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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

I mean that's "Park and Ride" which already exists but the problem is that people, kinda rightfully, hate it. All the downsides of a car with all the downsides of a bus.

The solution, which has done in my city to genuinely smashing success is to nationalize the parking garages meaning government builds them, maintains them, and they're free forever. Dot them around a dense mixed use area and quite literally watch the money pour in. Everything is within grandpa walking distance of at least one garage, they're specced to over capacity so each one is never full, and it provides parking to the workers and apartments.

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That sounds like a recipe for getting a ton of cars into your city. Think of parking garages as "traffic generators". If you cater to cars you shouldn't be surprised if what you get is more cars. It's literally sending the signal to people that it's fine (and encouraged) to drive cars everywhere. After all, your tax dollars are paying for all that infrastructure

Maybe some people are fully car-pilled, but many people want to live in an area that isn't so car-dependent, it tends to make everything more spread out, noisy, polluted, and congested. It also imposes very large personal costs.

I mean yeah… getting cars into your city is like the whole point. Cars are filled with people and people work and spend money. Specifically outside money. This is a city that has no subway or rail, vehicles are the only means of moving people. If you rip out the parking you won't get a vibrant walkable downtown, people won't start taking the bus, demand rail or move downtown because "the downtown area" just isn't that valuable of a destination. You will get a dead downtown. In a sad twist of fate when your "business district" doesn't have the capacity to absorb workers commuting or people going out on nights and weekends you'll see commercial buildings spread out even more to areas that can. Little pockets of nightlife and office space crop up next to newly built 5 over 1 apartments with plenty of parking built adjacent to major suburbs.

> Cars are filled with people and people work and spend money.

You're conflating people with cars. You want people and you're assuming that all those people must be attached to a car. There are other ways to get people to be populate an area which brings me to my second point...

> If you rip out the parking you won't get a vibrant walkable downtown

You will if you build a lot more housing in that area. If thousands more people are able to live right there then of course it'll become more vibrant. That parking garage could be home to hundreds of people. Instead it's temporary storage for cars. The problem is that suburbanites are going to fight tooth-and-nail to bring their cars. So what you get is cars.

If that's what you want, so be it. That doesn't sound like a vibrant place if everybody has to drive a car to get there, though. It's traffic by design.

> because "the downtown area" just isn't that valuable of a destination

This is another point people miss - 50 maybe 75 years ago the downtown area was a valuable destination because stores were smaller and what you needed could only be found at one or two places in a city; often downtown.

Cities are much bigger, but so are stores - you can go for months shopping nowhere but a SuperTarget or Walmart; and half the remainder can be delivered.

You make downtown desirable and then begin fixing the traffic problems. It takes 20+ years, but it can be done.

> that's "Park and Ride" which already exists but the problem is that people, kinda rightfully, hate it

... do people hate park and rides? Where I'm from (suburbs outside a US city) it's completely standard to park outside the city (in a garage or big lot at a train station) and take the train in. I find it quite comfortable personally.

It sounds like yours is specifically for buses, but I think it's that people generally don't like buses, they're slow and uncomfortable. The park and ride is fine when you can walk from it to a subway/train.

Parking at a train station or even a subway entrance sounds like heaven compared to ours which is a surface lot with a bus stop. But I'm not sure if "just have a subway or train network" is going to work for cities like Syracuse that don't already have them.

That's fair, yeah.

I do think parking garages are a pretty good solution, though obviously expensive (but cheaper than building out trains, like you said)

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