12 ms·

American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

219 points by caiobegotti 8y ago

angarg12 8y ago
I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  This is just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's. However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem. People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car. Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure. Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished. If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-population-density/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...
  - zkms 8y ago
    > don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered. It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.
    - firstplacelast 8y ago
      This is absolutely correct. NIMBYism has adversely affected more Americans than Russia. Since it follows that NIMBYs are more anti-American than Russia, we MUST put sanctions on their ability to affect their fellow Americans.
      - dang 8y ago
        Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
  - ProfessorLayton 8y ago
    Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit. I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.
- randlet 8y ago
  It's infuriating to me living in North America (I'm in Canada but it's as bad or worse in the US) watching cities develop this way. Mention this to almost anyone here and you will be met with blank stares. There are countless places that contain many stores that share parking lots that we so huge you still have to drive between them.
  - jvagner 8y ago
    Reno is an awesome example of this, and this is true even of the latest developments. It's like developers in Reno have never seen pictures of other cities, even here in America. This problem has been solved time and again... and Reno builds large and small shopping malls and then they're empty and under-utilized, so they build another new one and the results are the same. Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.
- erikpukinskis 8y ago
  This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations. This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted. Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled. It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century. The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.
  - halbritt 8y ago
    Too real.
  - narrator 8y ago
    The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.
    - extradego 8y ago
- cmurf 8y ago
  A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more. Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in particular as men came home from the war, and women weren't doing as much factory work. Kids wanted out of the house all day long. Cars were many things to people but it was the hyped technology of that era and making everything bigger, including all the available infrastructure was a "good thing". You'd see gas stations on every corner. Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system. One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars. This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!
  - dsnuh 8y ago
    I'm not familiar with licensing requirements in other countries, are they more rigorous?
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      Here in the UK, you need to take a multiple-choice theory test and a practical driving test. The practical test takes about 40 minutes and is conducted on public roads. The pass rate for both the theory and practical test is about 50%. It's not uncommon for learners to fail the practical test several times. You're not required to have professional instruction but the vast majority of people do, because it's extremely difficult to pass the driving test without it. Most instructors recommend 30 to 40 hours of tuition before attempting the test. Learners who are driving on a provisional license prior to passing their test must be accompanied by someone who has held a full license for at least three years. They must display an L-plate on the front and rear of the vehicle and cannot use motorways (freeways) unless they are accompanied by a licensed instructor. It is my understanding that the British process is relatively straightforward by European standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/720308/drt-statistics-jan-to-mar-2018.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
- kartan 8y ago
  Yes. I had the same experience. Visiting Mountain View, I was surprised at how walk hostile is. It took me 10 minutes to just pass one of the buildings surrounded by a huge parking lot and move to the next. To go from Intel offices to the Computer History Museum takes a really long walk cross kilometres of parking space. The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking. I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    You can use an electric unicycle to get around easily.
- Derived 8y ago
  America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the suburbs even if it means a longer commute to the office. I like driving, and I have no problem driving places to get things done...after all, I can only carry so much shopping with me anyway.
  - wild_preference 8y ago
    I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      Significant sections of a number of US cities are quite walkable: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, parts of Denver, Chicago. As well as smaller cities like Boulder. It's certainly true that newer US cities tend to be more spread out but if city walkability is a priority for you, examples exist.
      - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        Very, very few cities in America are walkable enough to enable the average household to not own a car without it being a hardship [1]. You can probably count them on one hand. So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article. 1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.
- Tiktaalik 8y ago
  I've heard this referred to as the "cycle of autodependency". This graphic describes it well. https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it. Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."
- jhabdas 8y ago
  The Bay is the garbage dumb of modern America. I'm sorry that it left av memory. Next time head to Chitown or NYC and absorb some culture.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US stores, like malls, seem much more convenient for families. What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    > What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built [...] far away from residential areas This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range. > wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.
  - UncleEntity 8y ago
    > What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      Out of curiosity, do you have a sense for whether the restaurant's patrons are driving from other parts of the city, or from the suburbs?
- isoskeles 8y ago
