Hacker News Reader

Comment by rimbo789 | Hacker News Reader

Cars, and in particular, parking, kills cities. Parking is sponge that sucks all the life out of places.

The High Cost of Free Parking is an incredible book that shows exactly how awful parking has been for society.

> Cars, and in particular, parking, kills cities. Parking is sponge that sucks all the life out of places.

Yes, and. If you start charging for parking to try to fight against this without also improving public transportation, it just kills cities faster. I avoid going into downtown cores where I will pay $25-$40 to park for an hour or two to eat at a restaurant, which means those restaurants can only support their businesses off captive people during the work day, which means that moving to remote work widely across society devastated downtown cores in a way you would not have expected. All because I can get downtown in 15 minutes from my house in my car but it takes 3 hours and 20 minutes by bus and there is no other public transport in the 7th largest city in the US by population.

Cars are the enemy, sort of, but the biggest enemy is the complete lack of any reasonable public transport in almost every major US city, which needs to exist to fairly ratchet up on parking.

Not in my city. Business is all dying, everyone avoids to go to the centre, everywhere the city fights cars, handy man charge extra just for comings, nah, it's basically gated communities now, well, they can have it, but life happens somewhere else then, where it can expand freely.

What is your city? What anti-car policies were implemented? Did city offer viable altenatives to driving?

Cars do not allow life to happen or expand freely. Cars are prison, trapping people and communities in congestion.

Cars are very very very dangerous devices.

Where do you live? I’ve never found a counterexample to the benefits of de-car-ing, would love to learn more

Makes a bold claim without stating the city.

> exactly how awful parking has been for society.

Not parking would be worse. Just think of the injuries from jumping from moving vehicles.

> Cars, and in particular, parking, kills cities. Parking is sponge that sucks all the life out of places.

What's your solution to it then?

Mixed-use developments, walkable neighborhoods. When you make it easy to walk or bike to any place people need to go, parking is not necessary. Plenty of cities do it just fine, just not in the US.

Then invest in public transit (trains, mainly) for whatever isn't within walking distance.

Okay, so cities that are only accessible to people who live there?

It would be better to just get rid of cities. They're a drain on resources that we can't afford.

I think you'll find that the cities that do this manage to have travelers from other areas just fine.

If you built for cars you get traffic and congestion: if you built for people (transit, bike lanes, pedestrianization) you will get community

Also ban free parking

Japanese cities have extensive train networks making it easy, quick and cheap to get around. Most people living in Tokyo or other major Japanese cities don’t own cars. This makes the cities much more liveable and community oriented.

Japan also has some other differences from america that are required for this system to function

Yes; however America constructed those differences over the course of the 20th century when they removed rail lines and paved everything over with concrete. In the 1920s and 1930s America was exactly like this, with dense high-frequency train networks connecting even smaller towns, and walkable urban centers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com