The force that shapes everything around us: Parking | Hacker News Reader

The force that shapes everything around us: Parking

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266 pointsvwoolf451 comments

There's an interesting interview with a designer of SimCity, where he discusses parking:

Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships

Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.

Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.

Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.

Source: https://bldgblog.com/2013/05/sim-city-an-interview-with-ston...

It's a pity that they didn't bake in the option to turn on realistic parking lots and road sizes for the required capacity. It does have traffic jams and more roads can help, especially since the player can control induced demand far more than in reality, but allowing the player to switch between both what's a fun game and what's a realistic simulation could have gone a long way to inform a good chunk of the population on the tradeoffs and impacts of parking and other infrastructure dedicated to automobiles.

I haven't looked at 'cities: skylines' or if there is a sequel... recently. I'm wondering if they finally did start modeling parking.

I think 'realistic parking' should probably be an option, like you said some people want the 'classic' sim-city experience and modeling. I'd hate to drive those people away from the 'cities' series, as it just seems to be sim-city without the EA enshittification.

I think it could be really interesting to allow users to try to build less car focused cities within the game. To simulate concepts like Barcelona's 'superblocks', to plan bikelanes or golfcart-focused communities like 'the villages'.

Generally the devs of 'cities' seem like they are interested in many concepts (there are sooooo many dlc for skylines) .. hopefully this one bubbles up.

Cities Skylines 2 is in the release press window, they have announced that parking and commutes will be modeled. So CS2 will be much more parking heavy, and should hopefully show just how terrible cars are in cities compared to literally any other transport mode.

There is a mod for the current version of cities that does model it. You have to make sure you have enough parking or your buildings will go empty.

There is a also a DLC addon where you can have walkable cities. It is pretty tricky to get just right.

Realistic parking and mixed-use commercial/residential as common in European cities are my two biggest wishes for Cities 2.

mixed use zoning (and new types of medium zoning like row houses and commie blocks) were in last week's dev diary: https://youtu.be/PBwwZ4XnW34?t=84

I am so happy.

There is a sequel coming out in the next few months and the developers say that parking is modeled more realistically than in the first Cities: Skylines. In the first game, citizens did not park cars at all - cars appeared out of thin air, were driven to their destination, and then vanished again. Folks often called these "pocket cars" because citizens could put them into and take them out of their pants pockets.

Apparently in the sequel buildings actually have parking, and the cars sit in the parking lot. Some citizens such as older ones prefer to drive.

That's also how SimCity did it, up until the bad EA one.

Traffic was modeled using the typical civil engineer math, rather than simulated one by one.

Moving to simulating actual trips made for very poor simulation performance

I was curious how much bigger the real stadium parking was.

SimCity: https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/simcity/e/...

Real Stadium: https://i.imgur.com/KwT1T53.png

I am surprised that this was surprising to people. Cars are much bigger than people, of course you'd need bigger parking lots than seating space

Assuming no other transportation alternative, and single person per car as well I guess?

Not assuming that, it's not that obvious how big parking needs to be.

> of course you'd need bigger parking lots than seating space

There is a tacit assumption in your statement. Of course you don't need vast parking lots around stadiums, and there are plenty of real-world sports arenas that don't have those (some examples [1][2][3]). The parking that there is is structural, and most people simply use public transit to reach these places, which are often located in moderately densely built areas. So, allow me to restate your claim, with a different assumption:

Of course you need great mass transit connections to a stadium, how else would people reach it?

Edit: But yes, people also don't have a good intuition on how much space cars actually waste in bulk. For example, many people don't seem to realize how much space it saves on roadways if 50 people sit in a bus or or tram or train rather than in 30 or 40 cars. Indeed, any rational motorist should be enthusiastically in favor of any project that makes public transit more attractive or accessible, purely for selfish reasons!

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[1] Nokia Arena in Tampere https://goo.gl/maps/3WmAxfA2pCXDre8p7

[2] Helsinki Olympic Stadium https://goo.gl/maps/BQhopp5kRtTrEDR79 [under renovation in the aerial imagery]

[3] Tele2 Arena in Stockholm https://goo.gl/maps/za3y6HfRvocjfZR37

Even in US cities, stadia often lack massive surface parking lots. Giants stadium and Fenway are examples that do have some (very expensive) parking but are also on top of transit.

Or Letzigrund in Zurich, with a capacity of up to 50,000 people for concerts, and absolutely zero street parking available: https://goo.gl/maps/kPye3VdVB9ZLpPsx8

Oh, very nice example!

Edmonton's original light rail line was good for connecting the home of the Oilers with the home of the Eskimos, the former home of the Oilers, as well as the home of the Ooks, the Golden bears, as well as the Saville Sports centre and the Claireview rec center.

The light rail line is not so good for connecting people from their home to their place of work. It was built a long an old industrial rail corridor 40 years ago and the area around all the rail stations is still zoned as industrial.

They've since built massive expansions, which is good, although they are now nearly 4 years behind schedule on the first major leg expected to open. I'm looking forward to an lrt system that's good for more than getting quickly from one sports complex to another.

I'd love to see how they manage parking.

I'm also a little curious on how to compare capacities. Per wikipedia, it is only 25k for sports. 70+k for teams is common in many of the other stadiums I looked at. That said, I don't exactly know that many stadiums. Very intimidating to see how large many of these places are.

> I'd love to see how they manage parking.

There are a few thousand parking spots in garages a few stops away on the light rail, but the whole district the stadium is in has only about 5k public parking spots overall for ALL purposes. The sensible strategy is to arrive by public transit — many of the events (both concerts and sports events) have a train ticket included in the price of admission, run extra trains for the events, (including extra security in the case of soccer games), and light rail drops you less than 100m from the entrance of the stadium.

If you absolutely need to arrive by car, either come early or pick a garage elsewhere in the city, and take public transit to the stadium.

If you're absolutely allergic to public transit, you could probably get a Taxi, Uber, or friend to drop you off.

For sports events, some of the away fans travel in hired buses which will drop them off at the stadium, wait at some special lot (considerably more space efficient than the equivalent in cars, and can be further away), and pick them up again after the game.

It's not saying much that stadiums are weird in a way that games don't model (edited). A stadium's audience loves to drive to places, that's the purpose of the destination, to watch a thing then eat garlic fries and drink and drive home, so whatever.

I like the author's politics and agree with her sentiments. But if the author of this thing thinks she can run a business on Main Street without parking, by all means, she should go and do that. It gives me "I'm going to release my app for low end Android devices" energy. People who spend money, especially on the alcohol and jewelry on which Main St thrives, really fucking love to drive.

The most authentic system to me in Sim City was starting in debt, which I understand few players do. Then, it makes most sense to pause time and spend 100% of your money on day one, because services can be paid in deficit but improvements cannot. So why waste positive balance on services you can keep on with deficit spending? This strategy brings you the greatest ROI and the greatest tax base growth.

The micro of like, how many square feet of X does it take to simulate system Y... I don't know, who cares. The minmaxing people on YouTube make fascinating content re: urban design ideas, but it's not like it's grounded in reality.

That's a very North American biased view.

In fact, many studies have shown that in reasonably structured cities, pedestrians and public transit users are a more important source of income to downtown commercial services than motorists. Their individual transactions tend to be smaller, but there are more of them. But it's also vital that the city center and its neighboring areas are actually places where people live, not just visit for work and shopping. There's a quote that goes something like "Americans really like to be tourists in the city they live in".

But yes, many business owners (and the sorts of politicians they tend to vote) are irrationally attached to the idea that motorists are the ones who bring in the money, and that proposals to make cities more livable and less car-dependent would be really bad for business. I'd wager that to an extent they're just trying to come up with rational sounding post-hoc reasons for their emotional attachment to cars and driving.

> But yes, many business owners (and the sorts of politicians they tend to vote) are irrationally attached to the idea that motorists are the ones who bring in the money

If they're so irrational, go and start a business with no parking! I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm saying that you're not appreciating the forces that make people put up with commutes and parking in the first place.

> pedestrians and public transit users are a more important source of income to downtown commercial services than motorists

My family and I bike everywhere. Obviously my dog in this race is more accessible cities.

I'm just being intellectually honest.

Like dude, the company that makes my e-bikes is going into receivership.

I live next to Valencia Street in San Francisco, and there was so much opposition to building new bike lanes, thoroughly vetted by experts, from cyclists themselves. I would almost call it "irrational."

They didn't even build the center lanes very far, because the center lanes from 23rd to Cesar Chavez would have reduced the way the megachurches use the center lane as free parking on Sundays.

The businesses on Valencia Street need those underage CSU revelers trucked in by Ubers. They cannot walk from a side street to Blondie's, the thing they pay for is to be dropped off in front of the door.

Someone has to deliver all that alcohol that sells! Someone has to truck the produce in gas-guzzling trucks to Rainbow. Someone's gotta gas-powered-bus the pickers to pick the produce at Rainbow.

This is my one neighborhood. You are welcome to try to start a new local business on the idea that "[poor people's] individual transactions tend to be smaller, but there are more of them." I can guarantee you will fail.

I appreciate that there are experts studying this. They are welcome to apply for civil jobs in San Francisco! They can go and win elections! I am aligned with those politics and want those outcomes, and I am not saying they are inaccurate at all. I am saying your "studies" an incomplete view on cities.

I understand and empathize with your frustration, but I did specifically say that there are some prerequisites for car-light city centers to work well. But I felt that you in turn unfairly generalized the unfortunate NA situation¹ when in fact in, say, Europe there are dozens of cities with pedestrian/transit-first historical centers and hundreds more where it would be perfectly achievable – and is slowly being achieved – if not for ideological opposition.

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¹ Even SF is much less dense than almost any European city of comparable size!

San Francisco is a small city, but, at 6,655.4 people/km2, it's more dense than Berlin, at 4,126/km2.

Strongtowns has an article on this [1] that cites papers which show that increases in walkability lead to higher home values and attracts more businesses. If you have studies that demonstrate an effect and a model which corroborates the effects, opposition is necessarily irrational. The fact is that in NA people are very attached to their cars and parking and that people in NA are much more "fitness inequal" (people who are unfit in NA are much more unfit than unfit people in other developed countries) [2] so it's much more likely for folks in NA to oppose anything that takes away parking.

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/1/16/why-walkable-s...

[2]: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/trackin...

Yeah because their plan was stupid. For what's being asked of it, they should make Valencia one-way to accommodate its needs.

> It's not saying much that stadiums have very favorable land prices, which aren't modeled in the games.

But that's not even true, much like your assertion that businesses are kept afloat by customers who drive to them.

> But if the author of this thing thinks she can run a business on Main Street without parking, by all means, she should go and do that.

The whole point is that this is illegal. Let’s make it legal again and see what happens. :)

That looks like a pretty far distance to walk from the furthest parking spots to the stadium. Do these stadiums have some sort of "mass transit" system to move the people from their cars to the stadium?

I just measured that stadium on a map, corner to corner it is 1.3km. That is 20 minutes even at conservative elderly person walking speed, and the stadium is in the middle so for everyone it will be less than 10 minutes walk.

If you are about to sit for few hours and shove hotdogs + sugary drinks down your throat the 10 minute walk will do you good.

In my experience, some of them do have transport shuttles (golf carts, small vans, sometimes busses) that just do loops of the parking lot. Even some of the stadiums that don't provide that as an intentional house service find groups forming small shuttle companies to opportunistically make a few dollars on that service (and jam up parking traffic that little bit more because there aren't designed service routes, just these ad hoc third party providers trying to make a quick buck on a game day).

I think anti-car activists would do great to mod SimCity to have realistic parking lots.

I don't think many people are truly anti-car activists. Just that we need to redimension their absolute centrality to so many policies and budgets.

I'm involved in pro-housing politics and it's just amazing how many people are like "well, ok, sure, people need a place to live and all, but let's think FIRST about where to store the automobiles. If that works out, then I guess we can build some housing".

They don't say it quite like that, but it's the general idea.

Cities should be about people first and foremost. Places for them to live and do business. Cars are pretty convenient for some things, and many people want one...fine. But base the decisions around people first and then work out spaces for the cars.

It’s mostly because of zoning. If you separate retail from offices from housing, you force people to have cars to get around. Which then requires large parking lots and wide roads to deal with all the cars, in a big feedback loop. Those who can’t drive (about a third of the population are too young, too old, or disabled) are just forced to make do. Not to mention how difficult it is for the poor. Owning a car is really expensive for those living on very little money.

I feel like fixing zoning would at least make possible fixing the rest.

Don't forget the socialization of costs that comes in the forms of cities crippling their traffic flow for the sake of dedicating half their road surface to people parking on it instead of driving on it. I love cars but a street covered in unmoving automobiles is an intensely perverse sight.

You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute. Once people start forming families, "live next to work" is likely to be very unrealistic for one of the people involved, assuming they both work. One person gets a new job across town and the other doesn't? Setting aside whether or not most people would want to move anytime that happened, there's no longer a single answer. Start throwing kids in the mix and it gets even trickier. Gotta balance the schools in there, and the effect that moving would have on them, etc.

Reduce the need for shopping and entertainment commuting and build more transit so that more routs have practical non-car options and you reduce the need for traffic and parking, but that's realistically an incredibly expensive proposition for many cities. You need a really really really built out transit network to enable something close to point to point commuting in under an hour across a large city. (And traffic and parking becoming crippling things for a city are issues small cities often mostly duck by their nature of being small...)

It's a sort of "we all need to commit to changing our environment systematically for decades" problem.

> incredibly expensive proposition for many cities

I lived in Italy for a number of years. It is a poorer country than the United States in a lot of ways, and yet they manage this quite well.

It still comes back to zoning and parking: by allowing denser development, you can plan transit routes that serve a lot more people, some of whom don't even own an automobile.

The largest cities in Italy are quite a bit smaller than the largest cities in the US, so it's a very different situation.

Rome's metro area is about 4.3 million people. San Antonio's is about 2.6 million. San Antonio also has far more relaxed car-based commutes than the Bay Area or LA as a result.

If you dropped Rome's three subway lines in San Antonio you wouldn't get rid of that many car trips, especially since the city being smaller and less dense than the really big cities in the US makes the car trips that much easier in the first place.

Rome is notable for having kind of not great subway infrastructure for a major European city because, among other problems, they tend to encounter a lot of archeological stuff whenever they dig there.

And I'm not even talking about major cities. Where I lived in Padova, it has approximately 200K people in the same area that about 100K people occupy here in Bend, Oregon. Padova has way better transit than Bend does even if Bend is much more well to do in many ways.

Is Bend gripped by housing issues and traffic as much as the Bay Area or NYC or wherever?

The folks I know in smaller US towns simply don't have the same concerns about parking spaces as those in high-demand, high-population, central large cities. And comparing those cities to typically-small-to-medium-size Italian cities doesn't result in very actionable practical plans.

Bend has very serious housing woes. The housing crisis, at this point, has spread out from the epicenter type places like the Bay Area.

