3 ms·

AKA How to keep suburbanites out of downtown completely, lose massive amounts of business, and become a slum.

by donatj 9y ago

chairmanwow 9y ago
In the age of ride sharing, there is no need for people to park a car downtown. It is a waste when compared with the cost per square foot resting such a huge hunk of steel on the side of the street.
- donatj 9y ago
  I'm not going to rideshare 15 miles into downtown on any sort of regular basis. I took a Lyft home from downtown last night after drinking and it cost me $40
matchbok 9y ago
Use the bus? Subway? Cities have enough people - we don't need suburbanites clogging up our streets with ugly cars.
- donatj 9y ago
  If I am from out of town, I'm not learning your mass transit system just to meet a friend for lunch. Path of least resistance. It's not worth the effort when I can instead ask them to meet me somewhere with parking.
  - DonbunEf7 9y ago
    You're not very good at traveling, sorry. It's considered an important and invaluable skill for travelers to be able to read subway/train/bus diagrams. Going to San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, London, or Munich, if you can't handle mass transit, you're only impeding yourself.
    - donatj 9y ago
      I'm not talking about traveling, just about living in the suburbs, something I do every day. Going into downtown is already a chore to be avoided because of how hard parking is to find. If there was no parking, other than the times there was a business need, I simply wouldn't. Why would I do something remarkably inconvenient like taking a bus taking an hour plus when I can do the same thing directly in 5ish minutes? It's illogical. It's too much an ask. Life is too short to waste it all in transit. If you remove parking, you remove the suburbanites. It's really that simple.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    > I'll instead ask him to meet me somewhere with parking. In London you've just cut out almost everywhere worth visiting.
  - chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
    Public transit done right should be intuitive. I've visited Boston once or twice in my life and The T is easy enough to use, despite having never used it before. I've flown on different airlines, but the process is still the same for arriving at the airport, checking in, boarding the plane, etc. That's because they all use the same "interface". The process is uniform across airlines. It doesn't matter if you fly United or Southwest, either way you know how to fly. Likewise, transit systems in towns and cities need to do the same. If they focus on user-friendly design and even work with other municipalities to create a standard, they can arrive at a uniform experience no matter which system you are using. We have this uniform experience with cars: we assume that no matter where we drive, there will always be a place to park. This is something that has become so ingrained, that the thought of removing these parking spaces is repulsive. But that's the uniform experience I'm talking about. You just assumed that parking will be available, without doing any research to actually prove it. See how natural we've made the process of driving a car? It will take effort, but we can do the same for public transit. This is a solvable problem! Maybe you've had bad experience in the past with whatever mass transit system a town used, but there is an opportunity there for improvement. How can you make their system as intuitive as possible? How can you make these systems uniform across different cities?
    - donatj 9y ago
      I have used mass transit in San Francisco, Tokyo, Osaka, many other places, I know how to do it, but it's always a huge indirect waste of time I wouldn't want to do in my everyday life. If I'm meeting a friend for drinks after work I wouldn't want to spend an hour on a bus to get there when I can just drive directly to the brewery in town in a matter of minutes, or hell a suburb on the other side of the metro in 15 minutes. I can assure you almost all suburbanites feel the same way.
      - chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
        I agree with you that no one wants to spend an hour on a bus just to go grab a drink with a friend. But why do you think the bus takes an hour in the first place? It's probably because we've dumped so much of society's time and money into making our car-system as efficient as possible. Therefore, the public transit is terrible in comparison. Cars have encouraged so much sprawl in our suburbs. It allows buildings to be further away, because now you can travel greater distances. Massive parking lots then need to be constructed to facilitate the placing of our cars, which again, wastes huge swaths of land, further distancing buildings from one another. In my mind, we can't make public transportation viable while continuing to massively subsidize private car use. The latter causes sprawl, drawing us into a feedback loop of even more private ownership, which then in turn causes even more sprawl, and so on. It's a strong reinforcement cycle. We need to break free of this cycle, and I'm afraid the short-term efforts aren't going to be enjoyable, but it's all for what's best in the long run.
  - csydas 9y ago
    An app wouldn't suffice to tell you how to get from A to B? With some investment a mobile app for transit can make for an amazing experience. Pull Kakao Metro from your device's respective app store to see what a simple a well made transit app can be like. The seoul metro is huge and at first blush unwieldly, but this app made getting around Seoul a breeze (though it was pretty easy as is). It's not hard to produce simple apps and get word out around town and cities. If you have a phone you can get the necessary information the same way you would have to look up directions on the map application anyway in an unfamiliar town. I don't see much of a difference in finding the transit app versus using maps app to find the place then struggling to find parking.
manmal 9y ago
Exactly what is happening in my town currently. All serious business migrated to megacenters at the outskirts because city parking is expensive and scarce.
- icebraining 9y ago
  What's a serious business?
  - manmal 9y ago
    Fashion stores, grocery markets, liquor stores...
obstinate 9y ago
I would be interested in seeing some empirical numbers on this. I live in NYC and have driven a Zipcar here a handful of times for errands. The experience is . . . not great. This has made me wonder: who are these people in cars? And parked up and down the street? What are their reasons for using the mode of transport they do? I ponder this regularly. Sometimes I have the most irrational urge to go around and knock on people's windows to ask. I never do, of course. I know for most things I do, the car would be the worst possible way to accomplish them. Walking or subway are better, and biking is best. But maybe for others the story is different. There are some obvious good reasons: tradespeople, delivery trucks, taxis and ride-sharing services. But who are the rest? That said, I don't think you can really expect people to buy this claim without providing evidence.
- burkemw3 9y ago
  My anecdotal NYC experience has been that private cars are useful for leaving the city (upstate, Long island, Jersey shore, etc) and occasional off-peak trips. The outer parts of the boroughs can also be far from transit, and cars don't seem such an inconvenience to deal with.
  - obstinate 9y ago
    True, true. I live in Chelsea. I'm not surprised that people in outer Brooklyn drive in that area. I'm wondering why people drive in lower Manhattan.
- holydude 9y ago
  I have been regularly sick when i was using public transp. I know my hygiene and I know that when i switched to car only my sick leaves dramatically decreased. I would not trade car even if it would mean to get to the place slower.
uiri 9y ago
Maybe that is the case when it comes to large towns in the US (particularly in the South or the Midwest). In cities, even North American ones, you would have to be totally insane to want to drive downtown. To a large extent, this is because parking is a nightmare to begin with in a downtown core. It is far more convenient to Park and Ride in places like San Francisco, New York, Toronto, etc... even somewhere like Boston or Seattle.
- donatj 9y ago
  I went to San Francisco this last fall for a couple weeks and actually found it far far more drive/parkable than expected. We took the subway and bus a few times but mostly drove and parked, and it was honestly never. I was honestly reasonable surprised and relieved.
kortex 9y ago
Do you have any empirical evidence this outcome would occur? Nearly everything I've read suggests the very opposite [1]. Further anecdote: I've been to many European cities with minimal cars, and many American cities ranging from super walkable to Robert Moses-esque highway-organized downtowns. The overwhelming trend is that car-unfriendly zones are the most bustling, and the car-streamlined zones turn to ghost towns after work hours. [1] https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2015/03/the-complete-business-case-for-converting-street-parking-into-bike-lanes/387595/ https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2015/03/the-complete-busin...

