Less parking improves density which can improve many other things, as well.
It doesn't even have to be much less, just no longer require it and it starts to solve itself.
It doesn't even have to be much less, just no longer require it and it starts to solve itself.
Less parking makes density higher, which is a bad thing, not a good thing. Why do you call it an improvement?
People are not livestock to be packed in a tightly as possible. Give me space to live. Everyone should have a basement or a garage where they can keep random tools for random projects.
People should have backyards with enough spacing where they can have solitude from other people.
People should live far enough apart that you don't hear your neighbors.
Are there actually people who prefer to live packed in tightly with other people, in tiny apartments with barely space?
How many of those places can you visit without a car?
One thing people can get confused on is that density doesn't necessarily go hand-in-hand with mixed usage - you could have relatively low density areas that are extremely mixed so there's always basically everything within 15 minute walk, and you could have very high density apartment buildings with nearly no services to speak of.
Suburbs are especially bad at this because they segregate the living and the sleeping areas far apart from each other (but relatively short by car).
So I drive about 10 minutes and go to the larger stores, the selection is better and the prices are better because the land is not so crowded.
I have family who live in a very dense city without a car - every time I visit they "stock up" and go on multiple car trips with me to visit slightly distant stores to buy all the stuff that is cheaper, or hard to transport without a car.
The car isn't going away because it's simply too useful. No matter how hard you try to make a city that supposedly doesn't need one, the car option is still better.
Let's stop telling people what they should want and let the market build what people want. If "the market" builds what nobody wants, some folks are gonna lose some of their own money and someone else will make a profit from correcting it.
The fact of the matter is: many people in the US like it how it is, even if we don't.
Edit: If anything we currently have the reverse case, with dense areas where infrastructure is shared by many subsidizing less dense areas where roads and houses serve much fewer people while providing less tax revenue. There have been some good articles on here about this over the years.
Nobody is advocating forcing everyone to live in dense housing. Our current political/legal system massively favors and subsidizes lower density. Removing that favoritism is not unfair at all.
If you don't fund their roads you can't tell them "but you need a sidewalk".
The Americans with Disabilities Act says you need sidewalks.
What's the enforcement mechanism if the entity writing the rules doesn't control the purse strings? Tie them up in court for 10yr and then when you finally win they just do something marginally different to the same end (i.e. exactly what we see with civil liberties).
Yes because those people still own cars and they park those cars in other peoples parking areas. The cars don't magically stop existing, the developer just has a better bottom line because they have been subsidized.
Isn't it already illegal to park on other people's property without permission?
It’s funny because we would literally have more space if cars and their infrastructure took up less of it. So, in a way you’re advocating for cramming people together.
> People should have backyards with enough spacing where they can have solitude from other people.
> People should live far enough apart that you don't hear your neighbors.
I think that sounds just fine. And you can do that in America today. What does that have to do with living in the city or in nearby residential suburbs?
Sure it does, if you have a normal sized house, then you have space in front of the house, on the street where you can park. You also might have a driveway.
And there are no "giant surface lots" needed.
> you’d see tree-lined streets, beautiful large houses
And in front of those houses is a place to park. If the house is properly separated from the neighbor you can even park along the side of the house (if you always put two driveways together from neighboring houses, then driveways save space relative to parking on the road).
> It’s funny because we would literally have more space if cars and their infrastructure took up less of it.
The car is far to useful a tool to get rid of. Why do you think that even people in dense European "utopia car-free cities" still have cars?
I've tried it both ways - I'll never go back. I'll never live in a dense city.
Yes. That’s not really under debate here.
> You also might have a driveway.
You could do that so long as you wanted to waste that space on your lot, but you don’t need that because you can park on the street near your house instead or in your garage behind your house (where the alley is). Personally I’d rather have more green space, or just to have a bigger house since I live at my house and my car is just some random machine that is fine sitting out all day and night in all weather conditions.
> And there are no "giant surface lots" needed.
Right… yet that’s what mandatory minimums and car-first public transit are creating. That’s what we are complaining about.
> The car is far to useful a tool to get rid of. Why do you think that even people in dense European "utopia car-free cities" still have cars?
I’m confused about this statement. Where did I suggest we needed to get rid of cars?
> I've tried it both ways - I'll never go back. I'll never live in a dense city.
I think that’s great! You can totally live in the country. I find it very appealing myself. Just stop the continuous public transit subsidies of highways when we already have more than enough for all future needs for the next 50 years. It doesn’t make sense for people who live 5 miles outside of downtown to have to drive a quarter mile down the road each way to get a gallon of milk. We can’t afford it and we are going to bankrupt ourselves and the planet with this asinine waste of energy. It also has personal benefits for you living in the country because you’ll have fewer people driving.
My house was built around the time the automobile became common, meaning long long long before parking requirements or even driveways and I have a yard… I highly suggest you take a look around - even within the US - at older neighborhoods and see how nice and quaint it can be without loud, smelly, space wasting cars.
