Asphalt Wasteland: Maybe parking does explain the world
commonwealmagazine.org
commonwealmagazine.org
The country was built on railroads, the poor excuse that it’s “too large” for rail and walkable cities was always a cop out, people too lazy or blind to realize that driving to McDonald’s in your F150 after filling a flatbed with Costco Groceries isn’t how the rest of the planet lives.
New York and Boston are anomalies on the American map. You really won’t find any other city inside the U.S. that has as many pedestrians.
IIRC the formula was made by a man who had zero experience in anything and didn't even own a car. He just made up the numbers off the top of his head.
And now Americans have more parking spots than people.
Still everyone seems to love the European style walkable cities but refuse to understand they've actually made it illegal to make cities like that. Zoning laws don't allow for mid-rise buildings with commercial use on the bottom floor and regulations about minimum amounts of parking space force every second block to be a parking garage...
it seems highly unlikely, given the way law works in the U.S, that there is one overarching law governing this.
There are probably varying laws in each jurisdiction - but sure, these laws probably just copied whichever jurisdiction was first mover in the space.
Parking minimum recomendations were somewhat standardized by the Institute of Transportation Engineers,(ITE). So whenever city councils around the country decide to prioritize car usage over walking and public transit, and obligated to guarantee people a place to store a car, they often turn to the ITE's guides.
That said, the ITE's parking minimums guides are themselves kind of arbitrary. And the guides absolutely assume that practically everyone is traveling by car, and maybe (!!) that's not a great assumption to build on.
A YouTube channel called Climate Town created a fun and well-researched video recently on the topic.
At least the link is marked as visited for me, so most likely I've watched it.
Do you claim it'd be even bigger with European style cities?
I can agree on quality of life grounds, but "damage to the US economy" seems like a hard sell.
Yeah, very likely it would be bigger if people didn't have to waste time in traffic, commuting. Imagine the value added if 50% of the people wasting their time driving in major US cities could be instead using that time to do something else during their commute. Or how much money has been dumped into building and maintaining roads that could be used for other public utilities/services with higher ROI, like education, or healthcare.
American economy is the biggest due to other factors, in spite of being entirely car-dependent, not because of it.
I actually find it easier to find parking than in many US cities, as there are tons of private parking lots (both paid and free parking offered by businesses). But it puts the cost on the people who actually use and benefit from the parking space, and encourages people to use the space more efficiently. For example, people drive smaller cars in Japan than in the US because they are easier to park (there are other factors that influence this preference, but parking is the main reason that one of our two cars is a "kei" car).
[1] https://www.reinventingparking.org/2014/06/japans-proof-of-p...
I think that's usually just a trick to make rent seem cheaper. They advertise the appartment for 1000€, but when you look at it they say, oh, and the parking lot costs 150€ on top.
Loosening up this flat<->parking space bond is actually a recommendation in a paper on how to reduce surface parking in cities. Just can't find the paper right now.
Say all parking spaces vanish over night and now a lot of people are left with cars. What then? What is the next step? Are these people just expected to pay some fee to get their cars taken away? What if I need a car for commuting? Is it really reasonable to ask me to start using public transportation and completely revolve my life around a their schedule?
Just this summer I saw attractive new apartment complex being built that I was going to buy an apartment from - until I saw that their parking structure doesn't have enough parking spaces for every apartment. Meaning that if I don't pay extra to nab one of the spaces (+ maintenance fees and whatnot) there wouldn't be a place for my car and all of a sudden there would only be tiny expensive grocery store as my only walkable shopping place or ordering takeout from even more expensive restaurants.
I feel like this anti car sentiment comes from people who already don't have access to a car and have already molded their lives around public transportation and of course then it is easy to say we should get rid of cars. Just like it is easy for non-students to cut from stupid benefits, just like it is easy for non-parents to get rid children, etc, etc.
You've never been outside the US, have you?
>Is it really reasonable to ask me to start using public transportation and completely revolve my life around a their schedule?
Tens of millions of people in my city do it every day. "Their schedule" means a train comes every 3 minutes.
