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Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.

The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.

> The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.

You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").

That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.

> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.

So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.

It's ridiculous to need to drive at all, and just about anything called an SUV or crossover is a good deal larger than it needs to be and certainly big relative to the cars of the 80s, 90s, and even 00s.

I say this living in a suburb and driving a crossover myself. The charms of this lifestyle are not lost on me, but I would kill to have consistent coverage of proper sidewalks, bike paths, and corner shops. I'd love to not need the car at all.

And no bulldozing is necessary. Just tweak zoning to allow small businesses and people will organically start live-in corner shops.

Good thing there are microcenters on every corner.

If thats not your thing, Walmarts, or Stop and Shops, you know for people who don’t want to spend their whole pay check on a single meal worth of food (we exist)

If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to. New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.

> If you open up zoning to mixed density with light commercial, get rid of parking minimums, and design infrastructure that's walkable and bikeable, you don't need to intentionally bulldoze and rebuild any city from scratch. Instead people and companies will do it piecemeal because it makes sense to.

You should be smarter than that because...

> New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.

...situations like are a nuisance and engender resistance. Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.

So I think "get rid of parking minimums" is actually a pretty bad idea. You need parking minimums (but maybe not as large as is typical nowadays), plus zealous parking enforcement, to control the negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood.

> Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.

This doesn't feel like a realistic scenario at all. A "suddenly very popular coffee shop" or "several shops opening close to each other" over here wouldn't significantly affect parking/traffic for several reasons. 1. a coffee shop's capacity (as in: seating, queue times) is already much smaller than parking space nearby; 2. of people in the queue, most will be locals already; 3. "it's hard to park nearby" by itself acts as a filter that naturally pulls people either to shops closer to their location, or to public transport.

There's just no such thing as "people from outside my neighborhood going out of their way to drive to the local XYZ". And places that _do_ want wider audience like fancier restaurants or wholesale won't pick a middle of the neighborhood to set up even if they were allowed to.

Also, we may be having different definitions of a quiet street. If anything, traffic in a mostly-residential area should decrease since locals could do things like small groceries without using a car?

> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore.

I know this isn't your main point but I was sadly laughing at that sentence. Pretty much anywhere I go in the U.S. there are giant SUVs. Plus crossovers and even sedans are just getting bigger, with smaller cars like subcompacts being phased out and compact cars growing in size.

> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore

dunno what america you're in. unless your point is they're big pickup trucks now?

True body-on-frame SUVs are definitely much less common then they were at their peak around the turn of the millennium as buyers moved to either unibody crossover SUVs or quad-cab pickups. That said, I have no idea what the point making that distinction was as it really doesn't matter in this context.

> Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").

A 1990s Ford Explorer weighs around 4000 lbs. That was considered big at the time. A current one is a couple hundred pounds heavier, a Ford Edge around the same, Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V a little less but still almost 4000 lbs. By contrast a 1990s sedan was generally under 3000 lbs with ~2400 lbs being pretty common.

The main difference isn't that SUVs got smaller, it's that sedans got bigger. A 1989 Honda Accord was ~2500 lbs, the 1990s ones were ~2800 lbs, the current ones are well over 3000 lbs.

A lot more people cone out of accidents in modern Accords without a scratch than their 1989 counterparts.

That's more because of things like airbags and crumple zones than bigger cars. Weight doesn't help you when you hit an overpass or a utility pole, and is only a relative advantage when you hit another car, so the average going up doesn't help anybody.

I’m sorry, would you prefer lighter cars with fewer (heavy) safety features? I’m not opposed to that with informed consent from the customers, however I’m not sure what point you’re making

Modern cars are heavier primarily because they're bigger, not because they have modern safety features. How much do you expect airbags actually weigh?

No one is going across town for the coffee in either case. I’m willing to bet time to coffee is about 5 minutes for the SUV driving say Denver suburbanite as it is for the walking Tokyo urban dweller. Same temporal convenience just different scale based on the predominant mode of transportation.

Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).

Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.