One of my best friends here got priced out and now drives in 40 minutes from a nearby town. That's bad for 1) him and his family 2) the environment 3) traffic.

If you ask people on Nextdoor, they'll probably tell you there's also a traffic crisis, but it's not true.

Is San Antonio really a city? That just sounds like an endless suburb to me

I live in Tokyo: there's over 40 million people in the greater metro area. It's the largest metro area in the world. There's hundreds of train/subway stations and most of the population gets around by public transit, along with cycling and walking.

Population size isn't the problem, the problem is the way American cities were built. If you want public transit to work, you have to make cars extremely inconvenient, which means little or no parking (and the parking that exists is very expensive), high density, and zoning that allows all this.

Allowing infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do. All it costs is rezoning: if they then increase taxes on the now very-desirable-to-build land, it’ll be a huge net win, with cheaper utilities and transport infra to maintain relative to the tax base. Sewers cost roughly the same per mile regardless of if you’re serving 1,000 or 10,000 people.

This becomes really obvious when you look at where cities like Kansas City receive the most taxes vs where they spend the most: suburbs cost Kansas City huge amounts of money that the inner walkable city neighborhoods subsidize, despite the per-capita tax returns being lower in the more dense neighborhoods.

>> infill development of existing parking lots to create mixed use neighborhoods is in reality very cheap for cities to do

No. That is a radical change in needs and services. Cars don't need sewage treatment and fresh water delivery. Parking lots don't need school systems and health care. Just saying that a parking lot can be converted to houses ignores the radically different local and external needs of human residents as opposed to parked cars. It is akin to those who say that office buildings should "just be converted to apartments" with zero insight re the difficulties of doing so in practice.

Compared to the same amount of services further spread out, infill is far cheaper, and tends to generate a lot more tax revenue compared to the infrastructure needs. Here's a sort of simplified, but real-world example that uses snow clearing:

https://bendyimby.com/2021/03/24/snow-and-financial-producti...

Something like sewers are more complicated, but the basic equation is that you're adding things in an area that's already served by infrastructure and often pretty good infrastructure at that, rather than adding in kilometers of brand new infrastructure for relatively low-revenue uses.

>> adding things in an area that's already served by infrastructure

Unlike in video games, "adding" load to infrastructure can cost more than running new lines. Everything from pipes to power lines have finite capacities. If a city sewer system is at capacity, as many are, dropping some more people into the middle (replacing a parking lot with houses) will require possibly ripping up the old sewer/water/power lines to expand them. And expanding their up/downstream connections. That can impact far far more than the local connection, often costing much more than green-field development. Imaging how much cost to open up and expand a sewer under any Manhattan street. Compare that to digging a trench through a green field out on the outskirts of town.

Everything from pipes to power lines also have a finite lifespan, and many cities are succumbing to crumbling infrastructure as the low density suburban tax base isn't covering their costs, and is unsustainable in the long term.

Yes it costs a lot in absolute terms to rip up and expand a sewer lines in Manhattan, but that doesn't mean it costs more per person being served by that infrastructure.

Snow removal is cheap. The expensive things like schools, criminal justice, and health care are all more expensive per person in denser cities.

They're more expensive per person in cities with a higher cost of living, which often correlates with density. But zoning restrictions increase the cost of living by contributing to housing scarcity.

Density isn't the cause of high cost, it's the response to it. It's the market increasing supply in the presence of high demand. When prices are high you want more of it, not less.

In fact, I have increasingly seen the pattern of adults who work from home but have a commute to drive their children in the morning / afternoon. That's 2-ways both times, for the record. It's often multi-destination.

I know multiple people who bought houses 45 minutes from work that made way, way more money than needed for those houses.

They WANTED to be in the middle of nowhere. They could have had a house 11 minutes away with good schools and access to nature, but they choose 45 to be isolated. They live in their cars.

That's what congestion charges at city limits are for.

I wish I was further out of the city.

I think if actual self-driving cars arrive, they will fuel sprawl like nothing else before. I wouldn't mind a long commute if I could sleep or work or chill out as my car drove me to work.

I think this is actually a perfectly legitimate point of view if people are paying for the externalities: 1) CO2 emissions 2) paying more for road usage.

Everyone has different preferences and we should be free to fulfill them.

You're describing a train

A door-to-door train would be pretty cool, especially when my door is on a 10 acre lot 35 minutes outside of the city and I get a private cabin on the train that I can sleep in.

A self driving version of this could help you reach the train station/tram stop: https://www.karsan.com/tr/e-jest-genel-bakis

Why pay to have a house then though. Just have a self-driving RV and live wherever you want. You can live in the office parking lot during the week, and in the park the rest of the time.

Because I do want a home base. I want a large workshop for woodworking, painting, and maybe ceramics. I want a place to have musical instruments. I want a great home theater, gym, sauna, and an amazing kitchen. I want space to work on my motorcycle.

Land is important. I want a big garden and lots of space between me and my neighbors. I want quiet nights and a dark sky.

I could never afford this near a city, but once you drive thirty to sixty minutes, there are a lot of options.

I want a lot of things too but unfortunately I have a limited amount of money. I'd like all those things, but I'd rather have money so I can live off the interest and not have to work, so I have the time and energy to do any of those things.

To each their own.

> “Reduce the need for shopping and entertainment commuting and build more transit so that more routs have practical non-car options and you reduce the need for traffic and parking, but that's realistically an incredibly expensive proposition for many cities.”

These American cities are like the 600-lbs person who contemplates a lifestyle change but laments that it would be incredibly expensive to eat vegetables instead of fast food. “I need so many calories at my weight, it’s just a fact, they’re not cheaply available from that fresh stuff.”

> You're not gonna get rid of the need to commute.

Higher density enables mass transit.

Moreover, work from home is a thing now. One person lives near their job, the other works from home, no commute.

> build more transit

This is putting the cart before the horse. The suburbs aren't dense enough to justify a transit route and if you install one there it will just go unused.

First you have to rezone all the low density areas to allow higher density. Then you look where people are starting to build once they're allowed to and install transit routes to the places that now justify them.

> Moreover, work from home is a thing now. One person lives near their job, the other works from home, no commute.

This works great as long as neither has to ever change jobs to either a different location or one with a different WFH policy.

In other countries you can commute easily without a car by using transit and rail.

I hope/believe that we are near a tipping point. There is a very large and very substantial neighborhood premium based on what's around it, but the zoning is the same everywhere so the competition was legally restricted to greenways, sidewalks, parks, and HOA facilities. Even in the suburban US, it is a VERY desirable feature to be within walking distance of a park where young children can play. This has created a strange effect, where people (let's be honest, affluent people) accumulate a collection of aspirational wheeled items - strollers, bikes, weird electric skateboard-like things, and other wheeled things for the kids. These are coupled local government parks and spaces where people can ride a bike JUST FOR FUN. I mean it very seriously that greenways outright avoid any turns that might be useful for economic life. Riding bikes on the roads is mostly for the true anti-car zealots.

I've been ready to buy a house for few years, but I've realized I'm no longer happy with the whole package. I want to realistically be able to walk or bike to get a dinner, coffee, or groceries. Yet, city centers (in the south for sure) tend to offer the most dangerous roads for doing this, and unhealthy environment, and poor social atmosphere.

I'm sensing that there are more people on the sidelines (who have remove jobs, after all) who are ready to buy into better neighborhoods. These people may not be willing to give up their cars, but there is negotiating space, and it is relevant that these are people who have economic clout to force the issue.

Riding bikes on the road, even in the US, is mostly for the poorest workers. It is most visibly for the committed exercise or competitive cyclists, and it is vanishingly infrequently but looms large in the public imagination for the "true anti-car zealots".

https://www.vox.com/2014/7/9/5883823/its-not-just-hipsters-o...

I think the lifestyle you desire can be had somewhat near downtown areas of large cities in the South. However, areas tend to quickly flip-flop between gentrified and not. Things within walking distance may be slightly limited.

Worse, this is really just for the 20-30s crowd or childless crowd. As soon as you have kid(s), you’ll probably find this unsuitable (school quality/location, 3 floor townhouse design, etc). If you went to college and grad school and then moved out there, you might only have 5 years of this…

For the better schools in a more solidly middle class area, one easily ends up in a suburb. And if one desires a house less than 20yrs old, one learns about unknown communities formerly believed to be in remote reaches beyond the boundaries of known civilization… (I jest but they are way out from the city center!)

And remote jobs aren’t a panacea. If one has kids in school, they can’t just uproot their family and move to a rural mountain town across the country on a whim.

I’ve also always been vexed that I can’t live near where I work. Aside from years of long commutes, the distance caused me to largely miss out on after-hours social events. Almost felt like a foreigner next to the people who lived closer.

In the UK we build houses without enough parking and the whole area becomes horrendous. The idea I get from reading about US "pro housing" people is that if you don't provide parking, people will still have a car and still park.

In reality in the UK every patch of open space, including pavements (sidewalks) become car storage facilities. housing estates with 4 bed houses with just 1 car parking space (plus a garage which nobody users to store a car) end up with 1 or 2 cars parked on the pavement in addition to the drive, houses in towns converted to HMOs (house of multiple occupancy, because professionals can't really afford a 1 bed flat in the UK) with 4 adults in mean 4 cars parked on the roads.

What is 'horrendous' is people not having a place to live. Cars parked here and there is not great, but it's not nearly as bad as not having enough housing.

I've heard that UK zoning and land use is perhaps even worse than the US.

In the US they become places to live in a tent until the police destroy your tent and you live in a similar spot on the pavement two blocks away without a tent.

Total nonsense. New builds in the UK have ample parking.

No, they don't. Planing permission typically allows a 4 bed with 2 parking spaces, but one is a garage, meaning it's 1 usable parking space. Given that the only way you can afford a house is to have at least 2 workers, that leaves either 2 cars or public transit. Public transit in the UK is far better than the US but is still not good enough for most people.

With increasing numbers of children staying with their parents past education, you end up with 3 or 4 commuters per house.

In all honesty, why is a 4-bedroom house with only a single dedicated car parking space a problem? Is it because families that have decided they must have multiple cars parked close to their home all the time are leaving them parked in public locations that other people value and want to use? If so, it sounds like those parking locations need to be charged for. Said families may then rethink whether they really need those cars parked so close to their homes all the time (or indeed, whether they need so many cars at all).

It’s four different families in one house.

How common is that in the UK?? It'd be exceedingly rare in Australia.

Having 4 independent adults in a 4 bed house is quite common in the UK due to the cost of housing.

Having 3 or 4 adults in a 4 bed house is even more common once you include 20-something kids who live with their parents due to the cost of housing.

The cost of housing is nothing to do with the number of car parking spaces provided. If you assume the typical 2 adult 2 children household (the ones most likely to be in those 3/4 bed new build houses), where 55% have at least 2 cars -- at that includes London where car ownership is lower, having a single driveway is a major problem.

> Having 4 independent adults in a 4 bed house is quite common

As it would be in Australia. But not 4 families!

Sorry for the confusion. I was using “family” to emphasize that these were unrelated people in the same house. The idea being that the car-sharing dynamic is different between multiple families (or unrelated individuals) than within one family.

My spouse and I share a car. My neighbor and I probably could but not without a lot more hassle.

HMOs are increasingly common in the UK -- not just in London or for students, but in towns for working professionals. You can (and do) easily have a 4 bed house with 4 adults with 4 separate jobs. I have a 40+ friend with a phd who lives in such a house near Bristol (3 adults in a 3 bed house).

Hell back in 2003 I lived in a 4 bed house in London which had 7 adults in it (I didn't stay there for long). That type of housing is 3 times more expensive now in relation to earnings. If you were to put that in somewhere like Mansfield you're talking at least 4 cars even if half the people commute via bus.

> If so, it sounds like those parking locations need to be charged for.

I agree, however once you make it the norm then people expect to have parking for free, and anyone attempting to change that would be voted out of office

I think it's not just about storing the vehicles, it's also about making your life miserable in a 2 hour commute going to a 3 hour commute.

There IS more space in the united states, believe it or not.

Since there is more space, you'd expect that the market would allocate more of it for parking where needs be and that you don't need the government dictating parking minimums.

Also, not all space is equal: even in the US, well-connected space with lots of amenities like the downtowns of cities is not infinite.

The market allocates only as much as users can bear, which is about epsilon above the line of "for average user, the parking situation is so bad and unbearable that they chose to go without the service". Anything above it is money left on the table.

That's assuming there is a monopoly on providing parking spaces. Zoning notwithstanding, anyone can build a parking structure and rent or sell parking spaces. Tenants can choose whether to pay more for an apartment that includes parking or less for one that doesn't.

The total cost of a housing unit with parking wouldn't be be more than it is now because the cost of constructing a housing unit with parking wouldn't be more than it is now. It would just cause units without parking to become available.

Which would tend to increase housing availability, which would tend to lower prices including for units with parking. Because the people who want the parking spaces wouldn't have to bid against people who just want housing and don't need parking.

Fun fact - the city near me has a new zoning rule that limits the total number of parking spots in the city to something close to the current number of parking spots. If you want to build an apartment with parking, type find to need to tear down something with parking first.

So they're tearing down shopping centers, movie theaters, and grocery stores just so they can build apartments with parking. I have no idea where the people living nearby that don't have cars will buy food, but at least the new luxury apartments will have parking.

What city is that?

Japan has no street parking (and the occasional public lot run by the city) and I never felt this to be the case. You're right, there's no expectation of driving into a massive parking lot everywhere I go, but instead there are convenient paid lots at pretty much any trip destination. The only times these things get booked out is during big events when transit fills in the gaps anyway.

The real issue is people not knowing where to move. They go in google and search for top towns in the united states, and a bunch of city-data articles come up and next thing you know those drivable/parkable towns like Bozeman, Flagstaff, Bend, Grand Junction, Asheville (or Ashland for that matter) all become bogged down by massive population influxes. I'm talking like 2x 3x population boom in the last 5 to 10 years. There's no way these towns can't go from "Strongtown" status to homeless everywhere and clogged up roads if people can't get off google and find something new without google telling them something is hip.

It's not like getting rid of cars will make commute faster.

My friend (working in biology research) lived in England for a few years, and had 2+ hour commute by public transport. He was married, so both he and his wife had to find the jobs, and one of them had to end up with the large commute...

> and many people want one

Perhaps that's the main problem. If we were more content to share them they'd be far less of a need for so much parking space (and possibly even road space). I haven't owned a car in 15 years, at least partly because I've been happy to accept there's generally one available within the household to use when I need it.

I'm anticar.

Most people are too negligent/inept to safely operate them and there is genuinely no need for private vehicles if adequate infrastructure is put in place.

More people die due to automobiles every year than from cigarette induced cancer, and that's without addressing the elephant in the room of misattribution to second hand smoke that which is actually/more reasonably explained by chronic car emission exposure (take a look at that stuff, it's insane).

We don't actually need cars, people just Want them too kuch to do the right things to protect our children.

