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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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