You are right. Having lived all of my life in Finland, I have never been outside of US... oh wait... Again what is the alternative for me? To walk to the train station. Wait for the train that goes once per hour to spend 10 minutes on a train, so I can then walk to the bus station and wait for the bus that goes every 30 minutes, so I can take the bus for 15 minutes, so I can get - sort of close to work - and then walk for 5-10 minutes to work. In blistering snow storm.
or I can just hope in my car and drive 15 minutes and be within 30 meters from my office door.
Do you see how getting rid of cars doesn't seem to have alternative?
>Tens of millions of people in my city do it every day.
What if I don't live in your million people mega city? What if I live in my 30k people small city and commute because I don't want to pay out the ass to live in some shoe box?
But actually, if cars disappeared, people would have an incentive to work closer to where they live. So instead of living next to a quick road connection, you could live next to a quick bus/foot/bike route. And others would do, too. And look at all the unneeded space that used to be streets and parking lots, ready to be repurposed into new houses and offices!
My old commute, prior to switching to full time WFH, was ~25 miles and took 25-30 minutes by car depending on traffic/stoplights. It would take me an hour to an hour and a half on a typical ebike, and it would be far too cold to make the trek 3 months out if the year.
>people would have an incentive to work closer to where they live
Again this is easy to say for people who have already made the decision. If over night cars became illegal many people would now be stuck with basically unlivable properties since there is no public transportation or at least not good ones.
I could move closer to my office, but I would have to pay twice as much for same living space and that is now when cars still are a thing. The prices would go up by quite a bit if you literally couldn't live further away. At least this is what I hope you mean, if you mean that I should instead look for a job near me then that would just be silly.
In reality, cars can only disappear gradually, with less-car-dependent infrastructure replacing them as they go, and prices adjusting together with that. If you want to find reasons that no-cars can't work, you'd do much better by acknowledging that their disappearance would bring wider changes to urbanism.
(Also, it's not unheard of to choose a job based on what's in the area. Academic couples do that quite often: when one moves, the other often tries to find a job based on where they go.)
I was thinking the amount of whataboutism has a familiar smell. Just accept you live in the ass-end of the world where few want to (and even then it seems we want to kick out those who would), and that it comes with a price tag.
I live in a small 30k city in Scandinavia my self and know what you are talking about. It was a city with rural fishing villages and farming communities on the outskirts up until around 1960, but then the city started to spread out due to the increasing access to cars. Now most everyone drives everywhere, the small mall outside of town has grown to enormous proportions and now we even have american style strip malls along the main road out of town. Myself I live in a suburb outside of town that back in the days were farm land and some small cottages for the city folks. My family moved out here in the 80's, my dad used to take the bus out here to camp when he grew up in the 60's and 70's. Out here we are car addicted. People drive everywhere even if walking or biking takes about the same time. And people drive everywhere because the car is the default when going anywhere because we live 10 km from the mall and 18 km from the city so nothing is close by. Anyway, this is just me rambling. My point is that our places are designed for cars and such using the car becomes our default mode of transportation. By rather designing our environment for walking, cycling and public transport we can get more people to walk, bike and use public transport. And if you still "have" to use a car, that is fine. A car is a tool, and sometimes it's the best tool for the job, but very often it is not and the externalities of mass car usage is not worth it (In my opinion). :-)
I'm not saying "revolve my life around their schedule" is totally correct, but if you need to be somewhere on time, you usually take one bus earlier, even compounded if you need a bus to a subway station.
All I'm saying is that "I do not care at all, because every 3-5 minutes" is not every common at all.
So that tells me they have an alternative to driving, in the form of practical public transport.
The OP was highlighting the scenario were cars are being wished away, without any practical alternative. That's not going to work. The alternatives need to be made available first, then people can switch.
Or people who have choosen to not own a car and discovered that it is possible in the cities (at least in europe).
And every person not driving a car in a city, is making that city nicer and every person insisting he must drive - makes it worse. Air pollution, noise and safety.
I now own a car, but only since I live rural. In the city I was always faster by bike. So yes, the idea is to have eventually at least the cities mostly car free.
Until someone steals your bike.
>Air pollution, noise and safety.