> I'm involved in pro-housing politics and it's just amazing how many people are like "well, ok, sure, people need a place to live and all, but let's think FIRST about where to store the automobiles. If that works out, then I guess we can build some housing".

Out in the real world, as we have constructed it, this is (sadly) pretty reasonable.

It's a chicken and egg problem. If you limit the market for an apartment to people who are willing to waste an extra hour to make bus transfers and/or those who are willing to risk their lives cycling on deadly stroads, you're going to have a much smaller pool of potential renters.

Why not go all the way to the source of the problem to make it realistic?

E.g., NIMBYism

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-st...

And the root cause of NIMBYism is the public goods dilemma. Everyone would benefit if more housing were built, but nobody wants more built near their land.

The solution is not as simple as "Just stop electing NIMBYs!" because NIMBYism is a Nash equilibrium.

> nobody wants more built near their land

Absolute nonsense.

Why is it nonsense? The existence of NIMBYs proves the statement that people don't want houses built near them. Perhaps I was being hyperbolic with the word "nobody", but the point stands.

And now do the same for the existence of YIMBYs and see why your comment is absolute nonsense.

Perhaps the only solution then is to build in everybody's backyard. "Why don't we build over there instead of here" is more difficult to argue when the same construction is happening everywhere.

> Everyone would benefit if more housing were built, but nobody wants more built near their land.

Letting land owners build on land they already own with fewer restrictions solves this problem. If it's a matter of aesthetics or "neighborhood character" and not a matter of habitability as defined by the housing code, then why should the wants of whoever owns land that happens to be nearby factor in?

I definitely want more housing near my land. It means more restaurants and shops that I can easily walk to, more likelihood that my friends will live in easy walking distance, etc.

> When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. . . . So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground.

All the new HEBs (Texas grocery store) that I've seen are built above their parking garages with a smaller amount of parking at store level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-E-B

Is it wrong that I think I would enjoy playing Sim Parking Lot?

Try Mini Motorways. It's a different style of game but certainly captures the futility of car-centric traffic management.

It's a video game so if you're going to learn that lesson from that one, then hopefully you don't play its companion game, Mini Metro, because otherwise you'll conclude that train-centric management is also futile.

But in a different way. In Motorways you actually run out of space to build infrastructure. In Metro you run out of "money" (as represented by incredibly limited resources). They are both games where you're guaranteed to lose (in pursuit of high score), but the gameplay-feel is very different.

Cities Skylines has mods which can simulate parking in more detail.

The upcoming sequel has a much more robust simulation of parking requirements too: https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/cities-skylines-ii/...

The excess of cars in cities is bad enough, but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets.

Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many people are dependent on them. You can't ignore that. There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities, but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. We have to ease toward a situation where their negative impact is reduced. Underground parking in new construction seems like an option, especially in cities like NYC where there is no need fear of scaring off developers. And in the case of NYC, there is precedent that goes back to at least the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, where apartment buildings do, in fact, have underground parking for the building's residents. And I suspect the costs were not huge. In many cases, the "underground parking" is merely basement level or even the ground level.

> but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation.

This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands, but the US is a wildly corrupt country with very little in the way of actual representative democracy, which is the primary reason why this (locally) correct. In many other places, it is in fact possible to achieve these outcomes through state power.

It also took 40+ years. After WW2, NL was on a course to model American cities. There are some places that still harken back to that time. Dutch people also really like to drive, which nobody seems to talk about!

But now the trains have been privatized, the ticket prices jacked up, and gas taxes are absolutely bonkers right now. If we’re lucky, maybe the trains can be brought back into more direct government control in the next decade but I doubt it.

Good public transportation and city design is only enforceable through laws on the books. Dutch city planning in some ways is non-negotiable, but very fungible in others. We must stay vigilant if we want to see our small corner of the world continue to flourish and be a beacon of hope to North American and other western societies.

Ask every Dutchman to look at British rail and ask themselves “do we want that?”. If the answer is no, they’d better fight to reverse rail privatization

>the US is a wildly corrupt country with very little in the way of actual representative democracy, which is the primary reason why this (locally) correct

While your assertion about a lack of actual representative democracy may have truth to it, in my view, most Americans hate public transit and really like cars, despite all the clear negatives that come with them (and which those people deny). There are great cities in the world that are walkable and have excellent public transit: I live in one of them myself. But in my observation, most Americans simply don't want this kind of lifestyle, and in fact don't believe it exists. So as far as car-centric planning goes, I think that Americans really are getting what they vote for.

I know you prefaced your argument with saying it's your view and all but that's just not based in reality. Americans want alternatives. It's just too bad they can't afford lobbyists to agitate for those policy preferences. https://www.filesforprogress.org/memos/gnd-for-transit-polli...

I suspect maybe part of it is a generational thing. In my circles at least a lot of my peers get actual anxiety while driving. It's certainly the most dangerous thing Americans regularly do.

My view is based in reality, yours isn't. Just because a small minority of 20-something hipsters want bikeable cities doesn't mean most Americans do. They don't. This has nothing to do with "lobbyists" and everything to do with the voting public, just like Trump was not elected by lobbyists, but instead by half the voting public who supported his repulsive views.

Well no, Trump was elected by a majority of the Electoral College. The majority of the public vote went to the other candidate. Which is sort of the point, that the US is not actually democratic in some important ways which influence policy decisions.

>The majority of the public vote went to the other candidate.

No, it didn't. Hillary didn't get a majority, she got about 48%. Trump got about 46%. There was not a significant difference between the two, and roughly half the American public voted for Trump.

It's so weird how every single time I write about how roughly half the American public voted for that turd, people like you come out of the woodwork to try to insinuate that Trump was elected by some vanishingly small minority. Why is that?

Because you're lying about the claim being made. It is correct to say that Trump was elected by a minority of the total votes cast. It would be incorrect to say that he was elected by "some vanishingly small minority", but you're the only one saying that. Being elected by a minority is sufficient to sustain the claim that an institution is antidemocratic, particularly in an otherwise simple-plurality voting system. I'm sorry if there's some reality there you don't like.

If Hillary had won, it would have also been "antidemocratic" according to your definition. So would you have protested that too? No one was going to get greater than 50% of the popular vote in that election.

Apparently there's some reality there you don't like either.

You Americans are seriously lunatic reality-deniers. Close to 50% of the voters vote for Trump, but because it's not mathematically 50%, you dismiss it as a not-significant part of the electorate. You liberals are no better than the people who stormed the Capitol; you're just as unbelieving of reality as they are.

You seem confused. It's pretty common in English, particularly when discussing simple plurality voting, to use "majority" to indicate "plurality" instead of absolute majority. It would also be possible to claim that a vote is antidemocratic absent an arbitrarily chosen supermajority, but that's not being advanced here. I decline further semantic arguments as being non-substantive, as well as puerile. Your inventions about my character are nakedly intended to be offensive; probably you shouldn't post like that here.

indeed, how bizarre that saying "half" (not "roughly half", as you are now saying), a literally factually untrue statement, garners responses pointing out that it is.

are you sure you're on the right forum for you? This community generally values accuracy over flamebait.

Can't speak to this everywhere but in Seattle and Portland there is already extensive underground and 1st 2nd floor parking for many of the "4 over 1" style of modern apartments.

Part of the problem with this is that it's so expensive that it cuts into the developers budget leading to less housing being built in medium density areas and larger/taller buildings so to keep the margins up.

Even if you imagine a magic shrinking situation where a car could be shrunk down and put in your pocket like a pokéball there's still the issue that roads in cities don't have the throughput to be able to move all those cars effectively.

If only we had a means of transportation that could efficiently move large quantities of people into dense areas of living.

It would be like a really big car that could fit lots of people. You could then put it on tracks so it had its own right-of-way or even underground.

Oh well, one day we'll figure it out. I'm sure instead what we should be doing is expanding our highways and building more parking lots. It'll fix the problem one day I'm sure of it!

except that one big car is not controlled by you, and you have to schedule your trip around it, rather than have the convenience of any-time availability. Not to mention you can't really carry much onboard.

Your objection is specifically a cultural objection rather than one based on any physical real world issue.

Japan, many european cities, etc are all comfortable with the provision and use of widespread public transport.

Where it's a problem is those locations where people such as the Koch brothers [1] invested 50 years (1970 - present) and tens of millions of dollars to bend both public opinion and state and city representatives against public transport.

It didn't take much to have the land of the free muttering in lock step about freedumb's, liberty, and their right to roll coal.

From a distance it was like watching lemmings march over a cliff [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-pub...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvQ-uEP_w7A

> a cultural objection rather than one based on any physical real world issue.

and this is what i dislike about discourse about public transport.

It is woefully inadequate in the majority of the US. Until the day it is fixed, car will always be a superior mode of transport, but then if car is so often used, there's no public incentive to build out more PT.

And by now, the suburban sprawl has made it such that building out the necessary PT with sufficient quantity and quality to replace cars is prohibitively expensive.

The best solution, imho, is a fleet of auto-driving cars that do not need to be parked, but is available at one's beck and call. Think uber, but is available 24/7 on demand.

These are just small, super inefficient buses.

I don't understand what it is you dislike about the discourse. But to address your point, the United existed before cars. Post WWII, we took very intentional steps to dismantle all the trams and passenger rail we had (we had so so many trains), and to design suburbs that require cars. And by "we," I mean government officals and all levels of governments, along with the wealthy capitalists (car manufacturers could sell more cars if there are more places that require cars, and railroad tycoons made more money in freight than passengers).

Infrastructure is built upon intentional decisions with agendas, not following laws of nature or something.

> Japan, many european cities, etc are all comfortable with the provision and use of widespread public transport.

And yet, they have many many cars.

Do people not have to schedule around 15-30 minute drives? How is that any different from “I can be there in 15 if I make the S3 train otherwise about 25 since I’ll catch the 86 bus that runs shortly after”? There really is no defense at all for being car dependent. Literally every other country in the world proves you don’t need them.

> Literally every other country in the world proves you don’t need them.

Please, tell us one country in the world that doesn't need cars.

Many, may be less dependent on cars than the U.S. . But no country is independent of cars. Using such hyperbole doesn't help the conversions. It just deepens the trenches.

> Do people not have to schedule around 15-30 minute drives?

That's not the same kind of scheduling. You can miss a bus, and be forced to wait for the next one (which will at 15 minutes minimum), but your car departs exactly when you're ready to leave whenever that is. After that, then you add the 15-30 minutes drive time (or more for a bus, if it's not an express bus and makes intermediate stops or if it takes an indirect route for your itinerary). This is so obvious I'm surprised I have to point it out.

Where I live, the subway comes every 3-5 minutes, like clockwork. Is that really so inconvenient?

On the rare occasions you have more stuff than you can carry, you can just pay for delivery. It's far cheaper than the ongoing total-cost-of-ownership of a car.

> Where I live, the subway comes every 3-5 minutes, like clockwork.

aka, you've just qualified your use of public transport with the condition that you would not ever need to wait more than 3-5mins. What if you had to wait 30mins or an hour?

In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.

>What if you had to wait 30mins or an hour?

I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.

>In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.

Right, because the US is broken and doesn't know how to do this stuff properly. It's like complaining how Eritrea isn't able to provide efficient public transit.

> I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.

So you don't want to live somewhere near forests or lakes. Somewhere, where is still some for of nature present. You only want to live downtown in a major city. Let me guess, you don't have children. Because many people change their opinion about that when they become parents.

> ...but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets.

Not just more expensive, but enormously more expensive.

The aesthetic priorities of a video game probably don't map well to real life.

A quick web search puts local underground parking garages including necessary street alterations at about 1.7x the cost of surface parking, per parking square.

Not sure if that falls within the purview of enormously more expensive.

That doesn't sound reasonable. The figures I found say it's 2.5-30x the cost.

https://www.fixr.com/costs/build-parking-garage

And the real cost of building parking in a residential building isn't the cost of the concrete and painted lines -- but in the opportunity cost of not being able to build / sell more units in the space occupied by cars.

> And the real cost of building parking in a residential building isn't the cost of the concrete and painted lines -- but in the opportunity cost of not being able to build / sell more units in the space occupied by cars.

It's obviously not that simple, because the US isn't a place where no one wants a car but everyone is somehow forced into getting one. I wouldn't live in a residential building with no space a car, and I'm not alone. I'd imagine that most buildings like that just create an externality, where the residents use parking elsewhere.

Maybe for construction, if the building is designed around the need for parking. Parking garage operations are expensive. Self park doesn’t generate enough yield in a dense urban environment. You need to stack cars in there, maybe offer valet contracts to hotels, etc.

Even in cheap city, urban monthly covered parking is around $150.

To do a reality check of a big large scale and expensive solution to a particular problem it often helps to observe existing solutions, and how they fair in city (or state) policy.

For parking this solution is public transit, and in many cities in USA and Europe it fairs rather badly. Bus systems are often underfunded and cities quite often settle for a minimal viable system, a system so dismal that it only marginally reduces parking proliferation.

A policy of underground parking—being infinitely more expensive—will realistically yield an even worse outcome than the public transit policies of most cities today.

"but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help"

Our local Tesco (Yeovil, Somerset, UK) had a fairly large car park, and a rather strange split level two storey thing at the periphery which seems to have been designed and built for dodgy purposes and is minimally used! Around 20 odd years ago they simply put a second storey on most of it.

You need to provide walkways anyway, so you minimally encroach on those with concrete encased steel pillars (mostly for fire retardant but handy extra section anyway). It's a pretty cheap way to nearly double your parking.

Just don't have any mandatory minimums, and allow developers to choose to add the underground parking if it makes sense for the building's use case.

> There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities

There's a lot wrong with cars in cities. They choke up the streets with traffic congestion and the sheer geometry problem of them means that it's impossible for even a small fraction of people to get around via cars in a large dense city like NYC.

There’s plenty of parking in Manhattan, it just isn’t free. Parking isn’t the force that shapes the world. Free parking is.

Suburbs have zoning standards that usually require more parking than required. The average big box lot has parking stalls that have never used for anything other than piling up snow.

Is motorcycle parking still free (or unenforced) in most of Manhattan? I did this for many years (sometimes with a motorcycle cover as people recommended, but sometimes without) and was never ticketed.

In Boston it was the same policy until recently when they started enforcing motorcycle parking extremely strictly - basically requiring motorcycles to buy a car spot once the very few motorcycle parking spots are filled up.

Increasing the amount of parking spaces seems to me like it would further exacerbate the problem of car centrism. Houston will often preach “just one more highway lane. That’ll reduce congestion” but it does the opposite. If we want to reduce the amount of parking, we need to make the alternatives to driving more attractive. That is - investing in public transit, bike paths, and cities that allow anyone to walk no more than 20 minutes to a grocery store.

I played a lot of SimCity 3000, and as I recall, a lot of commercially zoned cells will end up being small parking lots. The game assigns whimsical names to properties, and the parking lots were named "They Paved Paradise."

Sim City's sort of on the correct solution track here.

The REAL solution is going to look way more like Azimov's Caves of Steel style city.