  Have you been to many other regions in the US? I live in the Bay Area and one of the few things I love about it is that it's way more "walkable" than other places I've lived in the states, especially the suburbs. Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?
- walshemj 8y ago
  America has a lot of land and in the developed world you wont get planning permission for residential property with out of street parking
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.
- csomar 8y ago
  That's because it is cheaper to acquire land than build underground parking. I live in a city that has gone through that transformation. Big parking were converted into malls/supermarkets with multi-floor parking. Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.
- badrabbit 8y ago
  This is why we have more flooding too. More parking space means less ground to absorb rain water.
- 8bitsrule 8y ago
  Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling. Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    The lack of parking may be an effort to solve a chicken and the egg problem. While some zoning restrictions call for parking per unit, some high traffic areas are calling for less parking per unit. If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest. By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.
burfog 8y ago
It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure, commercial areas don't have households but they still need parking. Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very little room for surges. Business is impacted when the availability of parking isn't 100% reliable.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least. Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of transportation mode. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste-of-half-empty-black-friday-parking-lots/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste...
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    > You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many? I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.
RickJWagner 8y ago
This is good-- it's where those fantastic barn-finds come from.
paulsutter 8y ago
“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk
daviator88 8y ago
It's no wonder Seattle's garages often sit empty, a parking space goes for minimum of $4 per hour
- jasonmp85 8y ago
  Wow that’s incredibly cheap.
  - eatbitseveryday 8y ago
    Hm. Downtown Portland is $2/hr. I would not say $4/hr is 'incredibly cheap'.
nickthemagicman 8y ago
You either pay for parking or get a ticket. It must make incredible amounts of money for all involved.
jaysonelliot 8y ago
Until cities have a better alternative to driving than "use our terrible mass transit in our poorly-designed cities," this will remain a problem. American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it's dangerous. Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000 pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you're riding something that can't be carried into a building with you, it's inconvenient at best to park it outside. Just removing parking from new construction won't solve the problem, it will compound it. People still won't want to get on slow, crowded, uncomfortable buses or packed, unreliable, dirty trains. We'll just get more people driving endlessly around the block looking for parking and polluting the air, more accidents from drivers hitting people in the road, more sprawl as people shun the city so they can drive in the suburbs instead. Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc. Public transit needs a major overhaul, major investment, and a new attitude. It has to be about riders' comfort, convenience, and happiness, not just jamming people into routes as if they were statistics in a planning meeting. New development should be aimed at walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, planned for people first, not cars. All these things have to happen to solve the problem. It won't be easy, but unless we do something like that, we'll be living with the car problem for a very long time to come.
- ebikelaw 8y ago
  Kind of a weird argument that nobody wants to take the bus or the train because it's too crowded. Very Berra.
  - lozenge 8y ago
    It just means there aren't enough bus routes or busses on the route.
    - cozzyd 8y ago
stretchwithme 8y ago
Once automated vehicles take over (eventually), most people will switch to taxis. Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle. So the need to park will be greatly reduced. Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. Parking will be built underground for off peak storage of vehicles, allowing the repurposing of surface parking spots. Maybe agricultural robots will make use of them. Cities will get quieter.
- cozzyd 8y ago
  Yeah taxis don't have sufficient capacity. You'd just double the cars on the roads. Autonomous buses on the other hand could make a dent (since the primary cost of buses in rich countries is labor).
  - 55873445216111 8y ago
    I'm curious about this. How do you arrive at the conclusion that autonomous taxi adoption results in a doubling of the number of cars? Do you have a link?
    - cozzyd 8y ago
      Because order half the time they'll be empty driving to their next pickup. The increase in ride-sharing has already greatly increased congestion: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180316/issue01/180319945/whats-making-traffic-worse-in-chicago-signs-point-to-uber-lyft http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180316/issue01/1803...
      - stretchwithme 8y ago
        But in the most popular areas, many cars get multiple riders and find their next rides in the same area. And out in the boonies, some people will keep their personal cars, as it will take longer to get a ride. Also, the average car size will shrink. Not only will we lose the driver's seat, but peak demand as people go to work may be met with even smaller one-seat cars. You won't need a car that can handle your worst-case scenario for most of the time. Bigger cars will still be available, of course, because people do like to travel with their friends and family whenever possible. All in all, it's a lot more likely that that most seats will be filled.
nlawalker 8y ago
>> Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception persists that there’s “not enough parking.” I imagine most people will perceive that there's not enough parking unless there's an open spot right out front of where they're going when they get there. Services that facilitate parking further away from your destination might help.
21 8y ago
> Parking is also extremely expensive to construct and maintain. Say what? It's a fucking concrete slab. Maybe they mean expensive in land cost.
- black6 8y ago
  Extremely expensive compared to an undeveloped lot...
  - gruez 8y ago
    when your benchmark is $0, everything's expensive by comparison.
- robbrown451 8y ago
  If it is nothing but a concrete slab, the cost is the land. Parking structures reduce the amount of land per car, but then you have to pay for the structure.
