I think anti-car activists would do great to mod SimCity to have realistic parking lots.
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.
I feel like fixing zoning would at least make possible fixing the rest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone has different preferences and we should be free to fulfill them.
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.
To each their own.
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.”
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.
This works great as long as neither has to ever change jobs to either a different location or one with a different WFH policy.
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.
https://www.vox.com/2014/7/9/5883823/its-not-just-hipsters-o...
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 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.
I've heard that UK zoning and land use is perhaps even worse than the US.
With increasing numbers of children staying with their parents past education, you end up with 3 or 4 commuters per house.
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.
As it would be in Australia. But not 4 families!
My spouse and I share a car. My neighbor and I probably could but not without a lot more hassle.
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.
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
There IS more space in the united states, believe it or not.
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
E.g., NIMBYism
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/opinion/democrats-blue-st...
The solution is not as simple as "Just stop electing NIMBYs!" because NIMBYism is a Nash equilibrium.
Absolute nonsense.
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?