  * High speed people mover beltway / sidewalks
  * No cost access to this transit
  * A Theme Park like utility corridor system

Plus high speed (freeway like) bypass routes around / through the city which can exit into mega parking structures (much cheaper at large scale than wastefully cramming into a normal building's footprint) as external interface buffers between 'car land' / intercity transit, and 'pedestrian land' / intracity movement.

>You could imagine a world in which streets were pedestrianized and where we planted trees and gardens and in what is currently space reserved for parking, and closed streets, outside schools, so kids can have places to play.

I would love to see a LOT more of this in urban centers.

I live in a college town that is about the same size as Iowa City. Iowa City has taken the step of closing off their downtown and making it mostly pedestrian space. It's incredibly nice to explore the area on foot. Our city has considered the same idea but pedestrianizing our downtown has been so controversial when it has been discussed, it hasn't come up for over a decade- mayors are scared to death to touch it.

Part of the reason is poor past civic planning would make it very expensive to correct. The main conduit through the downtown business district is also the major East-West artery of town, making the street one of those dreaded "stroads-" a street in the sense that there is heavy commercial and residential presence, resulting in a LOT of local foot traffic and stops all day long; mixed with traffic that just wants to get through downtown to somewhere else. So half of the traffic is looking for parking and the other half is running red lights to get somewhere else as fast as possible.

There have been, predictably, many incidents involving cars, pedestrians and bicycles. But not one inch moved on what's become the 800lb gorilla. I don't think a solution is even possible.

A college town's context is very different than that of the central business district and inner city of a large metropolitan area. Context doesn't just matter, it's one of, if not the most, important aspects to consider when selecting a development pattern. You can't turn downtown St. Lous into downtown Iowa City or even 'downtown' Seoul, South Korea. Dreamers hate this reality and will contort their assertions every which way they can to avoid admitting any of this.

But those contexts and also such "contexts transformations" exist, so why possible at some places and unthinkable at others? Just saying "dreamer hits reality hard" is a bit destructive, arrogant, and apparently not the complete necessary truth?

Downtown St. Louis used to look like Iowa City though, before it was ruined by "urban renewal" and automobiles in the 20th century.[0][1] It was deliberately transformed from one into the other, and can just as deliberately be transformed back again.

[0] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/91127592440641982/

[1] https://www.stlmag.com/history/pedestrian-deaths-streets-dow...

Paris is closing the already pretty closed downtown ( along the Seine ). Does that qualify as large metro area?

What are the actual piece of reality that makes it impossible in US cities?

It's totally possible, but not as a step change.

Heavy car traffic is a stable system that's actively unfriendly to pedestrian and bicycle uses. You need to slowly claw away space for bicycles and increase ridership; and then work to densify and intermix commercial and residential for things to work well.

It takes decades, and the initial steps make things worse even if the new equilibrium is better.

> Heavy car traffic is a stable system that's actively unfriendly to pedestrian and bicycle uses. You need to slowly claw away space for bicycles and increase ridership; and then work to densify and intermix commercial and residential for things to work well. > > It takes decades, and the initial steps make things worse even if the new equilibrium is better.

Your point about the stable equilibrium is correct, but there's no reason it has to take decades. If you look at pictures of cities like Amsterdam, Paris, and Vienna from not long ago, you can see how much more pedestrian-friendly they were made, and much of those changes actually happened more or less overnight.

The actual changes are pretty easy to implement. Red tape slows it down, but that's a feature of our own invention, not an inherent limitation.

Things can definitely improve. I'm thinking of Copenhagen, which is probably the most bicycle friendly city in the world; it's taken about 50-70 years of bicycle-friendly policy and it's only now reached a point where number of car trips per day and bicycle trips per day in the city are equal.

Yes, it takes grits. Yo expands on Paris, Each mayor has been hated for it. The last one in particular. But then the reclaimed public space speaks for itself. Usually it seams irreal to think that an highway was in place of that canal/pedestrian area/bike lane/long park

It takes decades because policy makers aren't willing to make big steps. And believes like your that it has to take decades are part of the reason why they don't.

As soon as you take away cars, people look for alternatives and the space is claimed by lots of uses. Bus and bicycle use goes up fast.

As it happens, a non-trivial amount of Downtown St Louis is now failing commercial real estate: It's not just the AT&T building, which could be had for cheaper than many Seattle single family homes, or the two hotels in receivership, but also now Bank of America plaza. Wework exited downtown too, leaving two more empty floors in One Metropolitan Square. Its current use is basically sporting events, and the few government buildings that have to stay there.

Now, I'd not recommend that we centered any serious investment making downtown less car-friendly, but mainly because downtown's fixes are way too expensive: In its current form, it's not doing well, and not trending up. Walkability could help, but walkability downtown isn't a matter of making Market street narrower, or slower: Many buildings themselves are set up to be anti-pedestrian, with huge setbacks to the street, and no retail space. Just huge office buildings nobody wants to rent. Interventions to help the city of St Louis just have to start in parts of the city that have better bones. Spend a little to make the somewhat successful parts of the city a bit more successful. Allow relatively walkable neighborhoods to become denser, bigger and more walkable, and see if people vote with their feet.

Downtown? We couldn't afford fixing it, for either cars or pedestrians.

Part of the problem is you can’t just convert an area to a pedestrian area as people still need to be able to get there. You need to construct low cost parking garages around the area so people can still get there.

Comments like this make me appreciate living in a city that has a pretty comprehensive public transport coverage, and where bicycling is at least tolerable. The city you describe seems to be only usable by car.

Many cities in the US are only usable by car. You can’t just leap from a car-based city to a non-car-based city, you have to provide transitionary options (also even car-optional cities still have parking garages).

Absolutely, and while the transition is probably desirable, it'll take a long time. And yes, of course there's in fact still too much car traffic around here, and parking garages exist in great numbers.

What it takes is tearing down large swaths of current car infrastructure and the buildings surrounding it. Eg. Seattle tearing down the viaduct a few years back

Which is what it took to turn American cities into car based to begin with.

That's not a great example, because Seattle spent kajillions of dollars on a ridiculous tunnel under the city to replace the viaduct AND THEN built a second ground-level highway on the newly available delightful waterfront space. Seattle's way of getting rid of the viaduct is a colossal waste of money and years of work for a terrible shitty result that is 1000% car based. A giant failure.

I don't think it's a _complete_ waste. It's better than it was before, but, it's absolutely true it could've been done much, much better than what we got.

Sure, but many cities in the world are not in the US.

Somehow many cities took the leap from extremely pedestrian friendly in 1900 to completely car based, so "you can't just" is clearly not true. It just takes a lot of willpower, or in the case of cars, tons of lobbying.

Don't forget a huge post-war economic boom, plus a bunch of racism and white flight.

Having just returned from Europe I feel like the public transportation options are so much better.

On the flip side, Amsterdam is great, but I felt like I was constantly dodging bicycles.

There's currently very little incentive to pedestrianize actual problem cities from all concerned parties. Because pedestrians are still largely able to bike, walk, bus etc just fine. And drivers are largely able to commute/park just fine.

We need to be honest that the folks most concerned (rightfully so) with urban car congestion are wealthy upper class people who moved TO the cities for their upperclass nature. Should we totally upend one of these groups in an attempt to solve an unsolvable problem for both groups?

Bit of rambling but I am fascinated by this problem.

> Because pedestrians are still largely able to bike, walk, bus etc just fine.

I don’t see how that’s true for most cities in the USA.

For walking, in many cases, there isn’t even a sidewalk for pedestrians to use. If there is, crossing stroads is way more difficult (large distances between crossing opportunities) and dangerous (e.g. no pedestrian islands halfway) than needed.

Same goes for biking. If there is a bike lane, you still have two ton vehicles buzzing sometimes inches away from you at twice or three times your speed. The smallest intersection scares me. Turning left requires me to come to a complete stop and wait for a chance to change lanes and turn. It's equivalent to crossing the street on foot. When I arrive, I have to search for a bike rack. My nearest grocery store has one rack for five bicycles tucked in the far corner of the plaza (I have never seen a bike parked there, however). My favorite coffee shop has no bike racks anywhere on the street, so I lock up to a sign in the parking lot.

There's no way to escape this as my house is flanked by two stroads. I hear constant traffic sounds well into the night. I live in a beautiful old neighborhood that predates the Ford Model T. I've seen pictures of ox-driven carriages rolling by historical downtown buildings. We had a cable car that ran down one of the current stroads. My city could drastically drop car dependency if we had the will.

I recently needed to book a hotel in a medium-sized town. There is a shuttle I need to get to leaving on one side of the road, and three different hotels on the other side, immediately across from the shuttle stop. I can’t book any of those hotels because this “Main Street” is 6 lanes, there are no crosswalks for 1 mile in either direction, and the sidewalk on the 3-hotel side doesn’t exist (the only way to get to any of those hotels appears to be to drive).

Whereas if I was in a car I could turn left from the 3-hotels’ lot into the lot where the shuttle is stopping in under 1/4 mile. It’s absurd when you can drive for 1/4 mile or walk for 2.

Your class narrative is not a real world scenario.

In many countries (including USA and EU) working class people are pushed out of the cities and into suburbs or satellite cities as the inner city prices are simply to high and they cannot afford rent. This is doubly true for people with kids or otherwise large families. If they still work in the city, they are simply forced to commute. Thankfully many cities have adequate public transit systems so they are not always forced to buy a second or a third car for the household (notable exception here is the Sunbelt in the USA) and move even further away to an even cheaper house to be able to afford that.

It would be a simple narrative if in place of the poor folks moving out of the city, rich folks would be moving in. But that is not the case. In many cases these houses are filled by AirBnB, short term rentals, or simply left vacant by a landlord hoping to rent at a higher price.

Most working class people that I know and commute to work by driving would love to be able to leave their car at home and commute with a bus or rail. For them driving to work saves might save them over an hour a day in commute time, time they would rather spend with their family then waiting at a bus transfer. If they could park their car at a nearby park and ride and save even more time, they would. For them, they are not commuting just fine, they are indeed very annoyed at not having a better option.

I don’t have the stats, but would be very surprised if the number of airbnbs, short terms, and vacant apartments was more meaningful than the number of wealthy folks moving in. But if it were the case, it’s somewhat fair to assume it’s the wealthy that own those properties. So I think you agree with GP more than disagree.

As the price of rent/mortgage increases, this becomes irrelevant. I may be wrong about AirBnB but if low income people are priced out of a city, and middle income people move in instead, however the price of housing is such that after rent/mortgage payment the middle income folks have about the same disposable income as the displaced people, the dynamics end up being the same, and the only difference to the class dynamics is that low income workers can now blame gentrification for their struggles.

The only rich folks in the gentrification scenario are still the landlords, and honestly I don’t think they are moving to the city and complaining about too much parking. (though I admit I agree with GP that they are probably the ones that are complaining about congestion and lack of parking)

I never understood why you can’t do this to say 10% of city roads. That way there’s still car accessibility and you can continue to grow public transit, as well. Personally I think the majority of roads should be reclaimed to pedestrians and tracked rail cars. The only exception would be street-local deliveries/residents can enter and drive at say 3mph yielding to all pedestrians.

People literally took to the streets (ironic, I know) when they tried this in London, UK

SOME people did, yes. Others quietly enjoyed the improvements. Things seem to be moving in the right direction, despite the usual reactionary noises.

I read that no councillor had suffered at the ballot box for their pro-LTN news. Which suggests it's a noisy minority.

A vocal minority, who largely lived outside of London.

converting an area is hard, but a street is easy. we don't need to pedestrianize whole city centers, just pick the streets where it makes sense. cars don't need every street. people are perfectly willing to walk a block if that's their only option. if you close a street to cars, people will park on the next street over and walk.

the street parking in front of a business is never enough for all the patrons of that business anyways, people are usually parking and then walking 1-2 blocks to get where they're going. removing the street parking in front of a business only removes the hope of finding that perfect parking space.

This sounds like the worst of both worlds. We should ban on-street parking regardless.

> Part of the problem is you can’t just convert an area to a pedestrian area as people still need to be able to get there. You need to construct low cost parking garages around the area so people can still get there.

From what I've seen pedestrian area conversion typically includes perimeter parking.

A interesting case similar to conversion to exclude cars, is the conversion of very old places to have cars. Guanajuato, MX was built up in the 1500's. For the majority of the old town residences and businesses alike are inaccessible by car. The city did convert some major roads, creeks and mines to roads, but parking for many is relatively distant.

[Edit, update from state to city of Gto]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanajuato_(city)

https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowTopic-g150799-i726-k1701090-...

Yes you can. There is usually enough parking around the area and just having a basic bus usually already leads to far more use of the area. And if there is really not enough parking, then there is a commercial reason to build it.

I live in Iowa City - thanks for the shoutout! I can confirm - I work downtown, it's great. Boulder has a similar concept.

Ithaca, New York is another similar-sized town (population ~31K) that closed some blocks of its downtown "Main Street" (State Street) to make a very pleasant pedestrian business district. This happened in the 1970s.

The pedestrianized portion of State Street was part of a New York state highway -- highway traffic was re-routed to be on parallel one-way streets, separated by 2 blocks, that bracket the district.

The somewhat scattered wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Commons) has some of the backstory. (I lived there in the 90s and I think it's exaggerating the downturn in those years, but whatever.)

I live car-free in NYC. A large appeal of NYC to me was not having to park. I don't ~mind~ driving, but I absolutely hated having to deal with finding parking when I lived in other cities. Parking generally makes me feel stressed (competition for free spots), or makes me pay (using something like SpotHero makes it easy to find a spot, but costs me).

It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college town in Illinois and parking downtown is a nightmare, and can easily add 10 minutes to your trip time, AND it's paid. Visiting a city I'm not familiar with can add some stress too as you don't know the best parking, unlike cities you are familiar with.

NYC has problems of it's own (trains are generally reliable, but tend to have delays right when you need them), but for $33 a week I can get to most major neighborhoods in 30 minutes, walking straight to my destination. Add in $40 for a couple cabs when I prioritize a quicker trip, and I have amazing access to my city for less than $100/week.

> but for $33 a week I can get to most major neighborhoods in 30 minutes

Ahh yes, only the most important, noteworthy neighborhoods that most likely aren’t transit deserts, right?

https://subwaysheds.com/

Some neighborhoods are harder than others, but I have found the subway + bus service + regional rail makes it possible to get ~anywhere~ in an hour from where I live. And those neighborhoods are the exception for me, at least, 99% of my trips really are under 30 minutes.

Driving to those places would be 30+ minutes anyways, some of it really is just distance + gridlock

I travel around the USA a fair amount. In the vast majority of cities, parking just isn't a problem. I drive my car where I want to go and park. Sometimes I have to pay. But the places where no parking is available are very rare.

I am fully in favor of walkable neighborhoods and reducing the need to drive. But lack of parking is just not a stressor that most Americans worry about.

