America Has Too Much Parking
wsj.com
wsj.com
My city in Australia has been removing street side parking to replace it with trees and dining spaces. It’s beautiful.
I’ve recently moved to Melbourne and found public transport to be massively better. I just don’t have a point of comparison to what it used to be like, like I have for Adelaide.
There’s a lot more that could be done, of course - in particular, expanded car-free zones in the ex-CBD inner-city suburbs. Go from the CBD down Punt or Sydney Rd, for example, and the sudden change in air quality is pretty telling. Don’t reckon anything on that score will improve within our lifetimes though.
Garages that have 20% empty spaces pretty much all the time ,give me the confidence to rely on them. I plan around it being available (and am happy to pay for it). By contrast if it's full 20% of the time then that feeds me with doubt.
I say "done well" because in many cases it's using basement floors and other hidden spaces. Sure the building costs more, but that value is returned in parking fees, and also the improved "dependabilty" of the building.
Of course the sprawling open land approach is terrible, lacks imagination, is ugly, impractical in bad weather, and likely what you thought of reading the headline. So on that I agree.
Parking, like any architectural feature can be done well, or badly.
My impression the that people who complain about "too much parking," actually don't want to you have the "confidence to rely on" parking being available. They want to "feed you with doubt" until you get rid of your car.
I guess if I lived in NY or London I might get rid of the car. But to be honest that's never entered my head here. I need the car to get to work. And yeah, there's parking there. But if there was no parking there, I'd still need car for everything else.
I get the point, there are cities where you can work,play, shop, school, all on public transport. Where ironically the streets are full of cars all the time. But alas, I don't live in one of those cities.
Those types seem to want you to endure whatever hardship is necessary to use public transit and/or a bike for everything, or at least loudly head disdain on the suburbs wish you could join them in some car-less urbanist paradise. They're not really interested in you maintaining whatever lifestyle you have that requires a car, because they disdain cars and the lifestyles that need them.
Pretty close to correct! I can entertain a lot of nuance about the current necessity of car use given the century or so we've spent prioritizing it above all other forms of transportation. But I have no respect for a vision of the future that seeks to maintain car dominance, or the will to a lifestyle that depends on a frankly suicidal dependence on fossil fuels in the face of climate change.
Sorry, not really. If they limited themselves to advocating for areas designed so car ownership wasn't so necessary in accordance with local preferences, and were willing to let others live-and-let-live, that would be fine. Unfortunately, that's rarely the case. Those ideas are frequently coupled with dripping disdain for suburbs and anyone who prefers that lifestyle, and/or an attitude that views personal car ownership as some kind of moral affront that in time must snuffed out, etc.
No, I disdain city planning and architecture that requires nearly everyone to have one.
Do any of those cities exist in the US (except for NY)?
Shopping is tricky. In theory, we could manage our shopping with walking or transport, in practice it's a lot easier to drive.
Because the way it is right now, is that the only way things work is to build everything where land is cheap enough for free surface parking to make sense, the costs of building an underground/multistory garage are not insignificant. There ends up being an inevitable feedback loop wherein all other modes of transportation aren’t practical and everyone is forced into a car whether they want to be or not.
Parking garages are pre-engineered kit-buildings (like steel warehouses). The fact that you have to grease all the usual state palms, go through the stupid approval processes, etc, etc as if you're developing a standalone dedicated facility to put them up whereas a parking lot is basically a footnote on whatever you're already trying to develop is why you rarely see them.
That being said it’s not really a groundbreaking or even particularly interesting thing to point out that America has a cultural problem with favoring cars, and that too much parking is a simple consequence of that.
It's nearly 4% of the US population (2021).
It’s more interesting to have this conversation about a city like Dallas or Houston or St Louis or Tulsa, all of whom have absolutely kowtowed to car culture to create negative externalities like what this article is going on about and for which public transportation probably could not easily be described as “adequate” in comparison to the aforementioned cities of NY, SF, Chicago.
People used to be able to just go down the block here. That's been made illegal many places by zoning.
The issue isn't cars specifically. The issue is our built environment requires cars. Maybe more things should just be down the block.
The continental United States has about 3.5 million square miles of land. By comparison China has about 3.7 million square miles. Roughly the same, give or take a few. Observe the number of public passenger rail lines that China has and the timeframe in which they were built them.
The idea that America is just too geographically big for public rail or any kind of public transportation system and we must be beholden to the car is categorically false.
Zoning requirements are why so many businesses are "a box in a parking lot". When you see a sign in a restaurant that says "Maximum Occupancy X" - that occupancy limit is set by how many parking spaces they have.
"Vertical zoning" is the term used to describe zoning that changes based on height. In "older" cities, you can see photos where the ground floor is a store and the upper floors could be residences. That was killed off in the 50s.
Denver came up with an urban zoning called "Main Street" (now called "C-MS" & "E-MS") which is intended to be pedestrian-friendly [0]. The main page for the zoning code is [1].
0 - https://www.denvergov.org/files/assets/public/community-plan...
1 - https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of...
That's completely and totally wrong. Maximum Occupancy is set by fire codes, based on how many exists there are and how quickly people can evacuate in case of fire.
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/08/maximum-occ...
I could reduce my CO2 emissions by not having a front room and using shared front rooms like pubs or the library.
I'm not going to, though.
"When know what we're doing, this is is the way of the future, it's how we will implement our utopia" is what everyone said back in the 50s-70s when they were cooking up single family zoning, parking minimums and all that crap.
I'm very bearish on the idea that doing the same exact kind of micromanagement of property development but with a different set of values will generate results that of substantially different net value to society over all.
Wait a minute... You're trying to tell me how to live my life!
It is the same problem that presents with pushing everyone to electric vehicles, electric cooking, and electric heat. We can barely meet the demand now. Add 140,000,000 more electric vehicles and millions of homes and you crash the whole grid.
NYC has 4.4MM cars moving through it each day. If only a fraction of them were forced to take the MTA or LIRR on top of existing ridership, then everything grinds to a halt.
Driving is not a precursor to running errands and conducting business (unless your business is dealing with cars) in any established nation with a robust public transportation network. I have heard the argument that cars are necessary mainly from people who have lived their entire life driving from place to place and cannot fathom using public transit. Either because it is woefully underfunded in their area or it has the perceived notion of only being for the poor folk who cannot afford a vehicle.
> It is the same problem that presents with pushing everyone to electric vehicles, electric cooking, and electric heat. We can barely meet the demand now ... NYC has 4.4MM cars moving through it each day.
This is a strange argument. It doesn't take a genius intellect to see that the energy cost to move a person per unit distance travelled is far greater driving solo than it would be taking a tram, bus, or even cycling.
As a plus, we wouldn't need to use so much space for parking these vehicles and we could use the land for other projects that 1. generate more tax revenue and 2. serve a more useful purpose for the general public; i.e. shops, living quarters, third places[1], etc.
All in all, it would be nice to have the ability to go some place without needing the car. The removal of parking lots and reclaiming that space is the cherry on top. You can thank early automotive lobbyists for shaping the current state of affairs[2][3][4][5]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/25/story-cities-...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-31/why-is-am...
[5] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-ever-happened-to-pub_b_6...