AKA How to keep suburbanites out of downtown completely, lose massive amounts of business, and become a slum.

by donatj 9y ago

AKA How to keep suburbanites out of downtown completely, lose massive amounts of business, and become a slum.

In the age of ride sharing, there is no need for people to park a car downtown. It is a waste when compared with the cost per square foot resting such a huge hunk of steel on the side of the street.

donatj 9y ago
I'm not going to rideshare 15 miles into downtown on any sort of regular basis. I took a Lyft home from downtown last night after drinking and it cost me $40

matchbok 9y ago

Use the bus? Subway? Cities have enough people - we don't need suburbanites clogging up our streets with ugly cars.

donatj 9y ago
If I am from out of town, I'm not learning your mass transit system just to meet a friend for lunch. Path of least resistance. It's not worth the effort when I can instead ask them to meet me somewhere with parking.
- DonbunEf7 9y ago
  You're not very good at traveling, sorry. It's considered an important and invaluable skill for travelers to be able to read subway/train/bus diagrams. Going to San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, London, or Munich, if you can't handle mass transit, you're only impeding yourself.
  - donatj 9y ago
    I'm not talking about traveling, just about living in the suburbs, something I do every day. Going into downtown is already a chore to be avoided because of how hard parking is to find. If there was no parking, other than the times there was a business need, I simply wouldn't. Why would I do something remarkably inconvenient like taking a bus taking an hour plus when I can do the same thing directly in 5ish minutes? It's illogical. It's too much an ask. Life is too short to waste it all in transit. If you remove parking, you remove the suburbanites. It's really that simple.
- DanBC 9y ago
  > I'll instead ask him to meet me somewhere with parking. In London you've just cut out almost everywhere worth visiting.
- chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
  Public transit done right should be intuitive. I've visited Boston once or twice in my life and The T is easy enough to use, despite having never used it before. I've flown on different airlines, but the process is still the same for arriving at the airport, checking in, boarding the plane, etc. That's because they all use the same "interface". The process is uniform across airlines. It doesn't matter if you fly United or Southwest, either way you know how to fly. Likewise, transit systems in towns and cities need to do the same. If they focus on user-friendly design and even work with other municipalities to create a standard, they can arrive at a uniform experience no matter which system you are using. We have this uniform experience with cars: we assume that no matter where we drive, there will always be a place to park. This is something that has become so ingrained, that the thought of removing these parking spaces is repulsive. But that's the uniform experience I'm talking about. You just assumed that parking will be available, without doing any research to actually prove it. See how natural we've made the process of driving a car? It will take effort, but we can do the same for public transit. This is a solvable problem! Maybe you've had bad experience in the past with whatever mass transit system a town used, but there is an opportunity there for improvement. How can you make their system as intuitive as possible? How can you make these systems uniform across different cities?
  - donatj 9y ago
    I have used mass transit in San Francisco, Tokyo, Osaka, many other places, I know how to do it, but it's always a huge indirect waste of time I wouldn't want to do in my everyday life. If I'm meeting a friend for drinks after work I wouldn't want to spend an hour on a bus to get there when I can just drive directly to the brewery in town in a matter of minutes, or hell a suburb on the other side of the metro in 15 minutes. I can assure you almost all suburbanites feel the same way.
    - chiefofgxbxl 9y ago