I'd need to see some numbers to believe that this is true for "most Americans." Certainly it's not a problem for most of America if we're talking about geographic area. But population is obviously not distributed uniformly.

> I am fully in favor of walkable neighborhoods and reducing the need to drive. But lack of parking is just not a stressor that most Americans worry about.

Tell that to my local Facebook & Nextdoor groups.

You aren't looking at a representative sample. Spend some time talking to people outside of dense cities. Parking doesn't even make their top 10 list of concerns.

Even in regions like the SF Bay Area outside of San Francisco proper there is abundant parking near most homes, retail, and workplaces. Now I agree that devoting so much valuable real estate to parking is rather wasteful and we ought to eliminate some of those asphalt wastelands, but as a practical matter today it means most people don't get stressed about parking. If you tell them to get rid of their cars so that they don't have to worry about parking they're going to think you're crazy.

I do not currently live in a dense city; I'm in the burbs.

I'm aware that this is a squeaky wheel situation, but I asked a question on a local group about a laundromat that's getting torn down - of the (last check) 38 comments on my post, approximately 5 have to do with my question, and the rest are people worrying about parking spaces if/when a small apartment building replaces it.

Some people always complain about adding more housing in their neighborhoods. My point is that on a daily basis most people don't worry about parking. They just drive where they want to go and then park their cars. Outside of a few limited urban areas, no one sees parking as stressful or as a reason to avoid using their own cars.

> Spend some time talking to people outside of dense cities.

Are you sure this gives you a representative sample of Americans?

I agree there is this strange obsession with fixing super dense city areas, increasing density and public transit, getting rid of cars and parking, etc.. Im not sure why it is such a big cause right now. Its a bit confusing to see it so high on so many people's priority list.

I even bike to work every day since I choose to live very close to my office building, but I don't understand this desire.

Sold my car years ago and moved to Boston. I'll never go back to live anywhere that requires me to own a car. I bike or walk everywhere, and what makes me hopeful is that biking infrastructure in Boston (and neighboring cities like Cambridge) has improved dramatically in the years since I've been here and just keeps getting better.

Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. Between my partner and I, we're saving $20,000 per year not owning a car (and that's assuming a generous expenditure on bicycle TCO). High rents mean nothing when considering how much you save on not needing to own a car.

Although I think everyone I know who lives in Boston/Cambridge owns a car because they either commute/visit to friends out to the suburbs or do regular weekend activities like hiking or canoeing out in the suburbs/mountains--which can also involve specialized transportation for car-camping etc. You can work around a lot of this but a lot of people don't want to if they can afford it.

I don't live in the city but I'd definitely own a car if I did.

You probably interact with the types of people who are more likely to spend time in the suburbs, by dint of living in a suburb.

"Affording" a car in Boston is stressful as hell even beyond the cost, and I wouldn't recommend it. My friends who both live and work in the city don't own cars. I ditched my car when I moved into city limits, and ride an EUC, bike, or train to work.

The suburbs would have nothing for me if I didn't have family there. But even there, a weekend pass for the commuter rail costs $10 and can take me as far as Rhode Island if I want.

I'm actually even further out than the conventional suburbs. But, yes, I mostly know people in the city who routinely do hiking and paddling activities that practically require owning vehicles and who routinely get together with friends well outside of city limits. I think most of the people I know who own a car in the city have a dedicated parking space.

So, yeah, city people I know have made a deliberate (and expensive) decision to live in the city but maintain the flexibility to drive elsewhere without a lot of friction.

People naturally gravitate to lower friction. If activities like getting outside of the city/transit coverage is expensive/a pain you mostly just don't do it.

This is overly black and white IMO. For the million or so of us who live in the "first ring suburbs", e.g. Somerville, it's common to own a car for out-of-the-city trips, but use walking/biking/transit for day to day life and going out on the weekends.

Not trying to be black or white about it. I'm not extrapolating my experience, only offering what it is. If I didn't, the prevailing and only observation in this thread would be that it's uncommon to not own a car. And that doesn't match my experience at all, as someone who lives and works here.

Though my anecdote is pretty heavily skewed the other direction towards skaters and the types of people who own PEVs.

This is the same reason I moved out of the city.

Rents are very high because they assume you can live there without a car, but as someone who frequently drove far out of the city I was paying for the worst of both worlds.

I agree with your TCO assessment, thanks to pandemic/WFH myself and my partner were able to switch to sharing a car and we saw about 10k in annual savings.

> Rents are very high because they assume you can live there without a car

Rents are very high in cities because there's not enough housing for everyone who wants to live there [1] not because of an assumption about car ownership.

[1] Ironically, in part because of an assumption that people will have cars, which is one limitation on how dense housing construction is allowed to be.

I dislike car culture, but owning a car is not that expensive unless you own a newish one.

Yeah I paid $10k for a car 10 years ago, and I spend all-in (insurance, maintenance, gas) about $2k/year on it. Long-run, it probably depreciates by a few hundred dollars a year as well.

And buy a new one every few years like some Americans do

I LOVE the new bike lanes on the Mass Ave bridge. Total game changer on how often I actually want to bike into Cambridge now.

I wish the other sides of the bridge were better for bikes, too, but I'm sure they're coming with the next re-paving/maintenance of those roads.

> Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022

Every time I hear this insane number I have a good laugh. I own 3 cars myself and my total cost of ownership is nowhere near that high combined.

I always have the same gut reaction - then I realize I know people who lose at least 10k every 2-3 years on a new vehicle; one that they are financing and driving 2+ hours a day. So factor in gas and insurance etc., you can see it.

ten thousand dollars???

Look I get that I probably don’t do cars the way other people do cars, but like - ten thousand a year? I spend maybe $800 on gas in a year. What are these people doing? Buying a new set of tires every Christmas? Yearly visits to a detailing shop or something??

I mean like no offense but if you guys were spending twenty thousand dollars annually on cars… that’s on you. You don’t need to live that way. I bought my Subaru used ten years ago for $3k, and I’ve managed just fine without spend a small fortune on… whataver it is you were spending yours on.

Your number seems very you-specific. Back-of-the-envelope math, seems like you drive <7K miles per year, which is less than half of what an average driver does. You are also accounting for $0 in tolls, parking, insurance, repairs or maintenance, registration, inspection, an occasional ticket, etc.

I totally believe that it is possible that these are indeed your costs but I'll give you a counter-example.

My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there. Insurance is about $1.5K so we're at $6.5K and that's a good deal for around here. If we drive into Manhattan on a weekday, it's about $50 to leave the car in a lot somewhere in Midtown. If I do that just once a month, that's another $600, so we're at $7.1K already. We actually don't put a ton of mileage on and it's a hybrid so our gas costs are about the same as yours. That's $8k. I am leaving out a bunch of other stuff (registration, inspection, tolls - can easily be around $10 to cross into or out of Manhattan, an occasional ticket, parking meters, etc.)

I think my car usage scenario is pretty light (wife and I both WFH) compares to most people but I can easily get to $10K for one car based on where we live. Some of this can be avoided (eg sit longer in traffic to avoid a toll road, go slow to avoid tickets, only go into NYC on Sunday when you can get a free spot more easily, could have bought a used car, etc.) - just making it obvious that you can EASILY get to $10K.

Half of your cost is your $50k car choice, though, and doesn't include resale value of around $15k (I'm looking at 2013 highlander prices. It's probably more because you chose a bunch of upgrades, see below). Drops your yearly costs by $1.5k right there.

Get a reasonable car for $25k-35k and your costs drop significantly. Hell, your $50k number means you chose to have a bunch of upgrades. The base MSRP is $36k, and I'm seeing dealer advertised prices of $37k near me. I have to go all the way up to the "Platinum" tier to find $50k prices.

Thank you. I am extremely happy with my purchase and it's well worth the cost.

My point to the GP was that it's trivially doable to get to 10k a year ballpark car cost without doing anything too crazy.

If you are curious, it's a hybrid XLE with AWD. I wanted the hybrid, AWD is standard here in the north east and XLE is the lowest model that comes with (fake) leather seats which we wanted due to having small kids.

Yeah maybe so. I wfh and only do a couple of road trips a year - tolls are inapplicable, I barely ever need to pay for parking, and of course there’s occasional maintenance costs but I just cannot imagine those adding up to anywhere near $10k, that’s off by an order of magnitude in my experience. If I spent more than a grand on my car per year, I’d be doing it wrong, in my book.

Maybe if you buy a really expensive car, and you drive it all the time, and it’s really expensive to maintain / repair - I guess. But like - aren’t you choosing an expensive route, in that case? The person I was replying to made it sound like doing away with cars altogether was the reasonable option, rather than what seems like a no-brainer to me: just keep a less expensive car. I suppose that’s a luxury (ha) I can afford?

> My Highlander was about $50K all in. Let's say I keep it for 10 years, that's $5 per year right there.

Not really, the car doesn't evaporate on year 10. On a quick search I see 2013 Highlanders (you didn't mention a year but those are 10 years old now) selling from ~14K to ~20K. So looks like you'd get about a third of the purchase cost back when you sell it.

That's a 50K car though. If you like to spend on that, great. But it doesn't mean that owning a car has to cost that much. People who like to minimize car costs (like me) will buy a 5-8K used car and drive it forever, bringing the annualized cost down to just a few hundred dollars.

> I can easily get to $10K for one car

Certainly. Or 100K, or even more. I know someone who spends well over a million dollars a year in cars! The sky is the limit. But nobody needs to do that. If all one needs is a car for transportation, it can be had for under 1K a year.

Agree. Nobody needs to do that. And I am not complaining.

I am simply showing that it's easy to get to that ballpark number with relatively generic car owners behavior.

>Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. Between my partner and I, we're saving $20,000 per year not owning a car (and that's assuming a generous expenditure on bicycle TCO). High rents mean nothing when considering how much you save on not needing to own a car.

$10k seems suspiciously high. Maybe that's because everyone is buying overpriced pickups/SUVs? If all you want is a vehicle, you can get this[1] which the site calculates the TCO at $33,858 over 5 years, or $6.8k. I suspect that if you buy used or keep the car for longer (eg. 10-15 years, the average car age is 12.5 years in the US), you can get that number even lower.

[1] https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla-hybrid/2023/le/?vehicleid...

My thoughts too. If you buy a car with cash, the only costs are $1k for insurance (or less), $1k for routine maintenance, and fuel. If you have an EV, the fuel costs drop dramatically.

But most Americans have a car payment; the average amount totaling over $400/mo. So in that respect, I guess 10k isn’t too far off.

Yeah, I also find that weird. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love to not have a car and I'm all for public transit/biking/walking, but I bought my car (which I love) - a brand new Focus ST for 28k in 2013. I spend maybe $3k a year on gas and maintenance, insurance etc, (I don't drive much) bringing TCO to ~6k range. If you have to drive a huge amount obviously that's not realistic but for a city like Seattle where you kinda need a car, but only for certain things, it's absolutely possible.

Don't you feel confined to your little area? In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town. I couldn't imagine giving up that kind of convenience and missing those kinds of opportunities.

What if you don't live near a pool? Your kids just don't learn to swim? My local pool is a 15 minute drive, but a harrowing cycle route.

Note OP, but I'll try.

    In the weekend my wife and I drove out to a rural hike, 40mins out of town.

How do local tourists get to that hike? Probably buses or trains, which in decent systems are usually competitive with vehicles. It's how I did hikes in the rural Himalayas and Latin America.

    What if you don't live near a pool?

You build the pools where people live. They live closer together in cities designed before cars. Even rural towns used to be fairly dense and walkable. I picked a random suburb of Boston called Beverly. There are 3 public pools and a number of ponds that may or may not be swimmable. No one is more than approx 1mi from a public pool.

Also, commuter cycling should not be harrowing. It becomes harrowing when planners don't properly invest in the infrastructure and mix modes in dangerous ways. Imagine if we did the same thing with planes and used local highways as runways. Narrow the streets to reasonable, 3m lanes and even a 2-lane road can fit a dedicated cycle lane. The streets in my california neighborhood use a horrifying 12m for only 2 travel lanes, yet still can't find room for a cycle path.

I lived in a country like that. The "rural hike" was a Big Deal: you'd wake up early, pack your lunches carefully, take a bus, then train, then another train, and eventually arrive. Then hike for a nice, long time (having hike time < commute time seems such a waste), and go back home the same way. By that time, you'd be pretty exhausted, nothing else "big" would get done this day, and you'd take the next day easy too. And you probably would not want to do this too often.. maybe choose a more boring local park instead. In the dense city, one is likely only half an hour away.

Compared to that, now every time I drive to a remote hike it blows my mind how much stuff gets done -- the distance is the same, but it's just a long-ish morning trip. You can hike for a bit, then get back home, get groceries on the way, have lunch, and have the whole evening free. And you are not limited to destinations next to the train line either!

(One thing I miss however is the ability to enter into the forest on one train station, and exit on another one. It's pretty nice when you don't have to do a loop)

I live in Cambridge. All places I've lived in Cambridge were within a 5 minute walk of a publicly accessible pool. Before I had a car for outdoor climbing, I took the commuter rail to see local towns or got a ZipCar and split the cost with friends.

These days, most of my trips are on my bike. Anything I can round trip within 50 miles round trip is fair game. My roommate made it to Cape Cod a few weekends ago, but he's very athletic.

I live car free in Seattle, and with the combo of Amtrak, car rentals, and my ebike, I never feel confined. Even renting a car occasionally costs much less than if I were to own one in parking alone.

These are good questions. If you're a hiker/camper who needs access to a wide variety of remote locations, then that's a good reason to own a car. That said, from where I live there's plenty of green space that I can access without a car. At the end of the orange line (one of the local subway lines) is Forest Hills from which you can immediately access the Arnold Arboretum and Franklin Park (not to mention a huge quintet of adjacent cemeteries). If you want more wilderness rather than manicured greenery, then the green line terminates tantalizingly close to Middlesex Fells (not quite as close as I would like, admittedly, it's still a ten minute ride from there to the green line). If you want to range further afield, the commuter rail spiderwebs out for 30 miles in every direction. And if you don't want to ride either a subway or a train, I can ride all the way from Boston Common (in the heart of downtown) to Concord (where Walden Pond is) using nearly 20 miles of dedicated bike trails (mostly on the Minuteman bikeway), which hits up plenty of state parks along the way.

Sydney has metro rail lines that go out into the mountains as an alternative to driving.

Do you need a personal vehicle to carry a few sandwiches, some water and a first aid kit? If you are going camping can’t you rent a vehicle, how often do you realistically go camping that it justifies the cost of ownership over renting when you _truly_ need it?

If you really do need a car, that’s totally acceptable! But how many people don’t actually need it for anything other than weekend grocery shopping and work commutes? Hint: a very large portion of the population.

I did the math for my aunt recently: she pays more in rent and car expenses living in suburban South Florida (Kendall) for the same square footage I get in Cambridge, MA. Living paycheck to paycheck sandwiched between a super Walmart and the Florida Turnpike, it's not exactly glamorous.