Semirhage 8y ago
I’m from Italy, and until I lived in America for a while I’d never understood just how massive the US really is. I lived on two coasts, in two states that were both much larger than my entire country! People like to point to Berlin or Paris as model cities, but they’re population centers in countries that could fit inside Texas without making a splash. I’m not saying that US car culture is entirely healthy, or that it couldn’t benefit from more and better public transport in major cities. I’m always annoyed though, to see these conversations on HN ignore the sheer size of the country in question. Of course it’s spread out, it’s enormous! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-remembering-when-comparing-the-us-to-europe https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-reme...
- microcolonel 8y ago
  For some, the grass is always greener on the other side. It is stylish today to criticize every tradeoff the U.S. has made in order to credibly claim that every habitable square foot of every state is "inhabited", but a lot of it makes perfect sense. There is one piece of public transit which makes a lot of sense in the U.S.: the bus (both local and coach buses), but it is unstylish and so gets no attention. Imagine how much better it would be getting from city to city if the money that went into subsidizing AmTrak (which approximately nobody uses, least of which the lower classes) was available as a grant or credit for every passenger mile on the already-thriving network of American bus carriers (Greyhound, Megabus, and 24 others in the long-distance category alone).
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Amtrak is very popular on certain routes, predominantly in the Northeast Corridor. And, in fact, those routes are being upgraded. But poor people certainly don't use it. They take something like Megabus. And the money Amtrak makes in the northeast covers, though not entirely, a lot of long haul routes that aren't competitive with air.
    - microcolonel 8y ago
      Sure, if AmTrak restructured around a lack of federal subsidies for lines in the red, the Northeast Corridor (possibly incl. Acela Express) would clearly remain in operation. It's just that a major part of the network is composed of routes where the subsidy exceeds the fare, and the fare is still too high for most people to consider. Also, not really sure why the federal government is subsidizing $10-40+ one-way fares (receiving an average of 25 dollars in federal subsidy) as "commuter" service, even in the less-bad Capitol Corridor.
amelius 8y ago
Self-driving cars will solve the whole parking problem.
- captainmuon 8y ago
  Yeah some idiots would just let their car drive around all the time without them. I remember reading an article that they wanted to make a law specifically against this before it happens, but I can't find the link. Now if people can share the autonomous cars, that's a different story.
- amptorn 8y ago
  How? Being self-driving doesn't make a car take up less space.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    A self-driving car will ideally drop you off in front of your commute target and go find a parking space at a convenient location that might even be outside town.
    - antoineMoPa 8y ago
      This would multiply traffic in cities, which would be a terrible alternative.
      - lazyjones 8y ago
        It would add some traffic to/from parking lots but reduce the “find a parking space near my target” traffic.
  - ilaksh 8y ago
    https://grist.org/article/no-parking-self-driving-cars-could-have-a-huge-effect-on-our-cities/ https://grist.org/article/no-parking-self-driving-cars-could...
  - wool_gather 8y ago
mattlondon 8y ago
I always thought it was weird how there is so much parking in the centre of US cities. When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister. There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks like 08:30-17:00 would set you back anywhere from £25 to £50 a day (about the same as half to a full tank of petrol or diesel). Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor of the traffic and paying for fuel Understandably, as a result a lot of people use public transport. Sure its fairly decent in London, but thats only because people use it and pay for it so there are funds to reinvest into making it run effectively. If suddenly the average US driver was looking at paying $100/day to drive to work (or $2000 a month), I am sure that they could handle sitting on a bus for $10/day and pocket the $90 change, while the public transit gets better and better as a result. This is a solvable problem. 1 - https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_road_tube_station_oxford_st_london_england_w1d_2dh_united_kingdom_gcpvj40xp75/?arriving=201807160830&leaving=201807161700 https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_... 2 - https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge
- ryanSrich 8y ago
  A few points: 1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement. 2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations. 3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.
  - mattlondon 8y ago
    Here in the UK, employers offer things like interest free loans for season tickets or buying a folding commuter bike etc. 1+ hour away is fairly common in London, even on public transport. Not only is London itself pretty large, but it has a big catchment area for people coming in for work from elsewhere. Buses can be made safer and cleaner and more comfortable with investment. Would I prefer to drive in my own car in my own space? You bet I would. But the difference in price is not a few dollars, it in the order of £60 a day which is £1,200 a month. Not worth it. That £1.2K would be better spent paying down a mortgage
dawhizkid 8y ago
Personally very excited Travis (former Uber CEO) is CEO of City Storage Systems now to basically future proof antiquated urban real estate like parking or retail.
brudgers 8y ago
I think parking capacity probably reduces to a local scheduling problem [1]. If it does, it reduces to a 3-sat problem and this would mean optimum parking is NP-complete. Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant [2] and when it comes to where a person parks relative to their home the acceptable radius is probably 100m or less...Des Moines is cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and gets storms at the scale of the Great Plains several times a year. The marginal cost of a parking space is low. The heuristic for structured parking has long been $10,000 per space. Over a 30 year building life cycle that's less than $1/day. Private surface parking is a few cents and on street public parking is nothing...and often so is even that expensive structured parking because the $1/day of capital costs makes parking a potentially lucrative business. This means that the most cost effective way to avoid scheduling bottlenecks is with capacity that far exceeds the average rate or median demand. To put it another way, all that parking is what a working system looks like. Sure Des Moines might not need 1.6 million parking spaces -- but it's probably not far from what's necessary to provide required for reasonable livability at the density and geography [3] of Des Moines. Recovering all those parking spaces for development doesn't do a lot for Des Moines. It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower. To put it another way, land use for parking in Des Moines (or other cities) largely reflects an economic equilibrium in the real-estate market. When there's too much, it gets converted to other uses over time...and when regulations are impediments, major local real-estate interests get those regulations relaxed/modified/removed. [4] [1]: The size of the 'local' may vary, but it's much much smaller than Des Moines and difficult even down to the scale of on-street parking for a single urban block. [2]: Based on the heuristic of 1/4 mile reasonable walking radius in urban environments. [3]: Consider that the Des Moines river runs through the city and a parking space on one side of the river is not generally fungible with a parking space on the other side. The river complicates public transit by bottlenecking surface transit with bridges and subsurface transit with tunnels. [4]: Institutions with teams of $600/hr real estate lawyers and fifty year investment horizons.
- al2o3cr 8y ago
  > It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower. is somewhat contradicted by > Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant This is the space constraint the article focuses on: if there's enough surface parking, it pushes destinations far enough apart that you need to move your car to go from one to the other. Re: marginal cost, there are plenty of effects that impose additional capital and/or opportunity cost on converting between parking and not-parking uses - everything from long leases for companies that operate parking (10+ years sometimes) to basic constraints like "putting up a building requires a large chunk of up-front spending". Those effects make "economic equilibrium" slow-to-impossible to reach.
kro39nxkdk 8y ago
American cities have a “citizens are too lazy to walk an extra couple blocks” problem.
MisterTea 8y ago
edit tl;dr there is plenty of parking where it's not needed and too little parking where it is needed. I think the main problem is not the amount of parking but the distribution of parking. I live in NYC and avoid driving around the city as much as possible except off peak and short local runs. The big problem is commercial centers tend to be high density and clustered together. For example, queens boulevard between Forest Hills and Rego Park has dozens of restaurants and shops where the number of parking spots on the block vs. the number of people concentrated on that block is where the problem begins. A restaurant with one or two parking spots in front might have two dozen people people inside including staff requiring at least six parking spots (assuming couples). My neighborhood Ozone Park is in south Queens and live is a part that is a block from the A train. Super convenient location as everything is in walking distance of a few blocks including the train. There is also a school around the block. So every morning dozens of commuters pack the neighborhood looking for parking for the train and then add the teachers and other school staff who only get about two dozen reserved spots and half are blocked by construction. Your driveway is frequently partly blocked and finding street parking during weekdays is brutal until about 7-8PM. So the blocks along the train stations are municipal free-for all parking lots. As you push out into the back areas away from the commercial cacophony there is street parking so long as the neighborhood was built with sanity meaning homes have functional driveways (most don't or can only fit a single car). And there are plenty of those areas spread throughout the city but the parking goes to waste. Then throw in neighborhoods of row houses with no driveways and again, the housing density outweighs the parking. Face it, no planning was done for the automobile in major cities. Parking allotment is abysmal and to make things worse, maximizing the dwelling square footage is what all developers aim for to maximize the value. So there is zero incentive to build in sane parking. This is an example of a nearby 10 apartment home that was built with parking for about 8-10 vehicles if people park front to back and side-by-side underneath the front half: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75.15h,91.16t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-bqQmiu-VhaU5mt2H5TjUQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75... Not exactly a pretty example. Down the block from me a single story ranch with a big back yard was bought by a developer, demolished and three two family homes built with the easy ability to add an illegal basement apartment with a little modding (it was so obvious when we toured them during sale). There used to be more parking on weekends before those homes went in. Now even weekend parking can be tough. And this type of development is happening all over NYC. Single family homes are bought up demolished and replaced with 4+ apartments each of which usually bring one car into the neighborhood. They also build little or no parking in. The requirements for parking are easily cheated with a long driveway that is only practical for one or two cars to use as you can't practically park six cars back to back. No one is building single family homes anymore. Summary: it's a damn mess.
fencepost 8y ago
If anyone in city government is smart Chicago is going to have no real choice but to go against this trend because of its utterly atrocious parking meter deal 10+ years ago - or they're going to have to take that glut of spaces and make them free parking to try to get out of the deal. Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are closed for construction or eliminated completely, the city has to pay the private company for those spaces as if they were being used. Want bike lanes? Don't forget to account for the paying for all those eliminated parking spaces. Pedestrian only areas? See above. Ride sharing cutting into driving? Guess they'll have plenty of empty space to pick up and drop off in - unless there's a way for the parking meter company to charge for that couple of minutes in a parking space. But it's not all bad - the city only has to put up with it until 2083. http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-lease-slow-motion-train-wreck-only-has-65-more-years-to-go/ http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-...
- gok 8y ago
  The alternative was bankruptcy. And as the market for street parking vaporizes over the next couple decades, this may end up being a great deal.
  - fiter 8y ago
    This will still be a sour deal. What a waste of urban space to just leave empty parking spots due to the fees for repurposing them.
    - gok 8y ago
      Presumably as the market for parking goes away the owners of it will find a more profitable use for the space.