I can get the first two, but not safety.
>Or people who have chosen to not own a car
Yes, as I have always stated life is about sacrifices and paying way more for smaller apartment in a city lets you not have a car, but for many people paying thousands for rent is either completely out of budget or just ridiculous.
I have chosen to commute with a cheap old car and live in a cheap city.
I can get the first two, but not safety."
Then maybe try not driving around with a car once, but walking or cycling and you might get it.
I live in a place that is barely serviced by public transport but I still don’t like cars and I wish it were feasible to get rid of mine. It’s just an expensive tool to me.
Of course, as you point out, this only works if places are designed around local shopping streets and cycle paths, instead of strip malls and freeways smashing through city centres. Obviously we're not there yet, and a car-free life is unattainable for many as a result.
Nobody is saying that this goal is acheivable in the short term. It's an ideal we'd have to work towards gradually, piecing together the required infrastructure and rebuilding the fabric of cities over decades.
FWIW I am lucky enough to live in a high density part of an old city, and it is wonderful. I can walk 8 minutes to a small street of shops with almost everything I need. I can cycle to other parts of the city to enjoy other amenities and meet friends. But I don't kid myself that this is possible for most people, yet.
If you visit larger cities in Russia, this is a thing from the USSR times, and probably my favorite thing about the country. I've lived in one of those buildings for a few months in total, 6th floor, in the south of Russia.
If you need anything - coffee, groceries, fresh meat or produce, baguette (lol), ready-made food, drinks, medicine, sushi, or anything else, you just take an elevator down to the ground level and walk 0-5 minutes.
If you also have a job there (or work from home), you can spend your entire life, with the exception of going on dates, parties, and to specialized doctors that are further away (dentists etc are often in the building too), in 1/2 a square mile of land or so.
Its much like a space ship, and its very very cool.
These blocks can be very far away from the city center, or right in the center -- it really doesnt make a difference!
Contrast that with some modern cities in Europe, where you have to take a bus to get to a store (unless you have a car).
This very much feels like when people talk about how money is bad and we should get rid of it. Sure it might be preferable, but unless you have literal magical powers it won't happen.
All of this shit has to happen at the same time - preferably over night. No one is going to first start these grocery stores just incase cars are banned and if cars are banned first everyone will just move away from these places before these stores are built/started.
The Netherlands was car centric and shifted towards walkable cities over a longer period.
I think it would happen gradually over decades as cities make investments in transportation infrastucture, zoning changes, traffic code, etc.
It also doesn't need to happen everywhere at once (although I'm sure some anti-car folks would disagree with me here), the sensible thing would be to start making changes in major metropolitan areas that are already feeling the strain of traffic congestion, polution, and other quality of life issues from having more cars on the road than they can handle.
But many of the proposed car penalties would be onerous if it isn't.
The way to solve this is diversity. Stop having laws telling people what they have to do. If someone wants to build an apartment building with ten thousand parking spaces, let them. If they want to build one with zero parking spaces, let them. Then someone will build each one. People will choose where to live based on what they value.
We get the status quo dystopia when some fool in the central planning office thinks that everything should be uniform and have a minimum or maximum amount of X or Y. It should not. Variation is beautiful.
The problem (in many US cities at least) is that people still buy cars even if they don't have a dedicated parking space, and then just park it on the street. Which creates problems for everyone in the city (the article cites that 30% of traffic in New York is people "cruising" and looking for parking spaces, for example).
So if you are going to let the market do its job efficiently, you also need to put the costs of street parking on the people who actually use it. The most straightforward way to do that in US is probably with more (and more expensive) metered parking, or eliminating street parking outright if the space can be used more efficiently for some other purpose (bike lanes, bus lanes, etc).
That's fine if they live in a 2-unit townhouse and there is plenty of street parking there. If they move into a 10,000 unit high rise with no parking spaces and expect to find street parking near it they're a silly masochist who will quickly learn the error of their ways.
> the article cites that 30% of traffic in New York is people "cruising" and looking for parking spaces, for example
Then the cost of parking is being put on the people with cars, in the form of time. If they'd rather spend money there are parking apps that will direct them to the nearest available paid parking garage, often at a discount for using the app.