She's considering ditching the car and moving north. Gas, maintenance, and car payments are silent killers. Most people equate them to rent and cannot imagine a life where they don't pay for their car.

One of the differences with NYC (and maybe specifically Manhattan--though it doesn't map perfectly) is that there's a cultural expectation that residents, even those with money, may not own cars. It can still be a hassle for weekend trips but it's still something of a difference in mindset even for people in other large cities where carless living, at least within the confines of the city, is fairly doable.

> One of the differences with NYC (and maybe specifically Manhattan--though it doesn't map perfectly) is that there's a cultural expectation that residents, even those with money, may not own cars

NYC is the only city in the country where the majority of residents don't own cars. Manhattan has the lowest car ownership rates of all the boroughs, but car owners are still the minority city-wide. (Within NYC, car ownership also skews notably towards the wealthy).

I lived for a few years a 5 minute walk from downtown Palo Alto. I still used my car, but significantly less. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to walk, instead of drive, for a random trip to a restaurant. It was even better when going to the bar.

I think if we also focused on walkability for residential development, we could cut down on car use. Even though I now live in suburbia, I made sure there were a few places I could walk to before I bought my house.

Imagine how nice it was during Covid when all of University Avenue was closed off to cars! They've reversed all of that now... such a shame.

Come to the Netherlands. Sell your car. Buy a bike.

A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.

For what percentage of people in rural or suburban America do you think "move to the Netherlands" is a realistic suggestion?

Just out of curiosity - how big of an issue is parking in rural US?

It's an issue when it takes 10m to walk to the Walmart entrance from the parking lot.

(This is intended as humor)

Yeah, it's kind of a pity that once the cars vs bikes debate comes up, irony is often really not obvious.

The best take on this topic so far I've seen has been from "Not Just Cars": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nZh7A7qTPo

Sadly, sometimes in the US it takes just as long to walk within the parking lot as the equivalent total travel time would have been in a walkable European or Asian city

In terms of 'will I have space to park my vehicle pretty much anywhere', little to none. In terms of, 'we could make way better use of all this land that's given over to parking' tons.

Warm season: no problem, go anywhere anytime and park for "free" except maybe at certain neighborhood churches on Sunday and big school functions.

cold season: if the lines are covered by snow, all bets are off. Some capacity is lost to The Pile, but even more is lost due to nobody knowing how to just park next to somebody else.

Clearly not a lot. It took the comment as a means of letting others know that American style asphalt parking jungles is not the only option. That there are healthier, more aesthetically pleasing, and more environmentally friendly alternatives to our way of life.

The Dutch American Friendship Treaty makes it slightly more attainable than most other European countries, for those who employ themselves at least.

Are the buses any good if the weather turns? I rode a Dutch bus once or twice and it was jam packed. Some old lady even kept trying to insinuate that younger ladies on the bus grab onto me for support!

The Amsterdam metro was very comfortable though and I can’t wait to ride it again.

We arrive August 2nd. What would you recommend for newcomers? We've signed up with the gemeente and our daughters have spots in the Taalschool. Any ideas on how to meet people?

Sports (your own or of your children), school (parent gatherings, extra activities involving parents) are great ways to meet people that are even in your age group.

Get yourself bikes asap, also your children. No need for electrical bikes generally (depends on where you are going to live).

Already bringing my Brompton and Bacchetta (I might actually feel safe on a recumbent!) but we're sorting out a bakfiets when we get there.

I'm delighted there's a lively Halloween group :-)

Nonsense.

This is only true if you live in an inner city bubble. Cars are pretty popular ways of getting about in the suburbs and rural areas.

Oh the Urbanity recently visited the Netherlands and did a profile video, "The Fascinating Human-Scale Urbanism of Dutch Suburbia":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nImFJ7KKjAo

> Cars are pretty popular ways of getting about in the suburbs and rural areas.

But how much are cars needed on a day-to-day basis for day-to-day errands? I don't think any is saying that they are not useful (at times), but you can have them be less necessary.

Errands? I guess you could get by without a car. But then, you could get by without leaving the house for the most part, with groceries and other stuff delivered to your door.

Still, the average number of cars per household is more than 1 in the suburbs. And that's no surprise really, because work is not in the suburbs. Especially not the jobs that pay enough to live in suburbia.

If you're lucky the one bus line or tram line in your suburb goes to near your job. More commonly, it doesn't.

Look, people use cars because they are practical. They are fucking expensive, so anyone who reasonably can do without, will. People in inner cities do not use cars that often, because a car is a heavier burden there. Parking is expensive and difficult in the city.

I'm Dutch and I want to push back against the glorification of our infrastructure. To comment on that video specifically:

Yes, fully on board with the narrower streets, "hiding" parking, having some shared public space like playgrounds. These are all good things.

But there's a flip side to this coin. This isn't necessarily a desired "way of life", it's what naturally evolved due to severe space constraints.

I specifically take offense at high cost dense suburbia. You pay through the nose but still are not in some cool city. You have a tiny house and possibly noisy neighbors as well as less privacy.

Suburbia can be denser but than it must be cheap. Dense expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds.

I'm also dutch. Housing is indeed expensive here. There are many factors, but it's not because of walkable neighbourhoods, biking infrastructure and public transport (the things that are promoted). I'd argue that without these policies housing and transport will be 10x more expensive and inconvenient.

The main factor is that the Netherlands is 15(!) times denser than the US. That's why everything has to be compact.

> But there's a flip side to this coin. This isn't necessarily a desired "way of life", it's what naturally evolved due to severe space constraints.

There is nothing 'natural' about the evolution of NL cities as demonstrated by the fact that (e.g.) Amsterdam started to go down the car-centric route:

* https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in...

It was a policy choice to not go in that direction—or rather to stop and turn away—as opposed to some kind of physical law of the universe. Not Just Bikes uses Rotterdam as an example of how even in NL† policy can go in other directions:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ovt1EMULY

My dad used to work at the post office facility in this area:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/4577+Eglinton+Ave+E,+Missi...

In the early 1990s there used to be strawberries fields across the street, and now the entire area is filled with generic suburb strip malls. Perhaps agriculture would have gone away eventually, but there's no reason why it had car-centric, low-density development that replaced it. How close is agriculture to some NL cities?

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s

> Suburbia can be denser but than it must be cheap. Dense expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds.

No: low-density expensive suburbia is the worst of all worlds because it necessitates cars, which has leads to all sorts of externality costs. The total OpEx is also much more expensive with low densities:

* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

And just because you have sprawl doesn't mean you have cheap housing:

* https://thetyee.ca/News/2018/03/23/Urban-Sprawl-Not-More-Aff...

See LA and even the Greater Toronto area (GTA) as examples:

* https://dailyhive.com/toronto/toronto-ranked-least-affordabl...

† I use "NL" in the international ccTLD sense, and not in my Canadian sense of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. :)

Definitely thought you were talking about Newfoundland and Labrador until your footnote, thanks for that

I mean these type of developments are "natural" in the sense that the Netherlands is one of the densest countries in the world, 15 times denser than the US.

I can ensure you that the typical Dutch person would love to have a US style suburbian home.

> I'm Dutch and I want to push back against the glorification of our infrastructure.

The same channel (Oh the Urbanity) just came out with another video yesterday explaining why we should try to use more examples than just Amsterdam and/or The Netherlands. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIcwzqRlZ68

The funny thing is I think they address your point about density. Many places (in NL) are less dense and still have infrastructure, and other places are more dense (in other countries) and could support the biking infrastructure but don't.

Yet a heck of a lot of people have cars there. Private car ownership in the Netherlands is around 590 per 1000 population. It's within 10% of Germany on cars per 1000 population and on percentage of families that own a car.

The Netherlands stands out for its excellent biking facilities so that people who cannot afford a car are not screwed like they are in many places, and people with a car don't have to use it is as often, but car ownership there is in the same ballpark as most of the rest of Europe.

Yea but the cars are smaller and transit isn't designed exclusively around moving cars from one place to another. I can't even bike in my city because I'll get ran over. Comparing the numbers directly doesn't make a lot of sense.

I've seen more Large US Car/Pickups (think old full size van/suburban/pickup) in the Netherlands than anywhere else in Europe (with the exception of right outside of a US military facility).

And they should be banned as they are wrong on every scale and measurement. Our infrastructure is not made for those huge machines nor does anyone need one.

If you need a car for a construction job, we have autobuses like VW Sprinter or Caddy for that

How much time have you spent here? That doesn't jibe with what I see at all. There are so many more giant truckish cars in France, Germany, and the UK than I see here in the Netherlands. I'm looking out my front window now and I see about 20 cars of which one is in the SUV form factor.

Maybe it depends on where you are? I found the prevalence of Dodge Rams in the Netherlands jarring. They're incredibly poorly suited to the towns and cities there.

It's not that they're common, but at the fringe of the distribution the large "full size" US v8 powered things (Ram, Suburban, Full sized 80's Van, _not_ large EU style SUVs like the Volvo, X5, Range Rover, etc) were noticeably more common in NL than elsewhere.

There must be data somewhere about how much each car drives per year no?

The Netherlands do have huge bicycle parking lots and strict parking enforcement for bicycles. Bicycle parking is as bad as car parking over there. I'm glad I've only briefly visited there...

ha ha. You clearly don't have the slightest clue what you are talking about.

Here are the stats https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

Netherlands has 38th highest cars/capita. Austria, Scotland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Hungary all have lower car ownership numbers. Though not that much lower. Why is this?

Admittedly I live in a large, dense Dutch city, but the small number of people I know in the city who have cars only use them for DIY shopping and occasional weekend trips, not for everyday driving.

People have enough disposable income to be able to afford one of their own, and avoid whatever real or perceived annoyances they associate with renting, but are not getting in them every morning.

People I know in the suburbs and rural areas are much more likely to drive, but if they commute to a large city and have a train station in biking distance of their house then that's still how they do their daily.

The Dutch are wealthy, for one. And older (average age around 42, vs 38 for Ireland for instance). I don't actually mind cars existing. I just don't like it when they become the only option for most trips due to bad design choices, or when I am made to pay for other people's motoring.

What's funny about this is the Netherlands has some of the BEST roads I've ever driven on. They also have some of the best sound-damping on their highways and bridges. Wonderful to see tax dollars actually going into transit infrastructure.

ClimateTown has a video about this today! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8

came here to post this :)

ClimateTown, along with Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, City Nerd, and the like give me hope that the message is getting out.

That being said, the more I watch these videos/listen to their podcasts the more I understand that city planners, specifically those in charge of managing traffic and parking, have been taught _incorrectly_ for decades. These content creators regularly say that if we want change we are going to need to go to city council meetings and speak up, but in reality what credentials do I have to talk about this stuff? It's my word as a software dev who consumes content about this against someone who's studied this stuff for years of their life. I don't personally blame the city planners, but I do think that car-centric planning has been engrained into their education fundamentally to the point where plans are made based on factors solely considering number of cars moving through traffic lights for example, vs. number of people crossing an intersection irrespective of mode of transportation.

I think the primary difficulty is not telling planners this, but telling citizens. Most people are so ingrained to use cars in the US that any mention of transit or biking gets a pretty severely negative response, and I’ve seen this in people I know across conservatives, liberals, and even (dumbfoundingly) progressives/leftists. To do this well also requires more dense apartments and mixed use zoning, which similarly upsets many across the political spectrum.

I am somewhat hopeful the trends are angling towards proper cities, but my impression of those trends is that it is moreso forward thinking cities/planners trying their best against an extremely misinformed citizenry + our existing terrible infrastructure + under/misfunding + impossible bureaucracy. It’s going to take a lot of effort to get people to actually use alternatives, and I think those channels will only appeal to a very small bubble of urbanism focused leftists.

(side note: e-bikes are my personal urbanism bet; they seem good enough to vaguely navigate surface roads and even some stroad conditions, while being able to interface with old bike path networks, and can be easy to park in areas where cities provide bike racks. I’ve had a good experience with one, and no longer use a car for most trips)

Planners actually already mostly know and are mostly good. The problem are more often the uneducated elected officials and the transport engineers. State DoT are particularly bad.

Ah, parking... It's a topic that resonates with me deeply. I must admit, I've declined some get-togethers simply because I knew parking would be a challenge. There's nothing more disheartening than realizing the only option is to find street parking in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and the added stress of searching for a spot, especially parallel parking, just adds to the frustration. This stress often reaches a point where the first thing I do when heading to a new place is to conduct a thorough Google Maps search, examining the aerial view and Street View to identify available parking options. Of course, if public transportation is a viable alternative, I try to opt for that, but unfortunately, it's not always efficient and can significantly increase travel time.

It is insane how much actual land is used for ground-floor parking. You could house every homeless person in the USA with like 1/1000th of the available parking space, and park all the moved cars in vertical parking structures. But, geez, that costs money, and political clout, and homeless people don't exactly have a lobbying group.

It would cost less money than all that is already spent on homelessness combined, but violates the principle that real estate must function first as a wildly profitable speculative asset in expensive urban centers, which is why it’s verboten. You can set billions on fire with BS homelessness programs that both don’t compromise the underlying asset prices and provide myriad opportunities for graft, which is why they’re the favorite form of indirect taxation on real estate put in place by politicians. We already have and spend the money, just in the most corrupt and useless ways imaginable.

I think you need to go one level deeper: People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks shapes everything. Cars, and thus car parking, come about because of this need.

Even before cars existed, roads and parking (such as hitching posts and stables) still existed because people needed to move.

And even bicycles (electric or not) need parking too. There are startups dedicated to creating automated bike parking garages to limit theft.

Why do I need to go to the mall? Because there is no retail zoning closer to my home.

Yep, cars facilitate cities of unsustainably low density. Reducing car use results in either migration to restore the density equilibrium, transit, or in situ densification. Pick at least one.

My city has plenty of all kinds of shops where people live, but they (and I) still go to malls because shops there are larger and better equipped, there are more of them and you can walk between them at nice temperature and protected from the rain.

Yes, small shops in neighborhoods will never be able to match the price to utility ratio of large shopping complexes with businesses like Costco, Target, Walmart, Best Buy, Ikea, Home Depot, Apple, Kroger, etc.

As long as one has access to a personal car, and those above big businesses are available within 30min, even 45min, it is basically impossible for a smaller, local retailer to compete. And now you have the internet and delivery to your door to compete with too.

Glad to hear it. Sounds like you have an excellent balance of options available to you.

It seems like a not insignificant amount of malls aren't sustaining themselves, so I wonder if the balance you described is a world where malls can thrive.

Because some things are too expensive to keep in stock (at least with any variety in styles/brands/etc) at local retail stores? Clothing, hobby supplies, computer peripherals, etc.

Why is that?

Thankfully changing retail zoning is as cheap and expedient as writing a document. Regrettably legislation takes a while to move, but given any solution to this problem will require legislation changes anyway, the marginal value for just allowing mixed use commercial/residential zoning is effectively nil.