      - fencepost 8y ago
        The ones in buildings and lots, sure, or they'll just set prices lower than street parking. The whole thing is still going to hurt the city by making it not worth going into. I know of "destination" specialty stores that have closed because adding an extra $4+ of parking to the cost of going there to shop made it not worthwhile. I personally was part of a group that used to meet for dinner at different restaurants every week, but Chicago restaurants got dropped from choices because an extra $8-10 on a meal gets you a much nicer (or less expensive) meal in the suburbs with free parking.
kosei 8y ago
> In Philadelphia, there are 3.7 times more parking spaces than households Honestly, this number seems reasonable to me, when you consider that people could be parking at a) their home, b) their work, and c) at any number of other places (restaurant, grocery store, mall, etc). Not to mention, each household may have more than one car. It's probably too high in aggregate, but we don't park by average, we park for specific means, and if the lot at the grocery store is full, or at our work, or at home, we consider that to be an inconvenience and want more spots. The only way to change this is to move away from the 1-2 car-per-family model we live in right now.
oneplane 8y ago
Maybe it's just me, but in larger cities, cars seem like an incredibly inefficient and impractical idea to transport people inside those cities. Maybe just dump the cars outside when you want to get in? Or just don't own cars and share them as a stopgap until a better solution is put in place?
- wool_gather 8y ago
  You're absolutely right, and this is the problem. In aggregate, they are horribly inefficient. At the level of the individual, they're generally much much faster and convenient than other options (i.e., public transit), even accounting for traffic. So -- in game theory terms -- many people defect. One of the reasons is frequency. Depending on time of day, a subway or bus may not come for 10 minutes. A car is basically infinite frequency: when you want to go, you go right away. The other is more direct routing. To get to my favorite bookstore, about 5 miles due north, on transit takes an hour because I either have to take the rail into the city center first and transfer (or take one of the most infrequent and slow bus routes in the system). It's maybe 35 minutes by bike or car, as long as it's not rush hour. I don't own a car, but I can't say I wouldn't be tempted some days, if I did.
pentagonpapers 8y ago
All these articles are b* I'm sorry try living in South Philly and get back to me on how much parking there is
Felz 8y ago
We can build over all of the parking lots once driverless cars become a thing, can't we? Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.
- antoineMoPa 8y ago
  Public transport also reduces the amount of congestion in roads that driverless cars can only worsen.
  - Felz 8y ago
    Probably true, but completely missing my point. Buses are inflexible solutions, far from ideal transport. You have to find the bus, abide by its schedule, and the bus can only deliver its passengers sort of near its destination. If the bus isn't near full, it's also very wasteful. A better solution would be on-demand, and could come much closer to the passenger for pickup and dropoff. It would be cheaper to scale as needed. I think that describes driverless cars, and less perfectly Uber/Lyft. Improving congestion is a matter of improving thoroughput, and our society would be better off focusing on ways to pack more driverless cars into less road, or have more roads, or have more road alternatives (point to point electric scooters), or have better traffic routing, than make a bunch of buses and have people drive them around all day. And I don't even need to mention the crushing inflexibility of subways and trains.
jjeaff 8y ago
This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends. Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems. You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.
- DINKDINK 8y ago
  >...averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty: > an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states in its phase space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity
  - haste410 8y ago
    Seems like a useful term to know. Too bad the wikipedia article is too dense to understand.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      Consider editing the Wikipedia page to make the term more approachable.
  - xapata 8y ago
    I'm not sure ergodic is what you're looking for here. Ergodic is like a gas particle in a box. Over time, it'll have been at every position in the box. Non-ergodic is like a house of cards. Eventually, it'll collapse and stay down.
lisper 8y ago
If you think about it, it has to be this way. The whole point of parking is that it has to be available on demand, which means you need to build enough capacity to satisfy peak usage at the destination. If you had full parking utilization, people have to queue to park, and that would defeat the purpose of getting to your destination quickly. You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-private vehicles (which includes things like taxis and Uber). But having fully utilized parking is the worst of all possible worlds.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  It's partly an information availability problem. Parking usage patterns tend to be based around factors other than availability, which leads to more extreme peaks and valleys than are necessary. If people could see what the mall parking lot was like at any given time and decide when to go based on whether parking was likely to be available, you could probably make the lot half the size. You already see this in many places around traffic; people in LA seem to plan their lives around when the freeways are known to be backed up.
gok 8y ago
I wonder what we’ll do with all this space once AVs take over.
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yuhong 8y ago
It would be fun to do the math if every one of the parking spots had EV charging
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
Another problem begging for self-driving cars. Have the car drop you off, then self-drive to an offsite parking, and then return when summoned. This model would also support mobile "gear boxes" where you have activity-focused mobile storage pods of gear (think toolboxes for trade work, or a surfing/beach pod with your beach gear, or a biking/triathlon pod with all your triathlon gear), which I think will be a huge benefit once self-driving hits reality. Rather than have storage units where you can't easily get to your stuff because of the side trip and annoyance of loading/unloading, you have modular storage that can be summoned to a spot and purpose needed. That would reduce storage needs in urban areas as well, so you could further enhance density.
loonyballoonys 8y ago
In the USA, from what I have seen, public transportation is a punishment for being poor.

