America has paid a steep price for parking
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Public transportation in the US is pretty much non-existent, except maybe in and around New York City. In the area where I use to live, public transportation now is rather dangerous to the people using it.
I rode a bicycle to work for and lite errands for more than 30 years, and am probably still alive because of that. But I have been hit by cars more times then I can count (no serious injuries). And I was in rather bicycle friendly area. I spent some time in the Detroit area 15 years ago, the area I was in, bicycling there is a form of suicide. As I said before, Montreal, to me, is a bicycle commuter paradise.
So what can people do in the US ?
I believe right now, the only way out of this automobile mess is to raise gas prices to $10 per Gallon. Then people and the Government may start changing, otherwise we are driving straight into a worldwide catastrophe.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-withholding-s...
I remain unconvinced about the argument around climate: when it is too cold to walk less than 15 minutes, roads are also unsafe to drive.
What does altitude have to do with anything? San Francisco has plenty of hills, yet people still manage to move around by bike.
When a city was founded has little to do with what to do with them going forward. Many american cities were very walkable, and then urban freeways where built in them, displacing people and disconnecting neighborhoods. Amsterdam itself was very car-centric in the 70's, yet they are now considered the biking capital of the world. Cities are living organisms, that can and should change over time.
If you don't see how being able to walk when you need milk helps with having a good quality of life then I don't know what to tell you.
Edit: the comparison is relevant because it gives us a good idea of what the lower bound of what it realistically means to downsize the usage of cars in urban environments. It's a very clear example of a place where half the population (which includes children!) has a car, but cities are entirely navigable by foot, public transport or bikes.
For example harsh winters and big temperature differences make maintenance of motorways significantly more expansive compared to railways and walking paths. Hence you have trans-siberian rail but no trans-siberian motorway network.
Also Netherlands did car-centric design in 50s. Then they stopped and reverted it because they realized it sucked.
When you understand how quickly the Netherlands changed (it used to be just as car-centric at the US), you might change your view about what's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnFYOvcOn_E
1. All my friends/family/professional networks are based in the US. Do I need to convince all of them to move with me to the Netherlands?
2. I would need to uproot my children from their schooling and friends and move them to a foreign country.
3. I would have to get a job in NL--perhaps doable for me, but what if you don't have in-demand tech skills and don't already speak Dutch?
4. I would have to work in NL for five continuous years before being eligible for permanent residency.
These hurdles are indeed not totally insurmountable for some people, but to pretend like it's a viable option for anyone who wants to live in more functional cities is silly. Why can't we just try to make our cities better? Look around at which cities in the world are working better, and learn from them!
Why can't someone want to make where they already are better? Why should someone be expected to accept the status quo?
"It's regressive and has an undue effect on the poor" and "It's moderately effective" are not mutually exclusive. That was a major reason public transit bounced back so fast in the Lower Mainland of BC, Canada - because driving is decidedly not cheap. Moreover, high gas prices are something I endorse, loudly and often, because it subsidises transit, and how much more expensive it makes the biggest (most dangerous to pedestrians) vehicles.
Still need to drive, and don't want to pay an arm and a leg? Skip the Silverado, get a hatchback or moderately-sized SUV or van. Need to haul your boat (or 40-foot camper instead of a tent)? Sounds like an expensive hobby - and anyone who's owned a boat can attest to that.
> The actual answer is to build a comprehensive mass transit system that makes driving unnecessary for most people
Car-centric design makes building such a system hard in many ways. You have to tackle both side of the equation at once - encourage public transport and discourage cars. Otherways you build it and nobody uses it.
Not that I particularly trust Google to do a great job, but interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
[1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/02/23/google-r...
IE Coal company towns and Fordlandia
That's the whole scenario behind the song "Sixteen Tons". "Load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go. I owe my life to the company store."
HN discussion (333 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35395060
At this point we could just turn ChatGPT loose and it could probably generate the entire discussion.
