How Parking Destroys Cities
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
For huge areas of the country (and yes, this includes those classified as "urban"), the distances are too long, and the scenery too hostile or unexciting, to encourage walking. The more this happens, the more people want cars, and everything about accommodating cars (vs accommodating those on foot) worsens the area for human use: heat islands from parking and roads, danger from the same, dead landscapes, etc. Part of the problem is that cars are great for GDP (road building/maintenence, New rings of suburbs every generation as people flee the old ones, the whole car ecosystem) and horrible for building wealth, and ultimately national policy is all about GDP.
The inertia of this ugly system keeps cars nearly necessary to live and work in most places. And you can live in ways that avoid car use, but all entertainment and recreation and your friends are inaccessible without cars because most people pick the car option when faced with the question.
All of this means that there's no critical mass of people using transit to push for high level of service, and buses (and in some regions trains too) become filthy places to avoid.
For example, a local city wants to expand a road leading to the downtown area, to improve traffic flow from the highway to the downtown core area.
I'd much rather they build a parking garage where we have a park and ride lot, and run the modern equivalent of a Budd Car on existing track a couple miles into the city and back. The tracks parallel the road they want to build, and anybody who wants to drive into the city is going to park and walk around anyway, so why not reduce traffic and make it less frustrating to go downtown?
Not necessarily. Minibuses, bikes, e-scooters, even cars (park and ride, a big parking next to a train station; you get off the train and on your car for the last/first part of your trip) are perfectly viable "last mile" options.
We have level of service standards for roads and highways. But for pedestrians and bicyclists there's no standards for sidewalks on every street, bus stop quality, tree canopy, protection from speeding SUV drivers, crosswalks, bike racks, etc.
Unfortunately massive public works are by far our biggest source of grifting. It takes an average of 20 years and $120M/mile (60M €/km) to open a new metro station.
Maybe Switzerland doesn't have this problem, but I'm all for solutions that take funds away from our politician's hands. And the car is great in that respect, as long as you don't advocate to increase road capacity at a massive cost.
Light rail transit or streetcars can be a lot cheaper than that, while still avoiding quite a bit of car traffic. The best system for any given atea is going to depend on density and local demand.
Yeah, but their downsides (noise, vibrations, visibility) make them impractical for new projects in most old cities.
"Vee arr ze stupid cows being milked until implosion!"
Moooo! ;->
Neither of these are very good. I'd rather one problem be solved than have a choice between 3 awful compromises.
1. Cheap
2. Takes very little space
3. Good for health
4. In a dense city almost as fast as a car; sometimes faster
For people who doubt biking is possible. In Finland there is a city near arctic circle called Oulu with population of around 100 000 people. They have 2h of day light in winter. Temperatures often go to -10 degrees centigrade. And 22% of all trips are done by bikes. Including children going to primary schools.
In fact, London's taxi culture already has (or had) that sort of approach.
Your commute to and from work are now influenced by traffic. Some days are worse than others, but your boss doesn’t care as long as you are on time.
Fuel/electricity, maintenance, tires, and all the other costs for owning a vehicle add up to be a significant cost. And if you are already paying a premium to drive, might as well capitalise on that.
Eventually you move a little farther from work to buy a bigger house for less, and free up some of your income for other things. That 30 minute commute is now an hour and maybe less on a good day.
Well, if your going to spend two hours a day in a vehicle, might as well buy something more comfortable.
It is said that in the Netherlands 27% of all trips are done by bicycle - IIRC it's the highest percentage in Europe.
What is not mentioned though is that 50% are done by car.
If you look at the distance traveled it's 75% car, 8% bicycle.
The cities in that country that have a higher trip percentage are tiny, 100k towns.
Bicycles replace walking, not driving.
I don't think the 27% number is particularly useful because it offers no context into the type of trip. No one is suggesting you use bicycles for intercity trips, but for city transport they're perfect. This is reflected in the mode share numbers for cities compared to the national average: Wikipedia has Amsterdam at 40% bike share with 29% public transport and 27% driving. In the context of a city, biking and public transport are the obvious choices to get more people into the same area.
I think you have a chicken and the egg problem in many cities where driving is hugely subsidised and no investment takes place in other transportation methods. For example, in the UK the majority of trips seem to be around 5 miles or less. By bike this is only a 30 minute commute at the extreme end. Once you account for traffic it ends up being only 10-20 minutes slower than driving the same distance.
Compared to the Netherlands cycling only makes up 2% of the national mode share. The difference between the UK and the Netherlands is that we have almost no investment in cycling infrastructure, and what we do get is typically poorly executed.
> Bicycles replace walking, not driving.
Personally I don't believe driving belongs in any city where you also want people to have an enjoyable time walking the streets and socialising. It's a perfectly acceptable way of getting between cities or from remote locations, but within a city there are almost always better options.
That's the thing: in Amsterdam. Who are those people that are responsible for half of all trips and where are they headed with their cars?