As someone who has lived in public transportation heavy cities, and currently lives in a flyover American city where we all drive everywhere, I strongly disagree. I live in a very popular commuter suburb of a larger American city, and the commute is about 30 minutes in the best case scenario. If you are in rush hour, or there is an accident (and there inevitably is), it pushes 45-60.

But the bigger point is that even for a similar amount of time, driving is far less convenient than public transportation. Cars demand your full attention. Public transportation does not. I can sleep on the bus or train. I can read. I can work. In the car my options are limited to music/podcasts/audiobooks. Cars are extremely expensive. They are expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and expensive to insure. Cars are deadly. Driving is the single riskiest thing people do with regularity, by a large margin. Cars are less efficient and have more externalities. They require more space for roads and parking, they produce more pollution, in terms of both greenhouse gasses and noise. They are also possibly the single biggest factor in the obesity crisis. Part of the reason America is among the fattest countries in the world is because a trip to anywhere requires driving there, where in many other countries people walk or ride their bike to many places the need to go to.

It’s very hard to live in a place with proper, functional urban design and public transportation, and walk away preferring car-centric culture.

> Traffic?

The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.

> Parking?

That's this:

> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.

This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.

You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.

Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.

> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."

Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.

>> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.

> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.

No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.

So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.

>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."

> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.

Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.

> That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.

As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.

Your premise is that the median one couldn't survive unless it was inundated, but that's contrary to all the currently operating ones in locations where that isn't happening.

> So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.

What really happens is that people look at the traffic at one when there is a severe constraint on where they can be built and expect that to happen everywhere without that constraint, when the constraint is the reason for the traffic being concentrated in that one place to begin with.

> Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.

The problem is the example was "45 minutes" which is actually pretty excessive, whereas the overall issue is "have to sit in traffic or circle to find parking to get there".

And then isn't your contention here contrary to your previous premise? If there is no traffic with that number of shops, what result when there are more, smaller shops so that each one has less traffic than that?

> As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.

That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.

> That's not actually guaranteed - it is possible for all or most of them to go out of business because of over-expansion - the key is that there are other sources of coffee that they're also competing against.

Suppose there are currently 5 coffee shops because the area zoned to allow them is already saturated, and then you rezone to allow them in other areas.

If the maximum number that can be sustained is still 5 because the zoning wasn't actually the constraint to begin with then either no one will build another one or someone will, there will be 6+ until some of them go out of business, and then there will be 5 again which is back to being sustainable. You still don't end up with 0.

If the zoning was the thing preventing there from sustainably being more than 5 then rezoning allows there to be e.g. 10. Then if there are 11+, some go out of business until there are 10.

About the closest approximation you could get to that is if you could sustain 5 but had 6+ and then several of them went out of business simultaneously, before the first one's exit could save the second or third one. But that's just a temporary condition where you have e.g. 3 in an area that can support 5 or more until people notice that the area is underserved and sustainably open more.

And that has little to do with zoning except that changing the zoning could allow the sustainable number to increase. If the number was 5 with the existing zoning and you don't change it, someone could still open a 6th downtown where that isn't sustainable and then have the temporary condition when there are less than the sustainable number if more than one of the 6 fail simultaneously.

Cars are the most sensitive form of transport to both traffic and parking, and even then the only other form of transport I can think of where parking is an issue is biking. If you could walk or take public transit, there would be no need to park, and traffic would be much lower because much less space is needed per commuter. Wider roads and more parking spaces are easy to point to as solutions but the real problem is subpar, uncomfortable, or even non-existent public transportation.

> but then they might not be economically viable

I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.

>> A 45 min drive is a huge distance.

Not in Cambridge, Massachusetts traffic!

Somehow all our neighborhood corner stores, cafes, village centers, and such seem to get by without a huge amount of parking. Likely because there's bus service and lots of housing within walking distance and actual bike lanes and such to get around.

The street parking issue is solved by making people pay for it, but people insist on their right to be given free space on public streets.

It’d also help if people in single family houses and some townhouses used their garage for its intended purpose. In my neighborhood the number of cars parked on the street would drop by 80-90% if people sold or dumpstered the mountains of junk sitting in their garages and parked their cars in there.

You don't need to worry about traffic or parking when you take a leisurely stroll to the store.