9' by 18' (162 sq ft.) is on the large end of parking space sizes. A couple living in a 400 sq ft. tiny house doesn't even make that true, and most houses aren't tiny houses. For more normal 2000 sq ft. houses, you'd need an average of more than 12 people living in each one to make it true.
For example this would include all the parking spaces at schools, offices, walmarts, etc.
You are to your house as your car is to your driveway. You don't dig up your driveway and bring it with you every time you drive somewhere.
But they're counting the parking space at the office and not the office space there.
But I'll do you one better. If you work from home you don't need the parking space or the office space.
...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive. My "empty" house still has utility. My family could be using it. It is storing all of my possessions. It is a source of comfort for knowing I have a place to go to rest.
Anyways, the productivity footprint of shared spaces is very different from those that are exclusively mine, and spaces that are exclusively mine are very limited...essentially my home and my car. I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
You don't just need a desk. You need a desk in addition to your share of a series of hallways that go to your desk, an elevator, a staircase, conference rooms, a lunch room etc.
More to the point, even if your desk is small, it's not literally zero, but that's how it's being accounted for.
> and it has usually been an open one at that.
The building's parking lot will generally be sized according to size of the space (i.e. the number of desks), so this also means that you don't have your own parking space.
> ...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive.
If you did have a house, it would commonly be in an area zoned to require each plot to have an acre of land. An acre is more than 40,000 square feet. Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
> I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
The thing preventing this is the zoning de facto requiring each house in the suburbs to have 35,000 square feet of grass.
All of which are shared throughout the workday, unless someone hired me to be the only one in the building, which seems like a poor decision. The parking spot I take is mine for the day though.
> Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for. Tell a person about to have diarrhea in the middle of a mall that the bathroom is out of service, and panic will surely ensue.
> The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
Ah yeah, and dumping 100 million barrels of oil off the coast of California will be totally irrelevant because the ocean is very, very big. The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic. But I love how you calculate the relevancy/irrelevancy of such massive changes in the snap of a finger. I really hope you don't ever estimate anything of actual value.
Which is why you account for your share of them, which isn't zero.
> It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for.
The size of the plot is extremely relevant to how much housing could be built on it in the alternative.
> The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic.
This is completely the opposite of where most parking spaces actually are. Millions of them are attached to suburban homes, which is about as far from a condensed place with a lot of traffic as you can get without actually being in a corn field. Many more are attached to big box stores and strip malls in low density areas. None of these matter to what happens in a city or what city-adjacent land is zoned to allow, except insofar as some of the areas are only low density because that's all they're zoned for. But if they were rezoned then they wouldn't be parking lots anymore.
... the offices, schools, stores, etc is much larger than just a house. All the heating cooling, plumbing, etc and it sits empty most of the time (and you have to walk/drive past those regardless of their parking infrastructure). I fully get the point they are making. The thing the grandparent was talking about is that the argument could just as easily apply to the building spaces themselves rather than only the parking. Given this and the host of other categorical differences in parking vs occupied structures does in my view make the comparison "absurd". In general, this article is using a lot of numbers to make arguments that are really emotionally based.
For example, if I go to Chipotle for lunch, I will go and park my car, go inside, get in line, order, blah.
My car, and everyone else's car will take up 9x18 units. If it's busy, you could have a line 10 to 15 people deep. That's 1620 sq ft of parking for people who will be occupying about 360 sq ft on the inside. (Assuming 10 people all taking up a 6x6 block).
As you have pointed out it could also means "The car in your driveway has 11 theorethical empty parking spots built for it, maybe there is an overallocation of resources"
Some relevant resource might be: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... from Not Just Bikes based on research from Strongtowns
Buses need roads too, and train tracks are just as big as roads but less versatile.
And delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles, etc. We certainly had roads before we had cars.
Road that connects 3 biggest cities in Netherlands has 3 lanes in each direction: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1822053,4.5947627,3a,75y,47....
Your average road in Netherlands looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1968565,4.592548,3a,75y,58.8...
You cannot directly translate between countries with such difference in population density obviously, but if anything - the more people USA has - the bigger gains are there to be realized by switching to more efficient mode of transport.
Mind you there's some cars in the videos, but they aren't any bigger than the horse-drawn carriages that roads had been accommodating well before that.
Parking lots and on street parking is a tremendous waste of space (and they're ugly to boot) and forces EVERYTHING to be more spread out.
That's why I said keep 2 lanes (1 in each direction). Anything more is optional and should be counted as effect of car-centric development model.
> train tracks are just as big as roads but less versatile
1 railway track in each direction gives you more throughput than any multi-lane motorway possibly could.
One at home, one at work, one at the grocery store, one at the cafe. Some of those are shared, but it is entirely believable that we have more paved parking than we have housing
"America has eight parking spaces for every car. Here’s how cities are rethinking that land"
Wow.
If you add more cars without adding at least 2 parking spaces per car you almost surely get less usage or cars stuck in traffic.
Car infrastructure is very expensive, see https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
Further, we are counting just parking at the residence, let alone the combined shared parking elsewhere. Plenty of roads has as much parking on either side as there is actual roadway
If you go to a place that isn't driving dependent and you'll see that the main factor for "better walkability" is namely "places are a few miles closer because you don't have to walk through 20 parking lots to get there". It's pretty eye opening.
That's not really the main factor. I would say the main factor is medium to high density, mixed use areas that have business friendly regulations and/or wealthy residents/tourists. There aren't tons of large parking lots in west Philly, but I wouldn't give it a high walkability score given all the vacancies (where are you going to walk to?) and safety concerns (both in infrastructure and crime terms).
Not being 90% empty space is a necessary condition for walkability.
Everywhere I go out has parking. I need to pick something up at the hardware store and grocery store today. I'm not worried about the parking at either. Usually, there's plenty of empty spots at most locations I'll drive to.
The few times I can't find a parking spot is around meal times at places with already limited parking.
And I just remembered, I have a parking pass for a local stadium for games during that sport's season. That's another dedicated spot for my car. I believe right now, both stadiums have empty parking lots. I drive by a minor league baseball field every morning that has an empty lot.
It's not just about the parking at one place, it's about all the places created so you can park your car. Parking has a lot of slack built into it. Most places have more square footage dedicated to parking than to the structure itself.
*I don't have an assigned parking spot or anything like that, it's just that we have a private lot only for use of employees. So there's always going to be a spot somewhere for me.
Although I'm not sure what the author's point is by using that comparison, aside from being an emotional hook. The resources, needs/wants, etc for these are quite different. Same thing for the statement about 3-car garages vs 1 bedroom apartments - it mostly comes down to preferences and how those manifest in the market, politics, and other aspects of life.
https://www.carsized.com is a fun resource to visualise the size evolution - take a far model and see how it's gotten bigger over the years.
You misunderstand. It's an alternate universe headline.
But in the alternate world where we didn't design for cars first, you'd be more used to other forms of transit, and a lot of things would be closer together. In our universe, where most businesses are surrounded by large parking lots, whole cities get sprawled out and everyone's travel times are inflated (regardless of mode of travel).
You don't need an alternate world as you can just look at history. Then we would have to consider why the people chose to adopt and promote cars to bring us into this age.
Come on, dude. A suburban home with a yard isn't a "nightmare," they're actually very desirable to a lot of people. They market themselves. Of course, there's a set of wannabe central planners that dislike that preference because it conflicts with their "vision" for how the plebs should live, so they try to deny that truth.
And those are the communities which were invented and built by central planning, by people saying: "these businesses all need to meet a large parking minimum, and these areas are _only_ allowed to be single family homes, and this other area can _only_ be commercial, and these arterials will then need to have 45 mph speed limits so drivers can get from their homes to the store in a reasonable period, and since they're going fast the lanes should be wide so I guess we won't have room for a bike lane, and only one side of the street can have a sidewalk, and hey what do you know, that really fits with our intention to not put crosswalks except at those intersections every 1/2 mile ...".
Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like. The design of the suburb _coerces_ people to drive by threatening the lives of cyclists and pedestrians, and invariably having poor or slow public transit.
Those aren't nightmares either. Or rather, they're only nightmares if your idea of a nightmare is "alternatives to urban living exist."
Also the selective use of "cookie cutter" as a pejorative is interesting. Everything is cookie cutter, especially dense urban development (e.g. all the rail-adjacent apartment complexes I've seen built in the last decade or two). But of course it's only a problem when we're talking about the trendy-to-hate suburbs.
Almost all those other requirements you complain about follow directly from a desire to live in a quiet neighborhood, and the rest are almost certainly a function of traditional American excessive cost-cutting (e.g. the sidewalks on one side, which are not universal). If people didn't actually want to live in quiet neighborhoods, they'd have stayed in the cities.
> Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like.
You missed my point: suburbs are desirable, but your urban advocate central planners lie and claim they aren't (e.g. they're "nightmares," people only moved there because of "marketing", etc. that have been repeated in this thread).
In that context, it's absurd for you to act like suburbanites are the brow-beaten victims of city-dwellers telling you how to live. People living in the city who don't own cars are paying higher housing costs because of planing policies that demand that developers build more parking, or disallow multi-unit projects. It's the car-folk who are telling everyone else how to live, and have been for decades. The city-residents are also subsidizing the road construction and maintenance and the less efficient emergency services for suburbs in our counties, and the whole planet has to deal with the higher carbon footprint.
For you to frame this as all about individuals just happening to prefer driving and living in suburbs is disingenuous when the policy problems are _all about_ car-centric policies _forcing_ unnecessary constraints onto people. The LA guy in the article that wanted to open a deli but spent 6 figures and multiple years blocked over showing that he was meeting the parking requirements, and then giving up -- why is his desire to open a business less important than your desire to drive and have ample parking wherever you go? Suburban drivers are not the victims here; they are the problem.
That was the second alternate universe scenario. You can make different tradeoffs, and that's one of them. I for one, would not prefer either of the alternate-universe tradeoffs I mentioned, and I know I'm not alone or even unusual in that preference.
It's a bit surprising this is news/debatable to some, but here it goes:
* Traffic is very heavy on those urban highways, making them highly inefficient in transporting people, their main objective; they result in massive amounts of time wasted
* The neighborhoods bulldozed for those urban highways, or near them, suffered immensely. Of course this being the US we're talking about, it was disproportionately poorer and "non-white" communities that suffered, as well as historic/picturesque parts (e.g. some US cities have highways on waterfronts which are super nice places to have as parks).
Ugly, noisy, polluting highways that wall off the undesirables while also being shit at their main task? Yes, urban highways were generally a failure.
Precisely what you see now are wealthy cities (outside of the sunbelt) tearing down old and crumbling urban highways like the Embarcadero in SF and poor cities like Baltimore being stuck with 83 which it can neither afford to maintain or tear down. In the case of 83 it cut right through a thriving working class neighborhood called Old Town which is now abandoned and little more than a skid row. Whereas the neighborhoods around the water that were slated for razing for highway construction but spared are the most thriving neighborhoods in the city. Urban highways were always a giveaway to people who fled to the suburbs at the expense of people who did not. They involved monstrous acts of government takings through imminent domain and eradicated the wealth of generations of people who had their property stolen with only token compensation. And now in the case of Baltimore, no only were multiple neighborhoods destroyed, but the schools that remained near the highway have worse performance which has been repeatedly linked to air pollution from the highway.
My better idea was for the government not to steal peoples' homes and businesses to build highways for people it also subsidized to live elsewhere. This create a double drag on the economies of American cities by depriving them of tax revenue and destroying economic activity.
My grandpa told me about this. Government troops driving him and his family out of their tenement apartment at bayonet point. Marching them, weeping, to a tract home in a suburb with a car in the garage. No one wanted to go, and they all wept for weeks. My grandma was home-bound for years because she refused to step into one of those infernal automobiles, and government forces had bombed all the trolleys. The 1950s was a a very traumatic time for America.
