To stop building heat islands, stop overbuilding parking lots
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The amount of surface parking in the US does always astound me when I see photos and videos of US cities... The country I live in isn't especially short on space (Australia) but land is expensive in cities so car parks are usually either pretty small, or they're multi-story or under the building (either ground floor parking with the building above, or underground parking under the building). Just seems like such a waste of space to have these massive surface car-parks. Doing it like it's done in Australia has the advantage of things being a bit closer together, which is better for walking between properties or just walking/cycling in general.
But the interesting thing is that surface parking seems like it used to be a lot more common here from what I remember from my childhood, and development and zoning laws seem to have encouraged what were car parks to be re-developed into much more space efficient use. So it is possible - kind of like The Netherlands and cycling - I wish my city and cities in my country were more like that, but they're better now than Amsterdam was in the 1970s, and slowly going in the right direction. The change is possible.
The total footprint as a result is far, far smaller than other large Bunnings buildings in the state.
https://www.bunnings.com.au/stores/sa/edwardstown https://www.bunnings.com.au/stores/sa/mile-end
There's a large timber 'yard', but I haven't looked to see how it works. Seems like there's a ramp up: https://bit.ly/31XKTBb
Might be an oversized lift/elevator too.
Otherwise, larger trade enquiries could be pushed off to a different store. Another store like Kent Town has a fairly small footprint but external parking, so I assume that sort of thing would be phased out.
Something similar in Berlin, Germany over the 'Autobahn' https://duckduckgo.com/?q=berlin+schlangenbader+straße
Developers choose surface lots when the cost of land is less than the cost of a garage.
The main factor is the space available and the cost of the land when the parking was built. Density, land value, and taxes on that land tend to move together.
Huge surface lots are most common in the sprawling parts of the US that were developed post-automobile: particularly suburbs and sprawling western cities. Some of that land that is now part of a city, wasn’t, when it was developed. It was cheap land outside of a city at the time.
Land generally is cheap in the USA because the USA is pretty damn big.
Europeans often don't think about how large the USA is. California alone is larger than every European country except Sweden, Spain, France, and Ukraine, and Texas is bigger than any of those. We have 10 states that are each bigger than the UK on their own.
It's why nobody in the USA takes a train anywhere. Even with a 200 mph train, it would take 15 hours to cross the country, and that's assuming no stops. In some states, you could ride that train for 3 hours in a straight line and not even leave the state.
Surface parking's still the norm here as you move out towards the suburbs and land becomes cheaper, but that's not a regulatory thing AFAICT-- parking garages are really expensive per-space, so surface parking is the standard here unless there's a good reason to do otherwise.
[1] https://library.municode.com/tn/metro_government_of_nashvill...
However, the code does specify a minimum number of parking spaces based on size and use.
You can't just start filming or setting up without going through the proper channels.
>Maybe it would be best if there were no parking mandates at all and cities let the market figure out the right amount of parking space.
That's just hilarious. You should visit just about any city in central and souther europe. All were build either before cars were a consideration or without adequate planning. The result is that driving downtown is a nightmare. Having minimal parking works ok when the population density is high and public transportation is good, but in a car-centric country like the US it just wouldn't work. And having public transportation is another thing to consider when planning a city.
I moved to Berlin a few years ago and aside from unplanned vacations into car-accessible destinations and heavy furniture pickup, don't miss having a car.
> Having minimal parking works ok when the population density is high and public transportation is good, but in a car-centric country like the US it just wouldn't work.
The US's design is not handed down from the Gods. It can and should change, for the livability of future generations if not the boomers who will cling to their coal-rolling machines as long as they can.
Is.. this a bad thing? Why do you feel entitled to a great car driving experience in the densest part of downtown?
Huge swaths of the US population don't live in dense urban areas, and don't have access to public transportation at all.
Try living in the country or even in most suburbs without a car; nearly impossible, and it is impossibly expensive to extend public transportation to every part of the US
I believe pushing public transports and bikeways from "quite good" to "top notch, really convenient" and free (paid by taxes) would make a long way for all these issues (possibly mandating for cars to say out of the city for most use cases; it would make many situations more difficult to handle though).
(European perspective)
What matters more for permits themselves, is the capacity of the nearby road network. Bigger parking lots, multilevel ones => more cars => congested network => traffic jams everywhere.
(European perspective with civil engineering experience)
Not impossible. Amsterdam is built on peat, but has plenty of underground parkings and a subway. Google gave me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Pijp_metro_station, which says “The lower level platform with southbound services to Zuid is 26.5 meters below street level”. That puts it way below sea level.
