be important to make that happen. People who want less than 5 minutes wait can pay more, but that will be pretty reasonable priced. It's cheaper to pay for a vehicle to wait for 5 minutes or even 20 than it ever could be to make it wait for 3 hours or 12 hours.
And that IS essentially what we do when we have a vehicle on constant standby. We are paying for the fixed costs of having it wait around all the time. There's a daily cost to tie up that capital. It's 1/30 of your monthly payment. And an hourly cost.
In any case, individuals will be able to choose the option that suits them. And go back and forth. Some days you may value immediate pickup and you could rental a vehicle by the day. Other days you may not care and want to save money. Or you use your vehicle to care around tons of stuff and it's better for you to own. It's all good.
Sure, many people are set in their ways. In the long run, that doesn't matter.
But that use case will be solved too. Automated vehicles will come in all sizes. Families aren't the only groups that like to travel together.
If there is a market for such vehicles, somebody will offer it.
The area where that is the case will expand enormously once a chauffeur driven limousine is cheaper than standing-room-only mass transit.
There's no way I'd drive up to San Francisco and deal with parking when I can be driven up there and dropped off for the same money. Even twice the same money would be a good deal.
You wouldn't need inspectors to make sure fares are paid. A lot of trains already don't have them.
But eventually it will be very easy to tell electronically if someone boarding a bus has paid the fare. You could even keep track of who doesn't and collect a fine later.
There really is no way buses win.
The cost and availability of parking is one of the primary deterrants to car ownership and driving. If that is removed, then due to induced demand, the price commuting by car will substantially decrease. Following induced demand again this means the amount of traffic on the road will substantially increase, which will be a nightmare for cities.
Autonomous cars will not solve anything and will in all likelihoods make the situation much worse.
The only thing that will take cars off the road is simply to reduce the amount of road available to them.
Traffic will always fill to occupy the available space available.
This is why LA and Houston have built incredibly wide highways and have never solved their traffic issues.
People say this but it's very unclear it will be the case. Especially outside of places where the environment (salted roads for example) take a toll, most of the cost of owning a car is ultimately distance, not time.
A lot of factors could make pay-per-use fleet cars a bit cheaper or more expensive than owner but it's not clear that the economic difference will really be all that great.
I also see people expecting drastically cheaper prices than Uber but the overall costs (including those associated with getting the car to you) are still going to be 50 cents a mile or so.
And that is a big part of why AVs will be cheaper. Paying 1/10 of $500 a month is better than paying $500.
The cost will also depend on how big a vehicle you need. For many people going to work, they only need room for one person and a little space for cargo. Paying for 1/4 of a vehicle is cheaper than paying for a whole vehicle.
So even the variable cost of your transportation will go down.
But mostly there is $0.50 / mile or so which is reasonably constant whether I put 10K miles on my car per year or 50K.
There's some savings in provisioning for average usage rather than peak usage as to type of vehicle and so forth. But I'm skeptical how significant this will be beyond city dwellers who are on the cusp of not owning their own vehicles (or their own second vehicles) anyway.
I imagine most people will perceive that there's not enough parking unless there's an open spot right out front of where they're going when they get there.
Services that facilitate parking further away from your destination might help.
I think the main problem is not the amount of parking but the distribution of parking. I live in NYC and avoid driving around the city as much as possible except off peak and short local runs.
The big problem is commercial centers tend to be high density and clustered together. For example, queens boulevard between Forest Hills and Rego Park has dozens of restaurants and shops where the number of parking spots on the block vs. the number of people concentrated on that block is where the problem begins. A restaurant with one or two parking spots in front might have two dozen people people inside including staff requiring at least six parking spots (assuming couples).
My neighborhood Ozone Park is in south Queens and live is a part that is a block from the A train. Super convenient location as everything is in walking distance of a few blocks including the train. There is also a school around the block. So every morning dozens of commuters pack the neighborhood looking for parking for the train and then add the teachers and other school staff who only get about two dozen reserved spots and half are blocked by construction. Your driveway is frequently partly blocked and finding street parking during weekdays is brutal until about 7-8PM.
So the blocks along the train stations are municipal free-for all parking lots. As you push out into the back areas away from the commercial cacophony there is street parking so long as the neighborhood was built with sanity meaning homes have functional driveways (most don't or can only fit a single car). And there are plenty of those areas spread throughout the city but the parking goes to waste. Then throw in neighborhoods of row houses with no driveways and again, the housing density outweighs the parking.
Face it, no planning was done for the automobile in major cities. Parking allotment is abysmal and to make things worse, maximizing the dwelling square footage is what all developers aim for to maximize the value. So there is zero incentive to build in sane parking. This is an example of a nearby 10 apartment home that was built with parking for about 8-10 vehicles if people park front to back and side-by-side underneath the front half: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75...
Not exactly a pretty example. Down the block from me a single story ranch with a big back yard was bought by a developer, demolished and three two family homes built with the easy ability to add an illegal basement apartment with a little modding (it was so obvious when we toured them during sale). There used to be more parking on weekends before those homes went in. Now even weekend parking can be tough. And this type of development is happening all over NYC. Single family homes are bought up demolished and replaced with 4+ apartments each of which usually bring one car into the neighborhood. They also build little or no parking in. The requirements for parking are easily cheated with a long driveway that is only practical for one or two cars to use as you can't practically park six cars back to back. No one is building single family homes anymore.
Summary: it's a damn mess.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-reme...
There is one piece of public transit which makes a lot of sense in the U.S.: the bus (both local and coach buses), but it is unstylish and so gets no attention.
Imagine how much better it would be getting from city to city if the money that went into subsidizing AmTrak (which approximately nobody uses, least of which the lower classes) was available as a grant or credit for every passenger mile on the already-thriving network of American bus carriers (Greyhound, Megabus, and 24 others in the long-distance category alone).
Also, not really sure why the federal government is subsidizing $10-40+ one-way fares (receiving an average of 25 dollars in federal subsidy) as "commuter" service, even in the less-bad Capitol Corridor.
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.
Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.
Buses are inflexible solutions, far from ideal transport. You have to find the bus, abide by its schedule, and the bus can only deliver its passengers sort of near its destination. If the bus isn't near full, it's also very wasteful.
A better solution would be on-demand, and could come much closer to the passenger for pickup and dropoff. It would be cheaper to scale as needed.
I think that describes driverless cars, and less perfectly Uber/Lyft. Improving congestion is a matter of improving thoroughput, and our society would be better off focusing on ways to pack more driverless cars into less road, or have more roads, or have more road alternatives (point to point electric scooters), or have better traffic routing, than make a bunch of buses and have people drive them around all day.
And I don't even need to mention the crushing inflexibility of subways and trains.