> changing retail zoning is as cheap and expedient as writing a document

This vastly underestimates the problem. It’s like saying all you need to be president is have people write your name on their ballots.

Are people in this city amenable to mixed zoning? The forces that decided this in the first place still exist and have to be disentrenched

> People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks shapes everything. Cars, and thus car parking, come about because of this need.

This is not true. Every city in the US used to have a robust public transit system. No cars or parking lots needed. You can hitch 2 horses per car space, and 10-20 bikes in the same space.

Those pre-car public transit systems were bankrupted by artificially low fares, and because a small number of cars literally got in the way: https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...

> Every city in the US used to have a robust public transit system.

Every major urban center, perhaps. No city in Montana (I'll go so far as to say the midwest, minus perhaps Chicago) has a "robust" public transit system.

And even when we create a perfect 15 minute utopia, people will still need one-off transportation on a periodic basis to spots more than 15 minutes away. Doctor visits, specialized purchases, bulk orders, building materials, recreation, etc.

> Every major urban center, perhaps. No city in Montana (I'll go so far as to say the midwest, minus perhaps Chicago) has a "robust" public transit system.

Your comment is talking about the present tense while theirs is not. I’m sure they would agree with you that non-car transportation options are lacking currently. I don’t know what Midwest transportation options were before we entered this car dependency era, from a quick search it appears streetcars were a thing there (which is what their linked article was about).

> And even when we create a perfect 15 minute utopia, people will still need one-off transportation on a periodic basis to spots more than 15 minutes away. Doctor visits, specialized purchases, bulk orders, building materials, recreation, etc.

You can include options for cars without making them the main method of transportation for everything. Having cars as an option is not the problem, designing everything around cars and letting other options fall to the wayside is the problem.

Those one-offs have specialized folks to do the job - taxis and delivery drivers and the like.

You don't need everyone to have their own car when a couple cars can serve everyone

It took me less than a minute to confirm that Billings Montana did, in fact, used to have an electric trolley system 100+ years ago.[0] Just like nearly every other US city at one time.

[0] https://billingsgazette.com/streetcars/image_1048a3b1-20c3-5...

So did the tiny city of Bozeman (I just got back from a trip there).

> This is not true. Every city in the US used to have a robust public transit system. No cars or parking lots needed.

That WAS true, but that's not the reality that's shaping planning now. Further, many central business districts have been eroded by cars + big box suburbanization, so that many of those essentials are only obtainable in areas that never even had transit or didn't exist when transit was still a thing.

In the past, I had the good fortune to live car-free for many years in a US city with a working transportation system. Not having to account for the car was actually liberating, despite having to plan my adventures a bit more carefully to align with said transit systems.

> That WAS true, but that's not the reality that's shaping planning now

Yes, this is indeed a problem we need to fix, agreed. For now I'm open to reducing the comical over provisioning of parking spots in strip malls by removing minimum parking requirements and hopefully replacing the large car parking spots with smaller bike and motorcycle parking spots and even bus stops.

this topic is a bit of a rabbit hole. Yes, roads have always been there. Massive car infrastructure and parking has not.

Looking back in time, most people would actually walk for most of their daily life. That reflected in how cities and villages were built. This layout has only changed after we started adopting cars as default mean of transportation (mostly 1930s and later, with some exceptions).

This may be an artifact of where I live, but most rural areas have always had a centralized city (post office, bar, church), and the vast majority of folks who called that village/city their home lived miles away from it on their farms.

Horses and carriages were a practical requirement, since walking all day one way to visit the grocer was unrealistic.

Rural living traditionally meant living in dense villages surrounded by farmland. Lonely farms were more common in the frontier. There was safety in numbers, and living next to other households allowed sharing things that were too expensive for most households.

Not really. At least, never in the US. Plantations, for example, are fairly distant from each other, and from their associated towns.

There are always exceptions and edge cases. Plantations and farms are generally neither known as examples of urban design, nor are they homes for majority of population of any state.

But even using the example of 18th century plantation - the idea of a parking lot for more than a dozen or so horse drawn carriages seems somewhat... straight out of Flinstones.

I agree that You can find some early examples of the modern "carriage-based" urbanism earlier than in the 20th century, but those would be very specific cases. If 90% of the population lives in some denser urban setting and mostly walks, "their" neighborhoods will reflect that in how and where they are built (at least after a generation or two that's necessary for construction). Same reasoning applies if that ratio changes and within a generation or two, everyone suddenly can afford to own a car. The question is now which way do we (and, by proxy, the politicians we elect) want to promote.

> People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks

Or being required to even if their job can be effectively done from home (and consists entirely of slack message and zoom calls with remote coworkers whether they pollute the planet driving into the office or not).

> parking is perhaps the greatest determinant of whether people decide to make a trip in a car or by some other means

Surely that can't be true in general - I would think the quality/convenience/cost of the alternative would be by far the biggest factor (but yes, you could argue that's rolling multiple factors into one).

But as an example, plenty of offices I've worked at over the years have offered free or cheap parking to all staff, with sufficient space for virtually everyone, yet less than half of the staff chose to drive simply because getting there by car was slower/more expensive than the alternatives (typically train or tram, and a few, like myself, that much prefer our pushbikes!). Actually at my current job in a CBD/downtown building, nobody drives despite the high availability of parking, but it is quite expensive to use (~$18 a day I believe).

> I would think the quality/convenience/cost of the alternative would be by far the biggest factor

The alternatives almost never beat a car in quality, convenience, and cost (minus parking costs, which is the point). The exceptions are very specific cases, like inter-Manhattan travel at certain times of the day, for example, where $2.75 can get you most places faster than your own car and cheaper than a cab.

It's not just inter Manhattan travel, getting anywhere on an express line is surely faster than a car a lot of the time.

I can't read a book or completely zone out while driving my car either, there must be some value to being able to do that on a train.

I suppose what I meant is if the quality/convenience/cost of the alternatives are good enough, many people will choose not to use a car, e.g. to avoid the stress of peak-hour traffic or because they believe it's a more productive use of time (even if it technically takes longer door-to-door), or better for the environment or whatever. And there can be real $ savings if this choice means a household then only needs 1 vs 2 cars.

A few of my memories from working in the parking biz:

1. We were bidding smart parking meters to a city in California who insisted that, per the ADA, they should be accessible to the blind. We suggested to them that blind folks tend to not park or drive cars very often.

2. Seeing damage photos from a customer's parking meter where somebody had inserted dynamite up the coin/ticket return tray. The explosion buckled the body of the machine, but incredibly the reinforcement and the lock held. The [paper] money inside got destroyed, though.

3. The angry customer reaction when a co-worker's "Get bent, loser" dummy/debug message accidentally found its way into production.

4. Having to certify the accuracy of a parking meter's onboard clock because it printed a boat launch ticket that was used as evidence in the case of a guy who killed his pregnant wife and dumped her in the SF Bay.

A land value tax would fix this.

https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-is-a-land-value-tax-520...

The solution to every problem: adding another tax

LVT is an alternate scheme for calculating property taxes which already exist in every state in the US.

The stuff I've seen about LVT is that it's supposed to replace all other taxes with it, as opposed to taxing income/work and property (making improvements on the land, making it and nearby land more valuable).

A drive in cinema I loved going to shut down last week because a land value tax made it impossible to conduct their business there. They were being charged over one thousand dollars per day of tax because in that area, tax is calculated ignoring what's actually on the land. If it was shut down and turned into apartments (which is what's happening now), the tax is spread out across all owners and manageable. But concentrated on one business, it made it impossible to run. Land value tax is anti-business.

No thanks.

> tax is calculated ignoring what's actually on the land

Isn't that the point? LVT forces land to be valued more so large less productive land use shifts to more productive use

We have an abundance of parking and a shortage of housing, it's too bad we don't have a way to quickly setup housing (even temporary) in parking areas. Most parking is already located near other utilities so they would already be close by. To start with, we could require every parking lot over a certain size provide basic amenities like public restrooms with showers and water fountains.

> it's too bad we don't have a way to quickly setup housing (even temporary) in parking areas.

RVs.

Don't quote me, but I suspect some temporary shelters during disasters are RVs (and go to the exact parking lots you describe.)

> We have an abundance of parking and a shortage of housing

But I'm not sure that putting RVs in underutilized parking lots will solve the homeless crisis. (Assuming that's what you're referring to.) I generally see a lot of homeless people in very dense cities where parking is at a premium.

Maybe "RVs in parking lots as temporary housing" would work for low-wage employees, who sometimes are at risk of becoming homeless due to their low wages?

I thought RVs had to worry about electricity and sewer hookups for anything over a few days.

From the parent:

> Most parking is already located near other utilities so they would already be close by

> I suspect some temporary shelters during disasters are RVs

Yes, they're known as FEMA trailers, and gained some national attention in the late 2000s due to toxic levels of formaldehyde in the ones that were used in the Katrina response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMA_trailer

When developers apply for a permit to build an apartment building on a parking lot people howl about the character of the neighborhood.

I know this is US-by-default site but does parking really shape everything around us (most of the humanity)? What about South America or Africa?

From my experience in living in Asia, USA and Europe, it might only be applicable to USA.

American cities seem to hover around 20-30% land area dedicated to parking in the city cores, according to ParkingReform. Canadian urban planning is largely indistinguishable from American here too. Mexico City is probably similar, with around 40% according to one source [1]. Rio is around 42% of new construction. In all of the cities I checked, it was largest land use category once broken out.

Melbourne seems to be better at ~12%, but it's still the third largest land use category despite long-standing efforts to deprioritize cars.

If anything, "shapes everything around us" might be understating the reality.

[1] https://www.itdp.org/2017/07/26/mexico-city-became-leader-pa...

[2] https://www.itdp.org/2019/01/31/rio-joins-parking-reform-lea...

I visited metro Detroit for the first time on Saturday and the parking situation was abysmal but this is perhaps understandable in a large city. I thought my small city in Canada was bad!

We couldn’t even park downtown since it appears you need to book it in advance and the trip was somewhat spontaneous. I just ended up pulling over (by a no stopping sign ha) on a quiet side street and setting the GPS back to Windsor.

Detroit, as the capital of the auto industry, has far more parking than just about any other city I've ever been to. There are huge, multi-story garages right on the main thoroughfare downtown.

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/parking-lots-eat-american-...

> Detroit was, or is, Motor City. Its center can pull off another automotive-related nickname: Parking Central. Fully one-third of downtown Detroit is dedicated to letting cars do what they’re not designed for: standing still.

That’s what I thought! But all of the five or so garages we tried cost $20-40 flat with no ticket machines or anything, and I wasn’t willing to download/fight with an app to walk around for an hour.

Next trip will be more planned for sure. I was impressed with the highways though. Definitely a motorists’ dream to get around the various suburbs.

Needing to download an app, and saying "you need to book in advance" are not the same thing.

Just because you didn't want to deal with it and didn't do research ahead of time doesn't mean "We couldn’t even park downtown". You didn't want to, and that's fine.

You’re splitting hairs, which I can also do:

There’s a giant parking lot with 10,000 spaces and 2 are free. There is ‘no parking’ unless you want to drive around for 2 hours.

For enough money you could probably get a permit from the cops and a security detail and park wherever you wanted, like in a city park. There is still ‘no parking’ in parks.

Within parameters that apply in the majority of cities I’ve tried to park in, there was no parking. In future I’ll download the app, book a spot and bring my phone charger and then I’ll be able to access the parking.

Saying there's no parking and there's no free (as in money) parking are two very different things. Parking in the downtown of one of the ten largest metro areas in the US is going to cost money. That's just how it is.

I don’t mind paying. In Toronto I’ll pay $20 no problem to park right in the middle of the core in a garage. But I have options to use cash or card at a meter or machine without getting my phone out. I can pay for an hour or 2 or all day.

In Detroit the options were street parking (all full) or flat rate in a garage behind an app. I looked for a ticket machine and there were none. My bad for not doing research but still, I had a good day elsewhere in the metro, was just surprised by the inflexibility in the DT core.

It was the end of the day and I wanted to walk around and scout out stuff for next visit. If I spent all day there I’d happily pay the $20-40 but not for an hour walk, that’s silly when I can look at stuff in Windsor where my accommodation and free parking were.

Plenty of cities get away with garages that don't require an app. Don't normalize shitty things like that.

I prefer being able to see my time remaining via the app and extend time if needed. Don't tell me what to "normalize".

An app is easier to maintain and enforce than meters, and I don't need to carry coins or go back to the meter to add time. I'm all for them but prefer a web interface with Google checkout, or text messenging with a card on file.

I don't know what you were doing wrong but Detroit has more available parking than just about any American city.

I must have randomly selected the 5 least suitable parking garages downtown then.

I was happy to burn gas for another few minutes to find one that… I could actually pay for… but the consensus of my passengers was to just go home.

This was at 4pm on a Saturday though, maybe you need to get parked before noon or something.

I recently took a roadtrip about 1500 miles to visit some family. On the way to/back we wanted to stop and check out some cities the kids wanted to visit and it's amazing the anxiety I had every time we drove into a large urban area, all about traffic and parking. Most of the time, like you said, there was no place to park so I drove around and around with hundreds of other people while the kids complained about not being able to get out. It's like you said, if you knew where you were going you may be able to map it out, which also gives me anxiety (ok kids, we need to leave now to get to the next parking spot). I don't know, each time I was glad to leave.

My whole life I've struggled with the need for cars in the places I've lived. Very few US cities have the right infrastructure to go car-free, and the places I personally have lived feature such unrelentingly hot summers that going anywhere without AC is pretty much a nonstarter.

But it exists as a low-grade "well this sucks, but I can't do much about it" fact of existence, like hangnails or tax audits. Then, last year, I bought a motorcycle in lieu of us getting a second car, and I found that EVEN WITH the hassles of weather and limited cargo, and EVEN WITH factoring in the need to wear protective gear, the dead solid CERTAINTY that I can park in seconds without being far from my destination makes the bike my preference 80% of the time.

Only 100F or driving rain will make me PICK the car if the logistics of the trip don't demand it for other reasons. The agility, ease of parking, and absurd fuel economy are all huge wins, plus it's always more fun that driving.

The problem with bikes is that you are subjecting yourself to a 6x higher deathrate. Thanks partially to the cars next to you on the road.

It's definitely more dangerous, but so is bicycling on those roads, which I do far more frequently.

It's worth noting, too, that motorcycle casualty rates are somewhat distorted by the 19-year-old dumbass factor. Anybody with money can get a moto license and buy a used liter bike with WAY WAY WAY more power than anyone should realistically have on public roads. An astonishing number of motorcycle fatalities and injuries are solo accidents due to misadventure.

I'm old. I did all my stupid stuff already, and have a healthy respect for being effectively naked in traffic (ie, from cycling). It's still more dangerous than being in a car, but the overall stats mislead about HOW much more dangerous.