219 points by caiobegotti 8y ago

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball. Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.

smallnamespace 8y ago
This is just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's. However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem. People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car. Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure. Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished. If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-population-density/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...
- zkms 8y ago
  > don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay? Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered. It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.
  - firstplacelast 8y ago
    This is absolutely correct. NIMBYism has adversely affected more Americans than Russia. Since it follows that NIMBYs are more anti-American than Russia, we MUST put sanctions on their ability to affect their fellow Americans.
    - dang 8y ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- ProfessorLayton 8y ago
  Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit. I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.
randlet 8y ago
It's infuriating to me living in North America (I'm in Canada but it's as bad or worse in the US) watching cities develop this way. Mention this to almost anyone here and you will be met with blank stares. There are countless places that contain many stores that share parking lots that we so huge you still have to drive between them.
- jvagner 8y ago
  Reno is an awesome example of this, and this is true even of the latest developments. It's like developers in Reno have never seen pictures of other cities, even here in America. This problem has been solved time and again... and Reno builds large and small shopping malls and then they're empty and under-utilized, so they build another new one and the results are the same. Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.
erikpukinskis 8y ago
This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations. This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted. Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled. It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century. The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.
- halbritt 8y ago
  Too real.
- narrator 8y ago
  The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S. Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.
  - extradego 8y ago
cmurf 8y ago
A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more. Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in particular as men came home from the war, and women weren't doing as much factory work. Kids wanted out of the house all day long. Cars were many things to people but it was the hyped technology of that era and making everything bigger, including all the available infrastructure was a "good thing". You'd see gas stations on every corner. Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system. One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars. This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!
- dsnuh 8y ago
  I'm not familiar with licensing requirements in other countries, are they more rigorous?
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Here in the UK, you need to take a multiple-choice theory test and a practical driving test. The practical test takes about 40 minutes and is conducted on public roads. The pass rate for both the theory and practical test is about 50%. It's not uncommon for learners to fail the practical test several times. You're not required to have professional instruction but the vast majority of people do, because it's extremely difficult to pass the driving test without it. Most instructors recommend 30 to 40 hours of tuition before attempting the test. Learners who are driving on a provisional license prior to passing their test must be accompanied by someone who has held a full license for at least three years. They must display an L-plate on the front and rear of the vehicle and cannot use motorways (freeways) unless they are accompanied by a licensed instructor. It is my understanding that the British process is relatively straightforward by European standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_the_United_... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/720308/drt-statistics-jan-to-mar-2018.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
kartan 8y ago
Yes. I had the same experience. Visiting Mountain View, I was surprised at how walk hostile is. It took me 10 minutes to just pass one of the buildings surrounded by a huge parking lot and move to the next. To go from Intel offices to the Computer History Museum takes a really long walk cross kilometres of parking space. The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2 Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking. I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.
- dominotw 8y ago
  You can use an electric unicycle to get around easily.
Derived 8y ago
America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the suburbs even if it means a longer commute to the office. I like driving, and I have no problem driving places to get things done...after all, I can only carry so much shopping with me anyway.
- wild_preference 8y ago
  I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Significant sections of a number of US cities are quite walkable: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, parts of Denver, Chicago. As well as smaller cities like Boulder. It's certainly true that newer US cities tend to be more spread out but if city walkability is a priority for you, examples exist.
    - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
      Very, very few cities in America are walkable enough to enable the average household to not own a car without it being a hardship [1]. You can probably count them on one hand. So yes, Denver has a few walkable areas that are nice. But if you can only walk 80% of the time and still have to own a car for the other 20%, which has to sit in a parking spot somewhere all the time, then we're back to the subject of this article. 1. I'm not saying it can't be done, but if you have kids, or aren't able-bodied, or don't want to spend 3x - 5x more time on public transit than you would in a car, or live in an area with extreme weather conditions, or don't want to be weird-sweaty-bike-person all the time, etc, then you need a car in most of America.
Tiktaalik 8y ago
I've heard this referred to as the "cycle of autodependency". This graphic describes it well. https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it. Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."
jhabdas 8y ago
The Bay is the garbage dumb of modern America. I'm sorry that it left av memory. Next time head to Chitown or NYC and absorb some culture.
lazyjones 8y ago
But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US stores, like malls, seem much more convenient for families. What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  > What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built [...] far away from residential areas This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range. > wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.
- UncleEntity 8y ago
  > What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you have a sense for whether the restaurant's patrons are driving from other parts of the city, or from the suburbs?
isoskeles 8y ago
Have you been to many other regions in the US? I live in the Bay Area and one of the few things I love about it is that it's way more "walkable" than other places I've lived in the states, especially the suburbs. Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?
walshemj 8y ago
America has a lot of land and in the developed world you wont get planning permission for residential property with out of street parking
stcredzero 8y ago
I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.
csomar 8y ago
That's because it is cheaper to acquire land than build underground parking. I live in a city that has gone through that transformation. Big parking were converted into malls/supermarkets with multi-floor parking. Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.
badrabbit 8y ago
This is why we have more flooding too. More parking space means less ground to absorb rain water.
8bitsrule 8y ago
Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling. Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  The lack of parking may be an effort to solve a chicken and the egg problem. While some zoning restrictions call for parking per unit, some high traffic areas are calling for less parking per unit. If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest. By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.

burfog 8y ago

It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure, commercial areas don't have households but they still need parking. Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very little room for surges. Business is impacted when the availability of parking isn't 100% reliable.

ebikelaw 8y ago
Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least. Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of transportation mode. https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste-of-half-empty-black-friday-parking-lots/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste...
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day. Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many? I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.

RickJWagner 8y ago

This is good-- it's where those fantastic barn-finds come from.

paulsutter 8y ago

“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk

daviator88 8y ago

It's no wonder Seattle's garages often sit empty, a parking space goes for minimum of $4 per hour

jasonmp85 8y ago
Wow that’s incredibly cheap.
- eatbitseveryday 8y ago
  Hm. Downtown Portland is $2/hr. I would not say $4/hr is 'incredibly cheap'.

nickthemagicman 8y ago

You either pay for parking or get a ticket. It must make incredible amounts of money for all involved.

jaysonelliot 8y ago

Until cities have a better alternative to driving than "use our terrible mass transit in our poorly-designed cities," this will remain a problem. American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it's dangerous. Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000 pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you're riding something that can't be carried into a building with you, it's inconvenient at best to park it outside. Just removing parking from new construction won't solve the problem, it will compound it. People still won't want to get on slow, crowded, uncomfortable buses or packed, unreliable, dirty trains. We'll just get more people driving endlessly around the block looking for parking and polluting the air, more accidents from drivers hitting people in the road, more sprawl as people shun the city so they can drive in the suburbs instead. Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc. Public transit needs a major overhaul, major investment, and a new attitude. It has to be about riders' comfort, convenience, and happiness, not just jamming people into routes as if they were statistics in a planning meeting. New development should be aimed at walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, planned for people first, not cars. All these things have to happen to solve the problem. It won't be easy, but unless we do something like that, we'll be living with the car problem for a very long time to come.

ebikelaw 8y ago
Kind of a weird argument that nobody wants to take the bus or the train because it's too crowded. Very Berra.
- lozenge 8y ago
  It just means there aren't enough bus routes or busses on the route.
  - cozzyd 8y ago

stretchwithme 8y ago

Once automated vehicles take over (eventually), most people will switch to taxis. Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle. So the need to park will be greatly reduced. Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. Parking will be built underground for off peak storage of vehicles, allowing the repurposing of surface parking spots. Maybe agricultural robots will make use of them. Cities will get quieter.