That tunnel was bored, but parking garages (and home cellars) get dug out (typically, before digging starts, walls to prevent cave-ins are pushed into the ground and water pumps are started)
Such projects typically go over budget because one offs are hard to cost estimate, and politically, you can’t sell a project that will cost, say “between $X and 5 × $X billion”. Saying “X billion” is a way easier sell a project.
Free != paid by taxes
I also think tax funded services are quite regressive as you have to pay for them whether you use them or not, and there are no market forces driving them to be cost competitive.
At the same time it also becomes an incentive to use them, because they become cheaper than the individualistic alternatives (as with the cost of owning, maintaining, and fueling a car).
They are operated with a "cram as many resources into my silo as possible" motive which is barely better.
One glimpse at our current reality will show that this is not what is working in practice.
Agriculture, for example, is subsidised up the wazoo. Were it not, market forces would dictate that no agriculture is done at all unless it can turn a profit.
Medication, for another example, is more expensive in the US than in any other place on earth. Market forces dictate that you pay hundreds of dollars for a commodity medication whereas in other distant lands the government negotiates a good price for its citizens.
Market forces give you one, maybe two ISPs to choose from in your area that are expensive and slow, or bandwidth capped. Those market forces also collude to prevent new entrants into the market, e.g municipal providers.
Market forces don't really invest in infrastructure, or shared infrastructure, unless they can get a return on the investment (e.g a toll road).
Market forces will try to keep things cheap, like labour costs, which is why there is such thing as collective bargaining and unions to ensure a person's pay isn't optimised away.
Market forces may also optimise away an entire industry or competence in favour of importing. This is how countries like the UK have transitioned to more of a service based economy and have also practically lost the capability to manufacture certain things.
The overall point being that for all of the things where the invisible hand of the market works wonderfully (as it essentially does with consumer goods), there are just as many cases where that is explicitly not desirable and checks and balances (i.e regulation, collective bargaining, government) are required to ensure the market works in favour of society and not against it. The two things have to work in balance, having one without the other would lead to undesirable outcomes.
The profit motive absolutely still exists, as the government will contract out the work to a corporation that will give a kick-back to the politicians that granted them the contract. If not directly via cash (Likely illegal, but still happens anyways), then via campaign contributions or insider stock trading tips (Again, likely illegal, but still happens anyways).
I don't use public transport that much, I use a bike, but recognize the necessity of public transport anyway.
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/g68PHEdxEJL1ApxFA
[2] https://www.boligsiden.dk/adresse/galionsvej-7-3-3-1437-koeb...
That seems like a pretty typical example of what you'd see as parking for a US suburb that was initially build as sprawl in the 50s but has had to begin becoming dense because economics (like around DC or Miami or the outer suburbs of Boston)
* an above ground parking garage is ten times more expensive than surface parking
* subterrain parking is ten times more expensive than an above ground parking garage
Not to say that we need to go back to surface parking. No we just need to change our cities and transportation networks so that people don't need the parking to begin with.
Part of the reason modern lots are so big and why parking covers so much area is simply because cars are too big! There is zero reason a person needs to own a 7 seat SUV to transport 3 people or five 2x4s twice a year. The proliferation of oversized vehicles continues to exacerbate a significant number of local and global issues and I'm of the belief that we need strong regulation to limit the size of vehicles.
I'll ignore for a second that I completely disagree the size of cars are the issue with parking lots. As someone who has a large truck, the spots are not designed for it, they're designed for a mid-size sedan. So, you aren't shrinking parking spots unless you're planning on massively increasing insurance costs due to all the door dings and bumper scrapes that will follow by making parking spaces smaller.
Who decides what is "large enough"? The family with 3 or 4 kids who has to take them to sporting events on the weekend like football or hockey and ALL of the requisite gear just have to take multiple cars now to fit everything? And that's going to be better for the environment or society? What about a weekend trip to the cabin, they need to buy and store a trailer now to have enough room for their stuff? Because unless you've got a solution to those among dozens of other issues, no legislator in their right mind is going to back significantly decreasing the size of cars. If you want to find an issue opposed from both sides of the aisle, try telling people they are going to have to start towing a trailer everywhere to get their kids to sports on the weekend.
Maybe the market can decide. We could be levying higher prices in taxes on the cars that occupy more space, damage roads more and are more dangerous to pedestrians.