> The most straightforward way to do that in US is probably with more (and more expensive) metered parking
Which is a tax on people who have less money than time, i.e. the poor.
> or eliminating street parking outright
But the problem was people driving around because there weren't enough parking spaces?
> if the space can be used more efficiently for some other purpose (bike lanes, bus lanes, etc).
Street parking is highly efficient because you need the space between buildings anyway for light and air, and putting parking at ground level is much less expensive than building a structure that can support the weight of a vehicle.
Bike lanes are mostly useless. I see them all over the place; no bikes in them. And the falling price of ebikes is quickly turning them into obsolete technology, because an ebike can keep up with other motorized vehicle traffic at city speeds and doesn't need a dedicated lane.
Bus lanes are entirely useless. Any place with enough bus traffic to justify a dedicated bus lane should instead have a subway line.
Do the math. If a 40-passenger bus can carry the same number of people as 40 1-passenger cars spaced 30 feet apart and traveling at 30MPH, to have the bus lane carry as many people as a normal lane would require there to be a full bus every 27 seconds.
Your views on bike lanes and bus lanes are overly simplistic. Bike lanes and bus lanes can be effective at reducing traffic congestion in many scenarios. [1] [2] And saying that "any place with enough bus traffic to justify a dedicated bus lane should build a subway line" is laughable, especially coming from someone who just said "the way to solve this is diversity". There is a major cost difference between building a bus lane and a subway. Even Tokyo - which has arguably the best rail infrastructure of any city in the world - uses buses and dedicated bus lanes to expand coverage of public transportation where a subway line is not feasible or warranted. All forms of transportation - cars, taxis, trains, buses, bikes, walking, etc - have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages, and city planners need to consider all of the above when designing transportation infrastructure.
And I disagree that e-bikes will make bike lanes obsolete. There is a significant proportion of people who (justifiably) don't feel safe riding a bike in traffic, and having access to faster bikes isn't going to make a difference. After all, we've had scooters and motorcycles for well over 100 years and they only make up a small fraction of automobile use. If anything I think the convenience of e-bikes will increase demand for and usage of bike lanes.
I also disagree that charging for street parking or utilizing the space more efficiently would disproportionately hurt the poor. If public transportation could be improved as a result, then that could be a great benefit to the poor (many of whom cannot afford to own a car in the first place).
To be clear I am not calling for the eradication of all free street parking. Street parking has benefits for residents and businesses - and if a neighborhood has the space to support it without issue then that's fine. But in a place like Boston which has the 4th worst traffic congestion in the world [3]? Absolutely I would be willing to sacrifice free street parking in the interest of better public transportation.
[1] https://www.vtpi.org/blw.pdf
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192092...
[3] https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2023/01/12/boston-tra...
I'm not ignoring them. I'm saying there is already a built-in pricing mechanism because cruising consumes the time of the person doing it, so they will want to minimize it and limit the amount of time they're willing to spend on it. If you have an area with minimal parking available then people who own cars will not be willing to live there because it will be too inconvenient to find parking every day, which thereby limits the amount of it that will happen.
> Those mandates exist for a reason, and your solution of just letting everyone build and do whatever they want does nothing to address this.
Sure it does, because the effect is a local phenomenon. People don't go cruising for parking spaces miles from where they want to be. So there can be areas with more parking and areas with less parking with all that each of those entails, and if you prefer the former then you live there and someone else who prefers the latter can live on a different block.
> bus lanes can be effective at reducing traffic congestion in many scenarios.
> https://www.vtpi.org/blw.pdf
This paper opens with an obvious fallacy:
> Bus lanes can carry more passengers than general traffic lanes, and so increase total capacity (people per traffic lane)
As above, if traffic moves at 30MPH this is only true if there is a full bus more than twice a minute. Even if you assume traffic congestion so traffic only moves at 5MPH, you would still need a fully-loaded bus more than once every 3 minutes to carry as many passengers as a lane of single-occupancy cars. And less than 100% of cars are single-occupancy.