cozzyd 8y ago
Yeah taxis don't have sufficient capacity. You'd just double the cars on the roads. Autonomous buses on the other hand could make a dent (since the primary cost of buses in rich countries is labor).
- 55873445216111 8y ago
  I'm curious about this. How do you arrive at the conclusion that autonomous taxi adoption results in a doubling of the number of cars? Do you have a link?
  - cozzyd 8y ago
    Because order half the time they'll be empty driving to their next pickup. The increase in ride-sharing has already greatly increased congestion: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180316/issue01/180319945/whats-making-traffic-worse-in-chicago-signs-point-to-uber-lyft http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180316/issue01/1803...
    - stretchwithme 8y ago
      But in the most popular areas, many cars get multiple riders and find their next rides in the same area. And out in the boonies, some people will keep their personal cars, as it will take longer to get a ride. Also, the average car size will shrink. Not only will we lose the driver's seat, but peak demand as people go to work may be met with even smaller one-seat cars. You won't need a car that can handle your worst-case scenario for most of the time. Bigger cars will still be available, of course, because people do like to travel with their friends and family whenever possible. All in all, it's a lot more likely that that most seats will be filled.

nlawalker 8y ago

>> Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception persists that there’s “not enough parking.” I imagine most people will perceive that there's not enough parking unless there's an open spot right out front of where they're going when they get there. Services that facilitate parking further away from your destination might help.

21 8y ago

> Parking is also extremely expensive to construct and maintain. Say what? It's a fucking concrete slab. Maybe they mean expensive in land cost.

black6 8y ago
Extremely expensive compared to an undeveloped lot...
- gruez 8y ago
  when your benchmark is $0, everything's expensive by comparison.
robbrown451 8y ago
If it is nothing but a concrete slab, the cost is the land. Parking structures reduce the amount of land per car, but then you have to pay for the structure.

Semirhage 8y ago

I’m from Italy, and until I lived in America for a while I’d never understood just how massive the US really is. I lived on two coasts, in two states that were both much larger than my entire country! People like to point to Berlin or Paris as model cities, but they’re population centers in countries that could fit inside Texas without making a splash. I’m not saying that US car culture is entirely healthy, or that it couldn’t benefit from more and better public transport in major cities. I’m always annoyed though, to see these conversations on HN ignore the sheer size of the country in question. Of course it’s spread out, it’s enormous! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-remembering-when-comparing-the-us-to-europe https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-reme...

microcolonel 8y ago
For some, the grass is always greener on the other side. It is stylish today to criticize every tradeoff the U.S. has made in order to credibly claim that every habitable square foot of every state is "inhabited", but a lot of it makes perfect sense. There is one piece of public transit which makes a lot of sense in the U.S.: the bus (both local and coach buses), but it is unstylish and so gets no attention. Imagine how much better it would be getting from city to city if the money that went into subsidizing AmTrak (which approximately nobody uses, least of which the lower classes) was available as a grant or credit for every passenger mile on the already-thriving network of American bus carriers (Greyhound, Megabus, and 24 others in the long-distance category alone).
- ghaff 8y ago
  Amtrak is very popular on certain routes, predominantly in the Northeast Corridor. And, in fact, those routes are being upgraded. But poor people certainly don't use it. They take something like Megabus. And the money Amtrak makes in the northeast covers, though not entirely, a lot of long haul routes that aren't competitive with air.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    Sure, if AmTrak restructured around a lack of federal subsidies for lines in the red, the Northeast Corridor (possibly incl. Acela Express) would clearly remain in operation. It's just that a major part of the network is composed of routes where the subsidy exceeds the fare, and the fare is still too high for most people to consider. Also, not really sure why the federal government is subsidizing $10-40+ one-way fares (receiving an average of 25 dollars in federal subsidy) as "commuter" service, even in the less-bad Capitol Corridor.

amelius 8y ago

Self-driving cars will solve the whole parking problem.

captainmuon 8y ago
Yeah some idiots would just let their car drive around all the time without them. I remember reading an article that they wanted to make a law specifically against this before it happens, but I can't find the link. Now if people can share the autonomous cars, that's a different story.
amptorn 8y ago
How? Being self-driving doesn't make a car take up less space.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  A self-driving car will ideally drop you off in front of your commute target and go find a parking space at a convenient location that might even be outside town.
  - antoineMoPa 8y ago
    This would multiply traffic in cities, which would be a terrible alternative.
    - lazyjones 8y ago
      It would add some traffic to/from parking lots but reduce the “find a parking space near my target” traffic.
- ilaksh 8y ago
  https://grist.org/article/no-parking-self-driving-cars-could-have-a-huge-effect-on-our-cities/ https://grist.org/article/no-parking-self-driving-cars-could...
- wool_gather 8y ago