And as I said, it does absolutely nothing to address parking lots.
I wish the judgement would stop on what people need/use. If they cause a huge impact, add a tax. (lower the gas guzzler MPG requirement, etc)
Any before anyone says anything, I do construction/wood working on the side so yes, I absolutely use it but do not daily drive it.
The AVERAGE size of a vehicle is literally irrelevant to the discussion. You asked what people with 3-4 kids did 20 years ago: My response was they bought the same Tahoe they buy now. Which was nearly identical in size. You keep saying "The average size" when it has little to no bearing on OPs complaint: which is he wants to eliminate full-size SUVs and trucks.
YOU implied that full size SUVs and trucks weren't a thing 20 years ago by asking what people did. Now you're moving the goal posts because I pointed out how silly your implication was. The Tahoe having its wheelbase grow 4" in 20 years isn't what OP is complaining about and you know it.
Let's quote what GP said: "There is zero reason a person needs to own a 7 seat SUV to transport 3 people or five 2x4s twice a year. The proliferation of oversized vehicles continues to exacerbate a significant number of local and global issues and I'm of the belief that we need strong regulation to limit the size of vehicles.". You chose to interpret "proliferation of oversized vehicles" and "strong regulation to limit the size of vehicles" as "eliminate full-size SUVs and trucks". I have no idea how you got there and what your definition of "large" here and how it follows from what GP said. That's what I mean by you creating a strawman. If you steelman the argument, you wouldn't get "eliminate full-size SUVs and trucks" from it.
Like no matter how great public transit is trying to transport 3 rambunctious under 6's isn't going to work for our family or anyone else on the public transit for any meaningful trip.
It's those lifted trucks that have a hood taller than some shorter adults, to say nothing of children. New pickups in general are just ridiculous compared to the same models from 30 years ago, which were just fine for, say, actual ranch work.
Downside of kids that always travel by public transport: on the rare occasions that they do travel by car, they puke nearly every time. For us public transport is a lot less stressful than traveling by car.
I’m only half-serious. I know there is good reason for public transport or having smaller cars in urban environments.
0: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046
This should be easy enough to test by comparing against cohorts in Europe and Asia.
That said, glad you have the option for public transit. I'd be happy if my city decided to beef up public transit, but the NIMBYs keep shooting down the public transit overhaul bills.
Most cars only have attachments for two car seats in the rear, so even if you did have space the middle seat would have to use the generally discouraged seat belt install instead.
"A minivan has room for luggage. It has room for air. And it has room liquids. That's right: It has space for THREE states of matter. Kids shoot liquid out of every orifice, and it constantly needs to be replenished. The minivan knows that it knows everything. Each minivan has at least twelve state-of-the-art liquid stabilization chambers, known to commoners as cup holders. That's way more than any other vehicle. It's basically a cup holder collection with an engine attached. If you want to you can haul a dozen slushies at once. Can't find slushies at the end of the world, not my problem. I don't have problems. I drive a minivan."
More seriously, when we go to visit family you can't fit luggage for a family of 5 and that family in a Camry, also when you have to grocery shop with 3 small children you have to be able to fit both the groceries and the children in the car at the end.
For luggage (even with 3 I would think) a hatch back does wonders. My larger limousine cannot fit the same amount of luggage or larger packaged purchases, simply because it doesn't fit through the trunk door at all, gets stuck because it's too long or too high and gets caught by stuff that sticks down into the trunk space (why they designed things that way, do not ask me). All of those things fit into the smaller hatchback we have without any trouble at all.
I can count the number of times I have had to put something in the rear seats for groceries on one hand and that was w/ the "large" car where I combined toilet paper, kitchen paper and a 'large' Costco run and the trunk space itself could've fit everything if it hadn't been for the above mentioned problems that would have been solved w/ the hatchback. 3 children on the backseat would've been no issue in the hatchback in that situation. Now going through a Costco on a busy Saturday morning w/ 3 small children would've been another story ;)
The fuel efficiency isn't great, but that's why our primary vehicle is a sedan that seats four (plug-in hybrid). Generally we use the sedan, except for large shopping trips or when needing the larger seating capacity.
This is wishfull thinking as cars are manufactured globally, have a very long life and it's pretty tough to imagine this sort of wide regulation fitting with the needs of a major urban center and huge parts of rural environments. I'd argue population controls which are plain crazy would still be easier to implement than regulated the size of vehicles.
That said there is no political will for this to happen, therefore it won't, which is sad given that is a good idea
All of us managed just fine. Even taking extended multiday family roadtrips.
Plus, the Accord of the late 80s and early 90s was closer in size to a 2022 Civic than 2022 Accord.
Nowadays people insist that they need at minimum a Honda Pilot, Toyota Highlander, or the current fave - Kia Telluride, to transport a single kid.
1990 Accord (source: https://hondanews.com/en-US/honda-automobiles/releases/relea...)
Legroom 42.6/34.3 Hiproom 52.4/52.4 Shoulder: 54.8/54.8 Passenger volume: 93 cu ft Cargo volume: 14.4 cu ft
2022 Civic (source: https://owners.honda.com/vehicles/information/2002/Civic-Sed...)
Legroom: 42.2/36 Hiproom: 51.2/49.8 Shoulder: 52.6/52 Passenger volume: 91.4 cu ft Cargo volume: 12.9 cu ft
2021 Honda Accord (source: ) Legroom: 42.3/40.4 Hiproom: 55.3/55 Shoulder: 58.3/56.5 Passenger volume: 102.7 cu ft Cargo volume: 16.7 cu ft
Though granted - too lazy to do the calculations right now, but I imagine a 1990 Honda Accord might be priced closer to a 2002 Honda Civic than Accord too.
Spaces are typically 9' apart. I've seen some new ones that have moved to 10'. But part of the reason for "large parking lots" is the building code requires a minimum number of spaces for a building of a certain occupancy.
>There is zero reason a person needs to own a 7 seat SUV to transport 3 people or five 2x4s twice a year.
While I agree, people do this because everybody else does it. If you're in a Mini, surrounded by Escalades, the Escalade starts to look a lot more attractive.
We went through all this in the 90s. The SUV explosion was because women like it. They like feeling safe; they like being up high; the car companies discovered this, and made the SUV a really comfy place.
There is no regulation that will fix this. You want to fix it? Make cities and public transportation livable again. It's really not that difficult. A safe, affordable, well-managed city with good schools would be attractive. The problem is achieving this will make certain people unhappy. Pick which one you want more.
There's much less of a savings benefit to buying kei cars since 2014, but they remain very popular. The decades of government incentive probably helped normalize them, and they really do seem to fit better in Japan's smaller streets.
What would your solution be for venues that have spiky attendance? Concert venues, nightlife, sports arenas, seasonal tourism?
Because sure you can centralize parking and then make people walk but there’s a reason we have many different tiers of caches.
The entire congregation isn't going to these but I'd wager most churches are actively using their lots throughout the week.
For venues that hold 'large events', if they have a capacity of X people then zoning often dictates that they need Y parking spots. See page 24:
* https://www.oklahomacounty.org/Portals/0/OKCo%20Zoning%20%28...
Still better than asphalt.
> The maximum theoretical efficiency calculated is 86.8% for a stack of an infinite number of cells, using the incoming concentrated sunlight radiation. When the incoming radiation comes only from an area of the sky the size of the sun, the efficiency limit drops to 68.7%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Thermody...
Of course solar panels are only 20% efficient or so and thus will still heat up, but not as much as if the panels were not generating energy. Damn thermodynamics, you can't even break even.
The recently elected new federal government debates right now applying this to all of Germany.
As a temporary solution, can't they start planting trees in the parking lots? Just give up a single lot for every N lots, and turn it into a garden with a tree that can provide a lot of shade and is low-maintenance.
Anyone can plug in a cheap electric heater. But an AC is a trickier proposition for most.
You would expect a COP of 2 for cooling (I.e. 1000W of electricity removes 2000W heat), and a COP of 3 for heating (I.e. 1000W of electricity produces 3000W of useful heat).
For heating a number of options exist from cheap electric heaters (which cost a lot to run); to gas or oil burners which require more infrastructure to build, but are cheap to run; and of course heat pumps, either air or ground sourced.
For cooling, your only practical options are a heat pump, or an evaporative cooler if your in a dry climate. Both are more experienced up from than an electric heater, and require infrastructure.
Finally insulating a home to retain heat naturally produced by those living inside can significantly reduce costs, along with insulating the humans (coats, jumpers etc). But cooling will always require a active component to move heat, and addition energy input. Although with good building design you can scavenge some of that energy using stuff like the stack effect.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/84/9e/62/849e6294c5c5ce739fd1656ab...
They're already very common, especially in hilly areas where the garage can also be the basement. Multi-unit versions also exist.