Moreover, it's even worse than that, because the bus doesn't cease to carry passengers when there is no bus lane. And a bus that comes on the same interval has the same carrying capacity whether it has its own lane or not.
The theory of the bus lane is that the bus will then be faster than driving and so more people will take the bus. But in order for this to actually move more people than a general travel lane, the incremental increase in bus ridership from the bus lane has to equal a full bus worth of passengers at the above intervals, because the passengers who take the bus either way are not a benefit attributable to the bus lane.
Bus lanes simply make no sense, because the number of riders you would need so that the incremental increase is that large is more than enough to justify a subway line. There are in fact widely used and sustainable subway lines with fewer passengers than that.
And it's worse than that, because the conversion of a lane to a bus lane increases congestion in the remaining lanes, lowering their carrying capacity, which that paper ignores:
> Travellers who shift from driving to transit in response to bus lanes are generally better off overall (they gain consumer surplus), or they would not change mode
Not true if the bus lane increases travel time for non-buses, which is exactly why people object to them. (The paper is clearly an advocacy piece for bus lanes.)
> especially coming from someone who just said "the way to solve this is diversity".
If someone says that food diversity is good and you shouldn't mandate that everyone eat only french fries and they also say that cyanide is poisonous and you shouldn't eat that, you have not discovered an inconsistency.
> There is a major cost difference between building a bus lane and a subway.
It's not that the subway costs less to build than a bus lane. It's that the very high amount of ridership you need in order for a bus lane to increase passenger capacity is more than the amount you need to make a subway economical. And subways are superior in any place where they're economical because they don't consume space on the surface.
> Even Tokyo - which has arguably the best rail infrastructure of any city in the world - uses buses and dedicated bus lanes to expand coverage of public transportation where a subway line is not feasible or warranted.
Governments everywhere regularly do inefficient things.
Putting a bus lane somewhere that you can't economically put a subway will only wastefully reduce transport capacity because there won't be enough additional buses in it to compensate for the number of cars it could have carried in the alternative. The only place they "work" is in the places where subways work better.
> All forms of transportation - cars, taxis, trains, buses, bikes, walking, etc - have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages, and city planners need to consider all of the above when designing transportation infrastructure.
Different things have different advantages and disadvantages, but some things have no niche in which they have a net advantage over a known alternative. Bus lanes are wastefully inefficient in low or medium traffic areas and inferior to subways in high traffic areas, leaving them with nowhere to be.
> After all, we've had scooters and motorcycles for well over 100 years and they only make up a small fraction of automobile use.
But the same is true of bicycles. The question isn't whether ebikes will replace cars, it's whether they'll replace bicycles.
But putting ebikes in bike lanes is also a problem, because the rationale to have a bike lane instead of putting bikes on the sidewalk is the speed differential. And now you've got more of a speed differential between a 28MPH ebike and a 12MPH bicycle than you had between the bicycle and the pedestrians, and in a narrower space.
So the ebikes would need their own lane, but that would only increase ridership by the number of people who don't feel comfortable riding in traffic, which are unlikely to be enough to justify the separate lane, because as you point out, two-wheeled vehicles as a whole are a small fraction of vehicle traffic.
> I also disagree that charging for street parking or utilizing the space more efficiently would disproportionately hurt the poor. If public transportation could be improved as a result, then that could be a great benefit to the poor (many of whom cannot afford to own a car in the first place).
You're conflating two different things. The point was that if you charge for it, it hurts the poor because now they have to pay. In that case the street parking is still there and you can't use it for something else.
I live in a low-density US suburb built in the late 90s. The prototypical place that according to the memes, I must drive 30 minutes to the nearest store.
> I can walk 8 minutes to a small street of shops with almost everything I need. I can cycle to other parts of the city to enjoy other amenities and meet friends.
Also, I can walk in ~10 minutes to stores and entertainment of nearly any type I could need.
It's not a binary choice of dense city center or can't walk to anything. Most suburbs can be very walkable.
> Just this summer I saw attractive new apartment complex being built that I was going to buy an apartment from - until I saw that their parking structure doesn't have enough parking spaces for every apartment.
