Hacker News Reader

Comment by twblalock | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, everyone driving and parking a car in dense urban areas is not sustainable past a certain level of density. This results in heavy traffic and a large amount of land dedicated to parking which could be better used as anything else.

This is a top-down structure that was intentionally designed by urban planners after WWII and it is reaching its scalability limit.

View on HN

Limitations on density are put there by popular demand. Most American's don't want that level of density either. I think they're wrong, but they're the majority.

By their actions, Americans show they want density. Otherwise, why are more Americans moving into big cities than moving out of them? Why do they clog up the freeways by driving to work in the same cities at the same time?

People might say they don't want density, but every current trend is toward more density, because of the actions people are taking.

Someone migrating to a big city generally wants to the last one in the door. People are much more interested in consuming density personally than in in allowing developers to produce more of it.

It’s a giant country, and despite what people in the Silicon Valley bubble think, there are a lot of cities with a lot of space. This is an insoluble problem if everyone demands acces to a spot in one or two major cities, because that’s where VC money is concentrated. That’s not a problem for most people though, who frankly don’t care about housing problems or traffic problems for techies. They’ll switch over to EV’s, but good luck trying to get them to embrace trains and busses.

The article is about Cincinnati, not Silicon Valley. And clearly there is a problem in Cincinnati or steps to roll back mandatory parking minimums would not have been taken.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com