Relevant 1 day old Climate Town's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8 "Parking Laws Are Strangling America"

> catastrophically mismanaged the way we provide parking in this country > it’s not properly priced

It is was interesting how complex the parking situation can be. So many factors come into play when planning a trip to raise my anxiety levels. Factors include: likelihood of availability given your timing, safely of vehicle, price (anywhere from free to $60 a day), time limits, proximity to desired location.

I think I would like some sort of reservation system, but I am sure that would come with other unforeseen issues, like rick people reserving everything at all times.

You could mandate underground parking lots for every new structure. Then liberate access to that parking via an app so that not only the above the parking lot folks take advantage of it.

I spent the first decade of my career in that industry, working on the hardware and software inside parking meters. It gave me invaluable exposure to embedded devices, RTOS, electronics, mechanical design, UX, and wired/wireless networking. Everybody else I graduated with in college took tame gov't and enterprise jobs, which would have bored me to tears.

I haven't had a car since 2015 and I don't plan on getting one. It's a waste of money, time and energy. If a country as big as china can have a solid train network. Why can't we? What does our biggest competitor do that we can't do?

Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.

> live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors

Doing either of those things makes your standard of living worse.

That's your opinion, sharing a wall but being able to walk or bike easily to everything I need it a huge boost to my quality of life.

If you get lucky and get quiet and/or friendly neighbors, sure.

Sound isolation is part of the price/quality tradeoff. Urban housing is just so scarce relative to demand that almost no one can afford quality.

So does having to drive to work, sit in traffic, pay for and maintain the car (or more likely in the US, cars.)

I live in a city, share walls, and am less than a 10 minute walk from my office. My coworkers come in early and leave work late to avoid traffic. I'm home before they can get their car out of the parking garage and I can easily go home for lunch. I think my standard of living is therefore higher than someone who must drive to work.

That's often true. I've also read about a lot of situations in rural areas where the nearest neighbor might be 1/2 mile away, but they are absolutely crazy about property lines.

You're describing urban environments. A lot of people live in those places already. But a lot of people prefer to live elsewhere. Differences in preference is fine.

What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but the folks who need it (e.g., people with mobility issues, or families with small children). If you're able-bodied in an urban environment, you should be the last person to be driving around regularly.

> it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in

This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.

Nope. This is why pedestrians die. Force cars to go slower in cities.

They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall.

Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on that island was saved.

Make car life in cities miserable.

If you want to make pedestrians safer, you can do that without having to make driving miserable, by building elevated pedestrian walkways.

Or reclaim street space from cars at infinitely cheaper initial cost, time, and effort.

And how do I walk in to a shop from this walkway?

By walking back down the ramp from it to the regular sidewalk. I just meant I want to add elevated walkways to cross streets with, not for them to replace sidewalks entirely.

I assume you mean for crossing busy roads and highways, not city streets? Certainly there are places for that, like Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. They're expensive and take a lot of space themselves, though, especially to meet accessibility requirements, and they can add considerable distance to the pedestrian's route.

Otherwise, what you're describing sounds like someone looked at this well-circulated cartoon and said "hey that's a great idea! Just raise the planks by 15 feet!" https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestria...

Elevated pedestrian walkways are miserable for people walking. You seem pretty deeply carbrained.

How so? I've used them before and didn't see a problem with them.

How are they for a grandparents pushing a stroller?

Would you say they encourage a vibrant street culture of cafes and shops?

The ones I've seen, especially in Berlin and İzmir, are loud and a hassle to cross. That's because walkways and bikeways over multi-lane roads are car infrastructure. They are there to prioritize high-speed automobile traffic with few interruptions. I'm happy for the one going up at my gym, but I know it's there to ensure bike/ped political forces can't endanger the trunk road underneath. True pedestrian infrastructure there would involve a major speed and size downgrade to the road, which is unacceptable, thus the political defensive move to pay out the nose for something car advocates would never normally fund.

Elevated/buried pedestrian walkways make walking harder for a lot of people. A wheelchair-accessible ramp that goes up 12 feet is going to add at least 100 feet more distance up and down - and still be painful for a lot of people with otherwise manageable foot/joint issues.

Pushing a stroller for the last few years, plus spraining my ankle a few weeks ago has given me a little taste of what trying to use sidewalks is like for people with even tighter mobility constraints, and this in an area that is relatively accessible without a car.

> Make car life in cities miserable.

Make life in cities miserable, is more accurate. The reason is that transit is worse than cars always. If you make travel in cars worse, then all you did is make life worse for everyone.

And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.

> The reason is that transit is worse than cars always

As long as 'always' is restricted to a certain lifestyle and worldview, and doesn't take into account the excellent transit systems that exist around the world.

> And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.

That's incredibly naive, and I think a lot of European cities are direct counter examples to this. It often makes things a lot less miserable for the people who actually live in the denser urban areas that were previously overrun with cars.

> Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever.

Why not?

No, it is the correct approach. It is somewhat a zero-sum game at least in urban centers. Driving is cheap because free and cheap parking is widely available, and car speed is prioritized over other factors including pedestrian safety. Some of the huge volume of parking has to be given over to other transit modes, which will increase demand and eventually price for what remains. Urban speed limits need to be lower, pedestrians need to have more and safer ways to cross, which will also lower average speeds.

All of this will make driving less pleasant and convenient, the cost of making walking safer and easier. As it is driving is "artificially" easy, the consequence of decades of it being prioritized very highly. It needs to come down somewhat.

And even when cities invest in non-car transit, cars will still steal those resources. It's not uncommon in my city to see cars idling on bus lanes, or gig delivery workers parking in protected bike lines inside the bollards.

Yeah where I am there is little and half-assed bike infrastructure. Cyclists facetiously and bitterly call the bike lanes "uber lanes." They are simply painted and unbuffered, unenforced. Extra parking in residential areas and loading, ride share, and delivery space everywhere else. Cyclists ride in the lane or not at all, and then are blamed for being there when we're injured or killed in traffic.

I used to knock on these people's windshields to ask them to move on busy roads. I had to stop doing that after one person tried to run me over a few blocks later (they missed and hit the sidewalk). Others were content to simply scream, or back up onto me.

> It is somewhat a zero-sum game at least in urban centers. Driving is cheap because free and cheap parking is widely available, and car speed is prioritized over other factors including pedestrian safety.

I've never seen an urban center where "free and cheap parking is widely available", or one with a speed limit above 25.

Chicago for example has both. Phoenix, las vegas. As do a number of medium-large cities in the southeast like raleigh, tampa, charleston SC. Maybe not cities that come to mind first when talking about urban centers but they are million+ population agglomerations with plentiful parking and serious pedestrian death problems. Tens of millions of americans live in these "small" cities of around a million, so trends across them end up affecting a huge population.

Another factor is that urban speed limits vary widely in how much they are actually limits. Research is clear on the fact that road design has at least as strong an influence on driver behavior as posted limits do. Without rigorous enforcement & given the wide streets common in these places, driver behavior tends towards interpreting the limit as the minimum speed they are entitled to, rather than the maximum to be attained only when safe.

And finally neither I nor anyone else here know what you've seen so that's a very silly limit to place on the conversation.

I've been to NYC where free and cheap parking is on nearly every major and minor street. I would consider it widely available. Yes, trying to find a parking spot is a nightmare but that doesn't mean it isn't widely available generally.

>Yes, trying to find a parking spot is a nightmare but that doesn't mean it isn't widely available generally.

But that’s exactly what it means. It’s not available to people. Someone else already parked there.

Well yes, because there are a lot of people. That doesn't mean NYC doesn't have ample parking; parking is literally everywhere all the time. Many streets park on both sides, so over 50% of the street real estate is parking! Consider maybe that parking demand is high, not that supply is low.

> I would consider it widely available.

Have you tried to park on the street in NYC?

Parking is most certainly not widely available. If spots exist but all of them are always taken, that means zero availability.

If you go to a restaurant with 100 tables, all of them full and a 2 hour waiting list, would you tell a friend on the phone "Yes they have lots of tables available"?

Improving transit is often achieved by making driving less attractive. For instance, by creating bus-only lanes that cars may not use, or by taxing/tolling car use to fund transit improvements.

Road space in cities is a zero-sum game. Currently cars command the vast majority of it, with obvious consequences.

Highly efficient uses of space, like dedicated bus lanes, directly transfer road space from cars to improve transit. This necessarily makes driving "worse" in the short term, until enough marginal drivers shift to the now-improved busses, leaving the car lanes quicker and less congested.

In most cities, cars are physically obstructing better transit, which makes traffic worse for everyone involved.

> Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever.

Why not?

The best way to improve transit is to take space away from cars and give it to busses, bikes, and walking.

Making roads narrower e.g. in residential areas, causes drivers to slow down, making it more safe for everyone.

Driving in urban environments is already terrible. This is the de-facto effect of density, regardless of what intended policy is. It seems to me that there’s just no way to have a large number of cars be comfortable in a dense urban environment. Might as well just try to minimize them.

Researchers like Giulio Mattioli have shown pretty well what should be clear from watching politics: getting people out of their cars requires sticks as well as carrots.

>Improvement to public transport is the only win-win policy measure in the diagram. As a matter of fact, all policies that reduce the need for an automobile to access jobs and services by improving the effectiveness of other modes are generally seen as contributing to alleviating social exclusion, insofar as they improve the situation of households without a car (Shaw and Farrington, 2003, p.109). They should have a positive impact on environmental sustainability as well, insofar as they encourage a modal shift from the private car to less polluting means of transport. However, transport researchers generally agree that “pull” measures that encourage voluntary reductions of car use – or “carrots” – are unlikely to effectively bring about change at an adequate scale and speed (Huby and Burkitt, 2000, p.390); therefore it is generally pointed out that there is a need for complementary “push” measures, which aim to reduce car use in a more direct and coercive manner (“sticks”).

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giulio-Mattioli-2/publi...

Or see this thread: See https://twitter.com/giulio_mattioli/status/16250810050893660...

Making driving worse is good, actually.

> getting people out of their cars requires sticks as well as carrots

Or...it requires that governments stop prioritising car-based travel over all others, i.e. they should provide carrots for all forms of transport in equal measure, according to the long-term costs of providing it. I live in a area with far better cycling/walking/PT infrastructure than probably most suburbs in my country, yet I'm still regularly struck by the degree to which infrastructure dedicated to moving people around in private automobiles takes up far more space and taxpayer budget than all the others combined.

You have to change zoning laws in large swaths of the United States to even allow building homes that share walls.

> share walls with their neighbors

I honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to do that. To me, it's only done out of necessity, and is a driving force in motivating people to get the hell out of that situation asap.

But the cool thing is, some people can choose that, if that's what they desire, even though I can't understand why.

There are unfortunately some people who say that we should abolish suburbs and force everyone to live in a city like that.

Who is saying this?

At most, what I've seen is people saying we should not be forced to build _only_ this type of dwelling in a given place.

I'd go one further and say it's wrong to assume the most inefficient, expensive, and socially isolating form of infrastructure shouldn't be expected to be the default. I get land capex is cheaper and distributed population is great for defensive posture against nuclear attacks and pandemics, but that doesn't mean that denser suburbs, small towns with strong centers, or indeed cities are less desirable than suburbia or rural areas by any means.

Life naturally fills the ecosystem it finds itself in to carrying capacity. The sustainable limitations here are financial, ecological, and regulatory. I think we're hitting up against those constraints right now. Unless they want to pay us more money, we're going to have to sacrifice the environment or car centric regulations to continue growing. If we decide to just stop growing, then we either need changes in regulations to further disincentivize growth or allow a ton of suffering to happen.

HN is filled with people who are deeply troubled by the way other people live their lives.

I chose to buy my first house in a townhome complex with 100 units.

Why?

Maintenance was outsourced, and at a lower price than I could pay for myself (100 households at once get a good group buy price!)

Everything on the exterior of my house was taken care of.

The complex has 2 shared green spaces, one for dogs, one for people. The large green space for people is bigger than the yard in my current single family home. All year round weatherproof commercial yard furniture was already on the property.

Every year my windows got cleaned, the deck power washed. Landscaping was professionally handled, trees trimmed, pests removed, all w/o me having to worry about any of it.

I'd buy another unit in complex with that design again w/o issue or hesitation.

With proper construction techniques (which sadly that complex didn't have), sound is not an issue. Sound dampening is a solved problem, and I've lived in other complexes that had the same sound leakage from connected neighbors and I have from my neighbors right now in the house on the lots around me.

This is all fine while the management is fine. As soon as the company or people change, it goes to shit.

The next thing you know you've been trying to get the broken communal door/gate/sewer/extractor fan/lights/electric/gas/whatever fixed for months if not years and no one at the management company is even returning calls, and you sure as hell can't fix it yourself since you are not legally allowed to do it (and you can guarantee that if you were to do something yourself the dormant management company would suddenly spring to life and sue you to hell and back). Then next summer they hike the management and maintenance prices 500% and there is fuck all you can do apart from suck it up because now you can't sell because no one wants to pay the high fee, and you can't not pay it as you'll be taken to court for non-payment of contract within days (and P.S. their contract says they can hike the prices as they please because wow look at that cool yard for dogs! I totally forgot to read the entire contract.whatevs.)

TL;Dr it is great while it is all working fine. IME after a few years once the initial glean and glow has worn off and things start to naturally wear out and break, it will go to shit. It will start small with broken lawn furniture that doesn't get replaced, then before you know it the roof is leaking and there is nothing you can do apart from hope the people you pay to look after the place but are not responding to emails or calls actually do something.

But hey good luck with your place anyway.

> This is all fine while the management is fine. As soon as the company or people change, it goes to shit.

HOAs are member voted, it is a thankless job and improving things is as simple as running for the board, every time someone has wanted to take over they have been welcomed on. The HOA there has been going strong for almost 25 years, doing a great job managing the place.

The HOA did indeed fire their previous management company for incompetence, since the complex is in a large metro area, there is no shortage of competition in that field.

Edit: Oh and it isn't like people I hire myself are super reliable! I've had vendors working on my house ghost me, sometimes in the middle of a job. And there is also the cost of my time in learning about different fields (e.g. yard irrigation), collecting multiple quotes, and trying to do background checks to ensure the people giving the quotes do good work.

The problem is that the US doesn't know how to build proper walls. It's a wall. I don't have X-ray vision, I don't know what's happening on the other side of it. You don't either. So why is it a problem to share a wall? Noise. But if you use building materials that aren't paper, then sharing a wall becomes not a problem. If one neighbor wants to blast their music at 3am, and another neighbor has to wake up at 4am to go to work, and the building they're in lets them, what, then, is the problem?

Unless it's just the knowledge that there's people on the other side of the wall bothers you, but that seems silly.

Density and diversity are opposing forces. Since diversity is now the absolute highest value in western culture, density can never be anything other than dysfunctional or a lament.

Do you have a source for this claim? I don't understand how diversity and density would be opposed to one another.

The problem with living in a car-free urban area, especially one that hasn't been extremely gentrified, is that someone is likely to liberate your bike.

> Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.

Completely unnecessary. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was build pre-WW2:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=1m8s

The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E

Examples (Streetview):

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON