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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

No thanks. Parking lots are necessary to support driving, which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to travel. This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs.

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.

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> No thanks. Parking lots are necessary to support driving, which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to travel. This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs.

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.

Isn’t this the same as claiming that “driving is not the fastest mode when the city is poorly governed”? If a city is not overbuilt and overpopulated to the point where the road infrastructure is overwhelmed, then driving works really well. For the vast majority of cities, there isn’t a conceivable point where you’re dedicating more spaces to roads/lots than destinations. But even if that were the case, I have to ask “so what”. If the people living there have fast access to the things they want to do and like it, and find the benefits to be worth the trade offs, then I don’t see the problem. It feels to me like the complaints are mostly from a very active and vocal urbanist activist crowd rather than residents at large.

Charitably, this is a goofy take. Less charitably, your reference to a "vocal urbanist activist crowd" suggests that you're leaning more on partisan talking points than evidence.

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.

> Given current demographic trends within the United States, major cities are guaranteed to see population growth beyond what current American public infrastructure can sustain.

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.

Roads cost money to build and maintain, they cost a lot of money to build and maintain.

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.

Firstly, I think you are mistaken about heat. It is objectively true that cities are hotter places to live in general, disregarding climate change. This is partly due to the large amount of materials which absorb heat from the sun, such as black asphalt in massive parking lots. It makes cities less pleasant, for sure.

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.

The article is about building parking lots that are unnecessarily large (overbuilding) due to regulatory mandates, rather than building too many parking lots. This argument has little to do with a war on cars, and scholars (including conservative, car-agnostic scholars) had been making it long before zoning became yet another culture war battleground.

I own two large cars to ferry my kids around the city and have enough time to get anything else done in a day. I hate that I need a car to do that and a backup in case one breaks down. I’d rather not have any cars and be able to use public transit. Alas, everybody has a car, so public transit is crap, because not enough people care. This causes a feedback loop, which in extreme cases in USA creates neighborhoods you can’t walk out of: I’ve been to a place literally surrounded by highways. The only way to leave was by car.

> This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs.

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...

Those externalities are minor compared to the massive utility we derive from being able to travel point to point at high speeds on our own schedule. In my opinion the reverse of what you say is true - it is fashionable for urbanists to claim these externalities are big when it is clear the time saved across the hundreds of millions who drive in the US alone is much larger in magnitude. The numbers you quote aren’t very meaningful without context. For example, 38000 road deaths doesn’t seem like much when you consider that there is only ~1 death for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled - and that number is going to keep falling as safety tech becomes more standardized. I also simply can’t take a claim like “city designs that are absolutely unlivable” seriously. Plenty of people live and thrive in car centric cities just fine, so this is clearly hyperbole.

It is actually possible to be able to travel point to point on your own schedule in the same small amount of time without all those externalities. See Dutch cities like Utrecht and Amsterdam. Where everything is a bike ride away.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, this is simply not true. “Everything” is not a bike ride away. You’re equating a severely limited life to one with a lot more access and freedom to chose from more than what is just immediately nearby. It’s simply not the same thing. I’m glad for the people who are content with such a set up, but it’s not for everyone. For me, I found Amsterdam tremendously boring after a short time because of the relatively limited choice of activities compared to a car-centric US cities where intraday travel over longer distances is trivial. I would also say that the claim that you can travel in the “same small amount of time” is factually incorrect for other reasons. A one mile bike ride is simply not going to be faster than a 1 mile drive unless you’re in a city where they have overbuilt or have tremendously lagging driving infrastructure. I can only see the two being approximately the same for very short trips.

I'm pretty sure a 1 mile bike ride is always faster than a 1 mile car ride unless you have empty roads and parking spaces right in front of the entrance. You can very easily cycle a mile in traffic in around five minutes (some people can run it in 4 minutes!). A car in very light traffic takes maybe two minutes for the same distance if there are no traffic lights at all. That doesn't leave much time for parking and walking from the parking spot to where you actually want to be.

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.

> after a short time because of the relatively limited choice of activities compared to a car-centric US cities where intraday travel over longer distances is trivial

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?

The Netherlands is the flattest country in the world. Of course bicycles are convenient there. Try biking around San Francisco where there are ski-jump sized hills everywhere.

The Netherlands are quite windy, but both wind and hills are negated by electric bicycles.

There's a shopping centre carpark here in South Australia where the shade structures are solar panels. Useful for customers in rain or heat, and obviously practical beyond that. You can see it here, plus the panels on the shopping centre also.

https://binged.it/3nIyoRV (Bing, since Google Maps has old imagery)

Looking around that map it’s surprising to see just how many buildings of all sizes have solar panels fitted. Impressive!

In that suburb, 41% of residential properties have solar. In my area (a couple of kilometres away) it's about 45%. The payback period is very favourable even without a reduction in feed-in tariffs, last I checked. So the hold-outs might include people expecting to sell their house within a few years, renters, etc.

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.

> which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to

scorch the earth. there, fixed it for you.

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