With self-driving cars, you can consolidate parking to single vertical parking structures that service the area, and have businesses and condos in its surroundings build more closely together in aesthetic walkable clusters. As long as the automated valet "fetch" of your car takes only a few minutes people will be happy.
I very much hope that the tech does massively improve but my opinion of it getting there soon is much more dim (although I'd say in the above case, lots of self driving tram like buses would be still better).
Maybe not useful to you, but we don’t design cities around just your needs.
And for similar reasons we don’t expect the microbes to grow into a tower at the centre.
Newsflash: we spend money on all infrastructure, buses, rail, ports, etc.
You can ague that the proportions are wrong (and I would be inclined to agree) but come on, at least make a token attempt to act like you're arguing in good faith here rather than just saying whatever you think will promote your particular beliefs that minute.
Trying to force people to live near where they work is a fools errand akin to forcing commodities production to happen near ports now that we have technology such that we don't need to do this. While there are certainly plenty of low hanging fruit to be picked (getting rid of zoning, investing in public transit infrastructure) but on a fundamental level the cat is not going back in the bag. Cities are just going to be ringed by some amount of sprawl because we have the technology to do that. You can play with regulatory policy to screw with the width of this band of sprawl but barring some black swan technological change it will always be there because there is always going to be some zone where that works. Things like self driving cars and a proliferation of electric bicycles widen that zone. Things like high energy prices contract that zone.
You're trying to fight civilization sized trends with public policy here. I'm not gonna say it won't work but on a longer than "until the next guy is in office and it's his problem" timeline the odds are long. Metaphorically speaking, you're looking at an early industrial workplace and saying "this is dangerous, these machines are gonna eat people and these carts of heavy stuff are gonna crush people, we shouldn't do this". That's not how things work. People are gonna come along and put guards on machines and invent traffic patterns to keep workers safe and life will go on. Stop focusing on miles driven or cars on the road and focus on the things that are the actual problems and figure out how to minimize those in a way that isn't a non-starter. Nobody in 1900 was going to shut down a factory that supports hundreds (or thousands) so a dozen people can be not dead and a several dozen can keep their appendages where they belong. Likewise society is not going to just accept the quality of life hit that would come with getting rid of sprawl for a benefit of similar order.
Of course cars won't go away. They have legitimate uses. They are just obscenely overused today because of the way we chose to shape the incentives.
I would appreciate it if you dropped the word "ideology" from this discussion, or at least prove why your opinion can't be legitimately called an ideology.
Take a look at the developing world. There are plenty of places where zoning is minimal and can be ignored if the right palms are greased (the US was like that too at one time). They still build highways and buy cars in droves (despite the latter being a much larger fraction of people's income) though they do build more public transit as well (developing countries build a lot of everything).
>Why can't I build higher buildings in my neighborhood even though demand is really strong?
Because people with exactly the same hubris as yourself who just so happened to have been born 75yr earlier also thought they knew best.
>Laws create demand for cars because they shape the city to be more car friendly than it might be if left to anarchy. The positive feedback loop of car friendly laws leading to more cars leading to more demand for car friendly laws is very obvious and hard to break.
Yes, American sprawling suburbs are over the top but in their time they were actually what people wanted and worked quite well. Now we're reaping what we sow.
>They are just obscenely overused today because of the way we chose to shape the incentives.
I thing regulating what one can build on their own property (vs what one can emit off of their property) is a violation of property rights but that's about as far as our agreement goes here. Attempting to incentive our way out of the problem is doomed to the same failure without some fundamental change in human nature
You know roads/highways predate America right?
And you know what? Once people could afford a car they bought one. They didn’t need it, they wanted it.
Yet all of the Seoulites I know desire a personal car and work towards acquiring one.
There is an alternative type of city design talked about in detail in these videos (the style is a bit like Thunderf00t's, if you don't like him you probably won't like these either):
That's a problem.
Cities should be designed for people, not cars.
This is what a cult looks like
Again, the only exceptions (that I see) will be: better public transportation (light rail to bring in residents in the suburbs, buses for inside the city), more on-demand services (I can't get an Uber or Lyft to bring me home, let alone pick me up, and my suburb has something like 20-30k people in it, but 5 miles past where those services will go), automated vehicles (related to on-demand), or movement back towards urban living (which can be served by the preceding + walking/biking more easily). That last one is highly unlikely due to costs, though, at least for a mass migration.