      I agree with you that no one wants to spend an hour on a bus just to go grab a drink with a friend. But why do you think the bus takes an hour in the first place? It's probably because we've dumped so much of society's time and money into making our car-system as efficient as possible. Therefore, the public transit is terrible in comparison. Cars have encouraged so much sprawl in our suburbs. It allows buildings to be further away, because now you can travel greater distances. Massive parking lots then need to be constructed to facilitate the placing of our cars, which again, wastes huge swaths of land, further distancing buildings from one another. In my mind, we can't make public transportation viable while continuing to massively subsidize private car use. The latter causes sprawl, drawing us into a feedback loop of even more private ownership, which then in turn causes even more sprawl, and so on. It's a strong reinforcement cycle. We need to break free of this cycle, and I'm afraid the short-term efforts aren't going to be enjoyable, but it's all for what's best in the long run.
- csydas 9y ago
  An app wouldn't suffice to tell you how to get from A to B? With some investment a mobile app for transit can make for an amazing experience. Pull Kakao Metro from your device's respective app store to see what a simple a well made transit app can be like. The seoul metro is huge and at first blush unwieldly, but this app made getting around Seoul a breeze (though it was pretty easy as is). It's not hard to produce simple apps and get word out around town and cities. If you have a phone you can get the necessary information the same way you would have to look up directions on the map application anyway in an unfamiliar town. I don't see much of a difference in finding the transit app versus using maps app to find the place then struggling to find parking.

manmal 9y ago

Exactly what is happening in my town currently. All serious business migrated to megacenters at the outskirts because city parking is expensive and scarce.

icebraining 9y ago
What's a serious business?
- manmal 9y ago
  Fashion stores, grocery markets, liquor stores...

obstinate 9y ago

I would be interested in seeing some empirical numbers on this. I live in NYC and have driven a Zipcar here a handful of times for errands. The experience is . . . not great. This has made me wonder: who are these people in cars? And parked up and down the street? What are their reasons for using the mode of transport they do? I ponder this regularly. Sometimes I have the most irrational urge to go around and knock on people's windows to ask. I never do, of course. I know for most things I do, the car would be the worst possible way to accomplish them. Walking or subway are better, and biking is best. But maybe for others the story is different. There are some obvious good reasons: tradespeople, delivery trucks, taxis and ride-sharing services. But who are the rest? That said, I don't think you can really expect people to buy this claim without providing evidence.

burkemw3 9y ago
My anecdotal NYC experience has been that private cars are useful for leaving the city (upstate, Long island, Jersey shore, etc) and occasional off-peak trips. The outer parts of the boroughs can also be far from transit, and cars don't seem such an inconvenience to deal with.
- obstinate 9y ago
  True, true. I live in Chelsea. I'm not surprised that people in outer Brooklyn drive in that area. I'm wondering why people drive in lower Manhattan.
holydude 9y ago
I have been regularly sick when i was using public transp. I know my hygiene and I know that when i switched to car only my sick leaves dramatically decreased. I would not trade car even if it would mean to get to the place slower.

uiri 9y ago

Maybe that is the case when it comes to large towns in the US (particularly in the South or the Midwest). In cities, even North American ones, you would have to be totally insane to want to drive downtown. To a large extent, this is because parking is a nightmare to begin with in a downtown core. It is far more convenient to Park and Ride in places like San Francisco, New York, Toronto, etc... even somewhere like Boston or Seattle.

donatj 9y ago
I went to San Francisco this last fall for a couple weeks and actually found it far far more drive/parkable than expected. We took the subway and bus a few times but mostly drove and parked, and it was honestly never. I was honestly reasonable surprised and relieved.

kortex 9y ago

Do you have any empirical evidence this outcome would occur? Nearly everything I've read suggests the very opposite [1]. Further anecdote: I've been to many European cities with minimal cars, and many American cities ranging from super walkable to Robert Moses-esque highway-organized downtowns. The overwhelming trend is that car-unfriendly zones are the most bustling, and the car-streamlined zones turn to ghost towns after work hours. [1] https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2015/03/the-complete-business-case-for-converting-street-parking-into-bike-lanes/387595/ https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2015/03/the-complete-busin...