This framing makes it sound like it’s a bad thing for you to have the choice of whether or not you want to pay for parking. Under the system where everyone gets a “free” parking space, you are still paying for it. It increases the cost of the housing because less housing can be built in the same space. Why should your neighbors that don’t drive a car pay for your parking space?
Just to tell you that is wrong: Have a car here, could have access to two or more, but regret having bought it every day now as we rarely need it (most is walkable, bicycling increases radius, and for the rest public transport or car sharing easily would do, better for the planet and the wasted space to just do the unimaginable and get rid of it.
The felt anti car sentiment that you have I think is also exaggerated, and more because for you it cannot be right what's wrong and unthinkable. Also there are certainly use cases for cars, but we (collectively) have overblown it as many things..
- a big supermarket (<1 min)
- a drug store (<1 min)
- a pharmacy (<1 min)
- a kiosk that sells beer during the night (<2 min)
- three bakeries (<2 min)
- a locksmith/shoe-repair guy (<2min)
- my doctor (<3 min)
- a hardware store (<3 min)
- a few bars/cafes (<3 min)
- my bands rehearsal space (<5 min)
My work is the only thing that is to far to walk and there the times look like this (during typical hours)
- bicycle (17 min)
- public transport (21 min)
- car (including parking lot: 40 min)
Now granted I do live in a city, but this is also the reason why I live in a city. When we are talking about cars we are usually talking about cars in cities.
But I grew up rurally — in a country with good public transport. Till I moved out I used the public transport for everything. That might be hard to imagine for someone from the US, but if you have working public transport and a society with nearly no violent crime you don't really need a car.
Also cars are fun, maybe not in hypercities like New York, but in places where you can get to a moving road, it's fun the drive.
Let's start with this, it's kind of obvious. "Cars are evil but I have two" would likely cause severe cognitive dissonance. Choosing to live carless is going to shape your life. It restricts where you can live, what jobs you can accept, your hobbies, family planning etc.
> What if I need a car for commuting?
Then you get a car for commuting, if you have to haul a lot of gear, can't move closer to your work, or choose another work that's accessible without a car.
> Is it really reasonable to ask me to start using public transportation and completely revolve my life around a their schedule?
Ideally you'd get public transit that runs often enough that you don't bother checking the schedule before heading for the stop, it'll be a couple of minutes of wait at worst. If you need to go somewhere off hours you accept the longer wait or the occasional taxi fare as a cost of not owning a car. That will rule out living anywhere that doesn't have the population density to support it, or is otherwise too car-centric.
> Meaning that if I don't pay extra to nab one of the spaces (+ maintenance fees and whatnot) there wouldn't be a place for my car
If there's no parking lot expanse, parking needs to be placed underground or within buildings, unless a lot more people are willing to go carless. It's going to be expensive, and someone has to pay for it. As long as it's not you, right?
> there would only be tiny expensive grocery store as my only walkable shopping place
This sucks. It's the kind of place you'd immediately rule out if you don't have a car. This is partly poor city planning, and partly a chicken-and-egg problem. Zoning for those apartments should take into account that there is enough space reserved for services within a walking distance. But if everyone just takes a car to the nearest highway hypermarket, there's no point for anyone to bring the services closer. Btw. we get our groceries delivered weekly since covid, I'm not looking to go back to a supermarket that's intentionally designed to waste my time walking past every single product to get what I need.
Disclaimer: not a "fuck cars" extremist, I just don't like driving very much, cars are expensive to own and operate where I live, a hassle to own and maintain in general, and inconvenient as a mobility solution in my immediate surroundings. So I've decided to try to hold out as long as I can (~20 years of adult life so far).
Now there is a balance with too much and too little, but later will not work out.
You literally listed all the solutions in your complaint.
Buses (in the longer term, nicer vehicles) running on empty roads are prompt and fast, and more demand means so many could run that you don’t have to ‘revolve around their schedule’ - try it in any large city.
Cars have extremely large externalities that are not sustainable socially, economically (asphalt is _expensive_ to maintain at the American scale!), and environmentally.
So perhaps we should move towards more walkable / bikeable cities and lowering the shared social costs for everyone? literally everyone wins here.