Looking at the map I wouldn't drive in this city as well - the distance from the city limits to the centre is less than 5km, so as much as I have from my apartment to the centre of the city I live in, and I generally don't drive into this 5km radius circle around here.
I guess what I'm trying to say is cities typically end up the way they do due to how their residents approach transport planning. You can either continue with a car centric approach that leads to more sprawl and a city center that's less welcoming/interesting to visit, or you can try to make the city friendly towards more efficient modes of transport that encourage people to onto the streets.
The point is if you build city centres around the idea of biking/walking then you can have much smaller and compact cities centres which are more pleasant and suitable for biking/walking at the same time. Biking/walking doesn't replace driving so much as eliminate it.
For people coming from further away, you drive to the edge of the city centre, park (often in a multilevel car park), and then walk the last part to your destination. This is how most Dutch cities are set up. Bigger cities of course have more short distance public transport too.
I'm from the Netherlands, 30 years old and have never owned a car. I do most everything by bike and public transport, occasionally if the situation calls for it I rent or borrow a car (I know people with cars that, unsurprisingly, aren't being used all the time). It certainly depends on your exact living situation, but my impression is that infrastructure plays a big role. I lived in Amsterdam for 12 years, and almost everything in that city encourages you to use a bike, and almost everyone does. Recently I've moved to Germany, and even though it's generally considered a bike friendly country with lots of people owning bicycles, the infrastructure doesn't compare. Dedicated bike lanes are way less common, and whatever is there is often bad quality (avoiding bumps all the time is really energy consuming). Again, unsurprisingly, people use cars here over distances where it wouldn't even cross my mind.
Of course distance matters, and cars will be preferable for long distances with bad public transport connections. I've never found driving a car inside a city to make a lot of sense though, it's often not even faster taking congestion etc into account. Put the bike infrastructure in place, and people will use it. Lots of Dutch train stations now have what's referred to as a "public transport bike", a few euros lets you borrow a sturdy bike for a 24-hour period. Take a train into town, do the rest with the bike, it's all really simple and fast. I see this being added to large parking spaces outside of cities in the future (maybe they already have - I don't own a car so I wouldn't know ;]).
In smaller villages however, that are more spread out and usually only have one or two grocery stores, people usually take the car or their bike to the grocery store, because walking is too far. In this case, bikes do replace trips by car.
Also note that in general, Dutch cities are quite walkable and cycleable. If I visit a friend on the other side of the city I live in, I go by bike. Which is about as fast as going by car. Going by public transport also takes about the same time. This is a result of the Downs-Thomson paradox [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
In cities (and I lived in London until six years ago) you needed a car for transporting shopping. Its either that or pay inflated prices at local convenience stores. Where I lived (Leyton) there were 1 or 2 supermarkets within a mile or two but other parts of London you had to travel further. Even with the much better public transport, you would not be able to carry more than a couple of bags of shopping. And much of London was just too dangerous to cycle on.
So I can understand why people like their cars even in cities.
It increases the costs of private properties when it's part of the property, and public parking increases government expenditures. It also consumes lots of otherwise very valuable space.
That's without factoring in the increased costs on social structures from the extra drivers on the road when there is more parking space.
In my opinion there should be no free parking in inner cities, and no requirements for parking spaces for property developers. Parking should be possible only in market priced parking garages. Parking options could still be built into apartment buildings, again at prices reflecting the cost of land/building costs. It should be markedly cheaper to buy an apartment without parking option.
Suburban areas are different of course, but cities seem to only turn really alive when cars are reduced and population density exceeds 10,000 per square kilometer.
I drive daily and have nothing against cars. I hope that small semi-self-driving electric cars will eventually replace our dying public transit. There are many great things about the car. But I hate parking with a passion. In Lisbon we could easily double or triple the speed and amount of traffic flow without any investment by getting rid of a few thousand spots of street parking. Road space should be for people to go about their business, not for storing inert objects.
My hope against hope is that will one day we abolish street parking and invest in world-class automated below-ground parking. Let 1000 underground auto lifts bloom. Done properly it might even jump-start a new globally competitive manufacturing industry, something we haven't had since the 80s.
Agreed, but surely the best arrangement in a dense, traditional city centre is not to have high speed traffic at all except on a few large thoroughfares, and to reserve most other streets and alleys to pedestrian use.
Why?? That can't work with the terrain and current buildings in Lisbon, there simply isn't enough space for a car per person. And I can't imagine a livable city with so much space and money wasted for parking and roads. ( Due to induced demand )
Improving public transit is a much better option, especially considering Lisbon has some decent infrastructure already ( the tram and metro networks seemed pretty decent from my trip there just at the start of the pandemic).
Maybe it's a sign of old age but I've grown tired of idealistic solutions to persistent problems. Would I prefer a phenomenal public transit system over cars? Absolutely, I hate driving. But it is what it is and pining for Nirvana will not help us whatsoever. Better work with the momentum we have.