But the policies I’m referring to are around federal home lending programs that only lent money for suburban developments, the construction of interstate highways, paying for “slum clearing” in the 1950, and so on.
But why bother knowing anything about history…
You're too fixated on one variable. You can decrease transit times by increasing density, but then you're cramming people into sardine cans.
Should I hate driving because sometimes my car is filled full of people or items?
How much space have we wasted on transportation infrastructure, period? How many one-bedroom apartments could we build in cities, if there was no way to get in or out of them?
I think that's an important question that The Atlantic magazine needs to commission a long article about. Preferably one written in a self-righteous, judgemental tone.
Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing/sewer, telecom etc.
Parking requires either gravel or gravel with asphalt on top.
Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?
Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing/sewer, telecom etc.
So do houses built further away. Do we want houses to be more close or not? What about corner shops?
Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?
Cars happen when systems are built for them.
I do not want to live in a sad concrete box in a city somewhere, and my quality of life matters more to me than someone else's communal pipe dreams. I had a rural upbringing. Cities are nice to visit but they give me anxiety.
People who like living in cities don't like cars. People living outside like them. It's quite easy to enforce tbh.
Some people who like living in some cities don't like cars. Try that schtick in Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, or New Orleans and see how far that gets you.
That's a tautology, and doesn't really address the point. Europeans also own a lot of cars, despite having cities much older than the modern automobile. Maybe cars have a use case that isn't easily addressed with public transit.
They're not static at all.
The truth is you need a place to put people (and data in the CPU world) while they are going about their lives and moving from place to place.
To move from place to place, it seems the average American prefers their car, since it generally runs on their timetable, and they do not have to share personal space with strangers.
And it is not just an American thing. If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.
Cars in Europe are a bit more expensive, and a lot more expensive in the third world. But in everywhere we always saw the same thing, as soon as people could buy a car, they would buy one.
And once someone has a car, they would also tend to move further to bigger places. Most people outside HN bubble like cars and their convenience.
Everyone loves [the first order effects of] cars. Climate control, directly to where you need to go, whenever suits you, for a high upfront, but low ongoing cost.
Everyone fucking hates the second order effects (see: literally anybodys take on traffic). Climate change, more danger to everyone around them (from pedestrians to motorcyclists to other drivers), noise pollution, and air pollution from tires and exhaust. Everyone likes them, typically right up to when they aren't the driver [0]
[0] Some gearheads break this rule, but I think nearly all of them would agree that requiring the average person to maintain and drive their car isn't great, considering the average driver's skillset.
Somehow, not owning a car, I rarely feel like there's too many people around, perhaps unless it's peak tourist season; I just associate the miserable parts with cars alone rather than people in-general. In fact, it's almost always a positive contribution to my day-to-day life. But when I seldom borrow a car, I remember why they feel this way.
There is endless suburban sprawl in the US that does accommodate cars, and people that feel the need to drive a massive vehicle are welcome there.
And this is coming from someone owning 7 cars living out in the sticks. But when I did live in Seattle the train and bike infrastructure made the city so much more livable when working downtown.
Urban planning in these places will naturally cap car ownership, i.e. in PRC cities have 0.5 - 1 parking spaces per car vs 3-6 in US. Ownership is not going to explode to the point of replicating comparable problems of car centric urban design. It comes with it's own downsides of course.
I’m sorry but I really hate this argument. In most places in the US it’s impossible to use anything but a car to get around. It’s not that most of these articles want to ban cars, most are just trying get public transit/biking/walking as a second option.
You can’t have only one option then walk around saying “well I guess Americans really prefer this option, we shouldn’t give them any other options”.
> And it is not just an American thing. If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.
This is, as usual a thing in degrees. The number of US cars owned sits at 96-100% of the drive-able population. China is at ~30%. India is ~10%. A commenter mentions Europe as having “a lot of cars” but a quick eyeball shows that most European countries have roughly 1/3 fewer cars than America. These aren’t trivial differences that you can just handwave away.