Parking spaces won't vanish over night, so I'm not sure it's worth entertaining this rapture-esque scenario. I do think we should begin gradually reducing the amount of parking spaces in the United States, though, for various reasons. Instead of subsidizing car usage through building free or artificially cheap parking lots (and highways, for that matter), I'd like to see my tax dollars subsidize public transit and bicycle infrastructure instead.
"What if I need a car for commuting? Is it really reasonable to ask me to start using public transportation and completely revolve my life around a their schedule?"
It's reasonable for some people right now, as evidenced by the millions of people who use public transit for their daily commutes. The alternative is to revolve our lives around finding a place to store a very large piece of property, in addition to planning around traffic congestion.
But I get it - I live in a suburban area outside of a major metro area, so while I have access to an okay bus network that I sometimes take advantage of, it often doesn't make sense for me to take the bus. The busses here simply don't run frequently enough and their routes have to cover a lot of points, which means that the routes sometimes take too long if I need to be punctual. And sometimes the bus stops aren't that close to my destination, which is fine if I want a little exercise and the weather is nice, but often it's annoying. I own a car, so I don't have to take the bus if I find it too convenient.
But I'm advocating for better public transit, which means buses that run more often, have more direct routes, and have stops that are closer to where I want to be.
I also think there are a lot of creative ways to tackle the "last mile" of a trip, such as bicycling and scooters. For example, the busses in my area have bike racks, and since I enjoy biking, that really expands where I can travel without a car. Some scooters can fold up small that are easy for people to carry, and other options can be rented on the spot. And with my bike, there are many places I can easily travel to without ever needing public transit, like the grocery store about a mile away. A 3-5 mile trip feels pretty pleasant on a bicycle, imo. And parking a bicycle obviously requires significantly less space than parking a car or truck.
Ideally, I'd love to see better train networks as well, something approaching the train networks in Europe or Asia. Some major cities in the US are expanding in their train networks, and I'm hopeful that Amtrak will become more robust as it receives some significant funding from the infrastructure bill that Congress passed in 2021.
Are you sure you haven't been indoctrinated by the car industry that pushed you into this car dependency? It was the car industry that bought and destroyed the US street cars, that made jaywalking illegal in the US (no other country has those laws in such a strict manner) and lobbied quite hard to make cities are place for cars rather than people. If it's a war on cars, then it's just the long overdue counter offensive against cars.
In all seriousness, I don't have a car (there's a car sharing in my city, but even for heavy loads I borrow a cargobike) but I also don't see the need to get rid of cars.
It's just two points: Restrict the public space they take up in our cities and give people the choice to pick an alternative to the car. If you walk out the door in the morning and have options for your way to work, be it your bicycle, public transport or because you need to carry something large this morning, a car sharing vehicle, wouldn't that be a true freedom?
And oh boy do people kick and scream and call you every name in the book once you propose that they'll actually have pay for at least part of their externalized costs.
During the pandemic, restaurants in Berlin were allowed to construct little outside seating areas on the side of the road, replacing parking spaces there. In some streets, this luckily has persisted, and it's eye-opening seeing what you can do with the space that parking takes up, which often times is free.
(For example: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E6ZtaubWEAMShFW?format=jpg&name=...)
Now, depending on how strictly the rules are interpreted, this can mean that you need to provide an actual parking spot at all times even if you don’t own a car (and do not have to let anyone use it!), or you might be allowed use the parking spot for other purposes, provided your changes are easily reversible. (So planting trees or building a shed is off limits, but placing down potted plants and some seating might be fine – as judged by someone of your local authorities.) Having an actual garage might also be preferable as a non-car owner, as that can at least serve as dry storage space while still counting as a parking spot.
Last, the idea is still a bit inane. Japanese-style rules where you need to show that you have a parking spot when buying a car (instead of tying it all homes) would be much preferable in my book. But this is difficult, as there are still many places where streets are so old that cars did not yet exist when they were designed. (And the houses actually touch each other and the street, so there is no place where they could add parking.) These houses are usually exempt from needing to provide parking for their units. Doing it on a house-by-house basis instead of a car-owner-by-car-owner basis is just easier because of this.