This article also makes vague claims of causation, and tries really hard to link the presence of parking lots to the PNW heat wave without any statistical rigor. It also then makes a misleading claim about the likelihood of increasing frequency of heat waves. The World Weather Attribution project’s own paper noted that the recent PNW heat wave would have have been a record breaking event even without climate change, and noted it as a 1 in 1000 years event.
Finally, the article seems to completely ignore the trivial solution of simply putting some shade above a parking lot. It doesn’t have to be trees - it can be reflective tarp held up by poles or a low absorption roof on a parking garage.
Driving is only the fastest and most convenient way to travel when you're the only one driving. In tech terms, it doesn't scale. Once you get to a certain point, you're allocating more space to wide roads, interchanges, and parking lots than to the places people are actually going.
More to the point, here's where this argument breaks down:
> If a city is not overbuilt and overpopulated to the point where the road infrastructure is overwhelmed
Given current demographic trends within the United States, major cities are guaranteed to see population growth beyond what current American public infrastructure can sustain.
Compounding this problem is the fact that there's significant overlap between the segment of the population which thinks that driving is a sacred right and folks who think that spending public money on efficient public transit is unacceptable.
I enjoy driving. It doesn't work for major cities. And those same cities are inevitably going to get denser if trends continue. Everyone driving his or her own car to their job (or to "the things they want to do") in the name of personal convenience is not the answer.
Not speaking for parent but the typical response would be "but then people should stop moving there", to which I reply that any utopia can sound good if you disregard people's incentives, desires and needs. Let me try: communism is in fact great, it's just that every time the people at the top end up corrupt for unrelated reasons.
Those costs are paid for by destinations, as road tolls are limited in the US. At a certain point, and the evidence strongly suggests many parts of the US are past this point, you’re spending more money on road maintenance, than you’re collecting in tax from destinations.
No amount of “cars are more convenient” will change the simple economics that cars and their infrastructure are vastly more expensive than either public transport, or bike infrastructure. And based on the atrocious conditions of US roads, it seems the US can’t afford it’s car infrastructure anymore.
The only reason driving is convenient is because you make no consideration for your externalities.
Noise, killing 38,000 people a year in crashes, 400 billion/year on road construction and maintenance, pollution killing people who live near highways, trillion-dollar imperial adventures to secure foreign oil, city designs that are absolutely unlivable without a car that costs ~$3,500/year to own and maintain...
Anecdotally, I'm faster on my bike on almost all trips that are shorter than about 7km, and a majority of the trips of up to 10km. Only then does a car really start to save time. And then you realize that many 10km trips could be 7km trips if the city hadn't used so much space for car infrastructure.
Within an hour, you could have been in Utrecht, The Hague, Rotterdam, Haarlem, by public transport.
Let's put it this way: you could be in front of Rembrandt's Night watch at the Rijksmuseum, and within 1h15 minutes, be in front of Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring in an entirely different city 60 km south, without breaking a sweat. Two of the greatest pieces of art.
Hell you could be in Brussels within two hours. London or Paris in four hours. You could have your breakfast by a canal in Amsterdam, your lunch in front of the Eiffel tower, and dinner by Big Ben.
But somehow, that's boring because it doesn't involve a car?
scorch the earth. there, fixed it for you.
https://binged.it/3nIyoRV (Bing, since Google Maps has old imagery)
Data from: https://pv-map.apvi.org.au/historical#10/-34.9043/138.6463
And it should be even more attractive for commercial properties operating and running A/C or heating during peak sunlight time.
I also don’t think you understand the “war on driving”… the point is that you have less freedom in a car dependent world. You can’t conveniently choose to walk to the grocery store a few blocks away when there are 6 lane roads which pay no respect to pedestrians. You can’t choose to take a train to a concert, since passenger trains are rarer and rarer.
You have fewer choices and less freedom if the only convenient choice is a car. And what if you don’t have or can’t get a car? Your mobility is extremely limited.
The “war on driving” is all about creating more choices and freedom for transit. It’s not saying all cars should be outlawed. It’s saying that the bus or train should be just as convenient as driving in a city, and that biking and cycling within a mile or two of home should be even more convenient than driving.
And, most importantly for you, in a city where everyone has many transit choices, driving is much more pleasant. With fewer people driving cars for trips that don’t really need them, there will be less traffic and less need for massive roads which are dangerous even for drivers. This video is very illuminating: https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k
In fact, I’d recommend watching even more videos on that channel to really understand why having more alternatives to cars is a good thing.