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Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but Ohio has ~4200 bars[0]. Which is roughly 1/4 the ratio of bars to people.

[0]: https://rentechdigital.com/smartscraper/business-report-deta...

Just to compare, they also have a tour for the UK https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/uk/index.html : 49,687 pubs.

They are such an urban phenomenon. A largely empty rural state, with the legacy of prohibition, where you have to drive? That's going to have way fewer drinking locations. A culture of hanging out and drinking requires walkable urbanism. Many of the UK pubs pre-date the invention of the car; "peak pub" appears to have been the late 1800s with over 100,000.

I'm impressed that Korea has more than the UK, but this is definitely going to be a matter of size and the tiny Korean bars.

> A culture of hanging out and drinking requires walkable urbanism.

I don't think that's really true. In the UK, villages had pubs. Gradually some of the villages were joined together into larger cities, and the pubs remained. It wasn't planned as walkable urbanism.

You didn't have to plan to get walkable urbanism before cars. It just happened because everyone needed a pub, store, school, etc. within walking distance.

But it wasn't urban. That's my point.

82k places in Korea include any restaurant or joint or karaoke with a license to serve alcohol. Personally I would not care to call 80% of them "bar".

So in Ohio probably everything with class C and D license. How many is not public but probably many times more than 4k.

Many actual street level bona fide bars in Seoul (which has half of all the people of the entire country and the most bars by far) are tiny rooms that fit a few people each. But you always have a "bar street" with 50 of those next to each other.

Ok, that gets the numbers in line -- there are about 27,000 liquor licenses in Ohio, according to a random Google, which is about the same per capita.

South Korea apparently ranks #97 on alcohol deaths, so it's apparently not a problematic number of bars, by global standards.

I don't think bars in Korea have parking minimums like they do in Ohio.

What's a parking minimum?

The minimum number of parking that needs to be available per seat/dining area.

https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/plaincity/latest/plain...

Codes like these are the secret sauce of America's asphalt deserts, in which you'll find - by international standards - comparatively large restaurants and stores. Walkable cities tend to gravitate towards smaller equivalents, and more of them.

A minimum amount of parking spots per patron capacity. So a bar with 60 people capacity must have 15 parking spaces. [0]

Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases. Which leads to stuff like a arena having 5x the land area be parking than what is taken up by the arena itself. [1]

0: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/harrison/latest/harris... (this is for harrison, ohio, just happened to be the first result I found. it's under commercial -> "Tavern, bar, club, lodge, and dance hall.")

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8

The idea of a bar (ie a place people go to get drunk) with a dedicated parking lot strikes me as particularly bad for road safety. I'm baffled that this is not only encouraged, but mandated.

How do people do this in practice? Just drink and drive and hope they don't crash / get fined? Or does everybody bring 1 friend who sips colas the whole night?

We call the latter a designated driver [1] though as you can imagine sometimes the designated driver is "only" slightly drunk.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_driver

Yeah but I mean, if everybody goes to the pub by car, does it mean everybody brings a designated driver? Or is this one of those things where everybody drives drunk but pretends nobody does?

Taxis exist.

The parking minimum is for taxis?

It's pretty common for people drive to the bar, get drunk, taxi/Uber/Lyft/DD home, and then return the following day to get their vehicle. I don't think it makes sense personally, but I also don't drink at all so I'm not a great judge here.

Makes perfect sense if people are not planning on having a big night and then do.

You can see people taxi/uber into a place if they are definitely planning to get blathered.

Mostly the latter IMO. The most popular bar where I grew up is on a busy highway with no housing within walking distance. Parking lot reliably fills up every weekend night, mostly with single occupancy vehicles. You can do the math.

Parking lots are not mandated for bars in the US, at least not everywhere. I helped my girlfriend's dad open a bar in Long Beach 20 years ago. The city required us to pay for the maintenance of three streetside parking spaces, but that was it. Pay the city. We didn't have to build anything that didn't already exist.

>Parking lots are not mandated for bars in the US, at least not everywhere.

This, they are making the mistake that all the people on /r/askamerican do over on reddit. Laws like this mostly aren't nationwide or even statewide, they are decided on a very local level.

>Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases.

That hasn't been my experience. Anytime I've wanted to go somewhere halfway popular the lot is usually full or nearly full. On the flipside, the lots are often empty during times when the business is closed, but reducing the size of the lot would exacerbate the issue of not being able to park nearby when the business is open. You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric, so you either have to dictate that businesses maintain a reasonable amount of parking or you have to have the municipality maintain several large parking structures throughout the city. Most cities would rather have the businesses that need the parking pay for the parking and most people would rather park near the businesses that they frequent.

> You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric

I think this isn't true. The same way suburbia spread out from cities, I think walkability can spread outwards too in baby steps.

For example, SF is relatively walkable/has public transit. The next step would be slowly removing parking minimums and making the areas surrounding SF more walkable. And then over time as people in those surrounding areas start using their cars less (not getting rid of them but at least trying to do short journeys on foot/bike/transit).

Over time that spreads outwards because half the community served by an area no longer needs a car for their daily travel and the envelope of walkability spreads further.

Sure you can slowly, over a long time, convert already dense areas into being less car centric, but you aren't going to make the rest of the country that way. Parking minimums, when they exist, are set by super local governments, they already don't exist or are set very low in areas of high density. The solution is to increase density, but again you aren't going to do that in the rest of the country. Random bars in Ohio are still going to have large parking lots, because land is cheap and given the choice, most people prefer less density.

A lot of bars in walkable cities fit about 10 or fewer people. East Asia in particular has loads of tiny bars.

Plus being able to walk or take a train home makes them far more accessible for people than needing to drive home.

This is also upper-bounded by the law; Ohio only issues one class D-5 liquor license (license to sell beer, wine, and spirits) per 2000 residents, which roughly maxes it out at ~5950 bars (in practice this looks to be rounded up on a per-town basis, making this an underestimate). An Ohio with the population of South Korea would only be allowed ~25000 bars.

Ohioans love "big bars".

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