Last time she came to visit, somebody got stabbed at the bus station an hour after she passed through. Someone got murdered on a bus within a few blocks of me two months ago.
I'm living in a very walkable neighborhood with only a moderate parking availability problem and similar groups of people are encouraging the police to do nothing while encouraging density nonsense through restricting parking.
If you want to create dense slums where the only people who don't leave are those who can't afford to, this is exactly what you should advocate.
I don't want to live somewhere where I have to worry about a guest's safety, cars achieve that to a significant degree. Fuck everybody who wants to ruin cities by cramming people in as close as possible.
That's crazy that people are getting murdered at your bus stop though. What city do you live in?
People getting murdered, assaulted, and robbed isn't a homelessness problem (it is quite hard to survive winter being homeless in Minnesota) it is a gang, poverty, and policing problem. Part of it is accepting a large number of Somalian refugees, a small but significant number of whom disproportionally contribute to crime, but it's not exclusively that group.
Despite the business robberies, gun shots, assaults and murders blocks away from me, my rent is still $2000.
However the "was that a gunshot or fireworks" question nearly daily with about a 50:50 distribution is not good for my stress levels or general sanity.
But trying to go entirely car-free is a pipe dream; but "car reduced" is possible.
What would be roughly a 30-40 minute trip by car becomes an hour and 20 minutes by bus, if you don't need to change buses too many times to get to your destination- and that's by ideal conditions (bus isn't running late, etc) (that example used stillwater park&ride to the north loop).
I too don’t want to take the subway or bud late at night in Stockholm or Gothenburg, as in my youth. Witnessed too many car burnings and shootouts.
It sucks to access things without a car because we made it that way, it's not an inherent quality of dense environments.
But I think the correct place to do the revival is not at the city centers but at the edges; we could reduce the "land use" of suburbs by 50% or more without diminishing the quality of life, and suddenly things that don't work because the density is too low would start to make sense.
For example, it's insane that I have to have my front wall set back 40 feet from the street, which itself is 50 feet wide to allow for parking on both sides - I'd much rather have a street with no parking that was maybe 20 feet wide in total, and allow the front of the house to be right up against the sidewalk on the same lot - get more useful backyard and reduce street speed too.
Everything where I live is accessible, but there's nothing you can do to make a bus schedule beat a car trip, and it's ridiculous that somebody a couple of miles away needs to be an hour away to justify a tiny bump in density for idealists.
Crime on public transit doesn't mean public transit is bad, it means that public transit is a last-resort option patronized by the most desperate members of society. If our cities were designed for more convenient public transit, more people would be willing to take the bus, and your average patron would be less likely to be one of the scaries that you and your visiting friend were worried about.
It still smelled like a latrine (once I'm positive someone shit in a fast food bag and left it in the middle of the car sometime before my midday ride). BART wasn't a "last resort option" but an "only resort" if I didn't want to spend $100 a day on parking.
It's not even public transit, my neighborhood is past the point of "safe" especially at certain times of day where I don't want to subject anybody who couldn't beat me in a boxing match to walking around significant distances between sunset and 10am (lots of people getting mugged around 7 or 8 in the morning too).
But it doesn't have to be like this. It's very possible to build dense living spaces that are nice to live in.
But more to the point, you are free to live in the middle of nowhere if you want to. If you don't want to live in a dense area, the vast majority of residential areas in the US cater directly to you. Personally, I'd like to live in an actual city, and I'd like to pay less than $5000/month for a decent 1 bedroom apartment.
I would like not to be forced out by idealists.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Density also makes services like policing cover more ground for less money. Japanese & european cities are often much denser and face lower crime rates.
Yeah they don't. At least not the way you're implying. e.g.:
- That rural town in Maine (Passadumkeag) that basically shut down because its sole clerk couldn't survive on $13,000 annually.
- There's plenty of state and federal money in local government. Texas, for instance, will use state funds to ensure a minimum level of school funding even in rural areas.
- Some places don't have much in the way of services. For e.g. Timathy Taylor in Klamath County, Oregon. The sheriff there has three (3) officers to patrol 6,136 square miles.
The uniquely north american model of cities oriented around sparse car centric growth is just not sustainable in the long run. Every metre of asphalt paved & pipes placed is a metre of commitment to eternal maintenance, and when that metre connects to a tiny suburb of 15 people that can't remotely afford the bill for the infrastructure that supports them then you have a cities that grow over the long run towards massively subsidized development, soaring property taxes, & growing debt.
That seems more like rural. Every suburb I've lived in has been on the order of 5,000-40,000 people (and that's one town, with towns not separated by anything but an invisible line).
This will never happen because the bulk of the people pushing for less cars a) see regulation as an inherent good and would rather regulate toward the outcome they want than just dispose of bad regulation and watch it happen organically b) wouldn't be caught dead agreeing with libertarians.