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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

Sure, it's easy to say "parking lots waste space". But (most of them) get used often. For "carsharing" to cover that usage, you'd need enough shared-cars to handle the trips for everyone in the lot. At which point, you'd be parking close to the same number of cars anyway.

If you really want to eliminate parking lots, you have to offer a reliable alternative, such as light rail or subways -- which most intelligent cities have and/or are building more of.

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That's the elephant in the room. I was surprised that the article left out public transit completely. (Maybe because it has such bad reputation in the US etc.?)

Suburban commute can scale much better with suburban trains. Carsharing/ridesharing/bikesharing can then be used to travel the last mile from home to the station and from the station to work.

Author mentioned home town as Zagreb, so I'm not quite sure that this has an American author.

But yeah, it's ridiculous that there's no mention of public transport, a system which has many other positive effects and per capita advantages.

Weird.

> (Maybe because it has such bad reputation in the US etc.?)

Author is Berlin-based, according to his bio.

But for Americans, there is so little public transit in the US, and what little that does exist is so rarely useful, that a large majority of Americans don't even remember to think of it at all -- particularly if your not in a top-20 US city.

There are even Top 20 US cities whose only public transportation option is still mostly just a public bus system.

With the right car sharing app and infrastructure, if you're going to be at your destination for more than a few minutes, you can mark your car as 'available' while it's in the parking lot so you don't have to keep paying for it while it's parked. Somebody else can then use it instead of leaving it there taking up space in the parking lot. Then when you want to go home, you call a new car.

Car sharing really doesn't make sense without self-driving cars – at that point, it'll actually start saving space, because you no longer need the parking space to be in the middle of cities, but rather can just build a few huge carparks in the countryside.

Car sharing fills this gap: I want to keep the same car and handle multiple errands and use the car as temporary storage in between. (I'm going to pick up some tools from home depot, then to get my hair cut, then to a grocery store before heading home.)

Check out The Walkable City by Jeff Speck or Suburban Nation. I believe both of those books touch on the lack of use of parking spaces. Especially with city codes requiring a certain number of spaces for businesses or residential structures even when said spaces aren't necessary.

You can reduce spots/meters and raise prices and that should solve a lot of the problem. It'll also increase walking/biking/ride sharing.

Also please keep in mind I'm just trying to be constructive with some thoughts I have and books I've read, and not trying to be argumentative.

I think people should also think about how useless setbacks are, in the suburbs setbacks are mandated so you end up with a front yard, but people only use their backyards, such a tremendous waste.

There are feedback loops here. In NYC density is high enough that very few cars per person are needed and public transit is used by most people. In this situation a taxi may take the place of 50 cars.

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