mattlondon 8y ago

I always thought it was weird how there is so much parking in the centre of US cities. When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister. There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks like 08:30-17:00 would set you back anywhere from £25 to £50 a day (about the same as half to a full tank of petrol or diesel). Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor of the traffic and paying for fuel Understandably, as a result a lot of people use public transport. Sure its fairly decent in London, but thats only because people use it and pay for it so there are funds to reinvest into making it run effectively. If suddenly the average US driver was looking at paying $100/day to drive to work (or $2000 a month), I am sure that they could handle sitting on a bus for $10/day and pocket the $90 change, while the public transit gets better and better as a result. This is a solvable problem. 1 - https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_road_tube_station_oxford_st_london_england_w1d_2dh_united_kingdom_gcpvj40xp75/?arriving=201807160830&leaving=201807161700 https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_... 2 - https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge

ryanSrich 8y ago
A few points: 1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement. 2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations. 3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.
- mattlondon 8y ago
  Here in the UK, employers offer things like interest free loans for season tickets or buying a folding commuter bike etc. 1+ hour away is fairly common in London, even on public transport. Not only is London itself pretty large, but it has a big catchment area for people coming in for work from elsewhere. Buses can be made safer and cleaner and more comfortable with investment. Would I prefer to drive in my own car in my own space? You bet I would. But the difference in price is not a few dollars, it in the order of £60 a day which is £1,200 a month. Not worth it. That £1.2K would be better spent paying down a mortgage

dawhizkid 8y ago

Personally very excited Travis (former Uber CEO) is CEO of City Storage Systems now to basically future proof antiquated urban real estate like parking or retail.

brudgers 8y ago

I think parking capacity probably reduces to a local scheduling problem [1]. If it does, it reduces to a 3-sat problem and this would mean optimum parking is NP-complete. Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant [2] and when it comes to where a person parks relative to their home the acceptable radius is probably 100m or less...Des Moines is cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and gets storms at the scale of the Great Plains several times a year. The marginal cost of a parking space is low. The heuristic for structured parking has long been $10,000 per space. Over a 30 year building life cycle that's less than $1/day. Private surface parking is a few cents and on street public parking is nothing...and often so is even that expensive structured parking because the $1/day of capital costs makes parking a potentially lucrative business. This means that the most cost effective way to avoid scheduling bottlenecks is with capacity that far exceeds the average rate or median demand. To put it another way, all that parking is what a working system looks like. Sure Des Moines might not need 1.6 million parking spaces -- but it's probably not far from what's necessary to provide required for reasonable livability at the density and geography [3] of Des Moines. Recovering all those parking spaces for development doesn't do a lot for Des Moines. It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower. To put it another way, land use for parking in Des Moines (or other cities) largely reflects an economic equilibrium in the real-estate market. When there's too much, it gets converted to other uses over time...and when regulations are impediments, major local real-estate interests get those regulations relaxed/modified/removed. [4] [1]: The size of the 'local' may vary, but it's much much smaller than Des Moines and difficult even down to the scale of on-street parking for a single urban block. [2]: Based on the heuristic of 1/4 mile reasonable walking radius in urban environments. [3]: Consider that the Des Moines river runs through the city and a parking space on one side of the river is not generally fungible with a parking space on the other side. The river complicates public transit by bottlenecking surface transit with bridges and subsurface transit with tunnels. [4]: Institutions with teams of $600/hr real estate lawyers and fifty year investment horizons.

al2o3cr 8y ago
> It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower. is somewhat contradicted by > Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant This is the space constraint the article focuses on: if there's enough surface parking, it pushes destinations far enough apart that you need to move your car to go from one to the other. Re: marginal cost, there are plenty of effects that impose additional capital and/or opportunity cost on converting between parking and not-parking uses - everything from long leases for companies that operate parking (10+ years sometimes) to basic constraints like "putting up a building requires a large chunk of up-front spending". Those effects make "economic equilibrium" slow-to-impossible to reach.

kro39nxkdk 8y ago

American cities have a “citizens are too lazy to walk an extra couple blocks” problem.

MisterTea 8y ago

edit tl;dr there is plenty of parking where it's not needed and too little parking where it is needed. I think the main problem is not the amount of parking but the distribution of parking. I live in NYC and avoid driving around the city as much as possible except off peak and short local runs. The big problem is commercial centers tend to be high density and clustered together. For example, queens boulevard between Forest Hills and Rego Park has dozens of restaurants and shops where the number of parking spots on the block vs. the number of people concentrated on that block is where the problem begins. A restaurant with one or two parking spots in front might have two dozen people people inside including staff requiring at least six parking spots (assuming couples). My neighborhood Ozone Park is in south Queens and live is a part that is a block from the A train. Super convenient location as everything is in walking distance of a few blocks including the train. There is also a school around the block. So every morning dozens of commuters pack the neighborhood looking for parking for the train and then add the teachers and other school staff who only get about two dozen reserved spots and half are blocked by construction. Your driveway is frequently partly blocked and finding street parking during weekdays is brutal until about 7-8PM. So the blocks along the train stations are municipal free-for all parking lots. As you push out into the back areas away from the commercial cacophony there is street parking so long as the neighborhood was built with sanity meaning homes have functional driveways (most don't or can only fit a single car). And there are plenty of those areas spread throughout the city but the parking goes to waste. Then throw in neighborhoods of row houses with no driveways and again, the housing density outweighs the parking. Face it, no planning was done for the automobile in major cities. Parking allotment is abysmal and to make things worse, maximizing the dwelling square footage is what all developers aim for to maximize the value. So there is zero incentive to build in sane parking. This is an example of a nearby 10 apartment home that was built with parking for about 8-10 vehicles if people park front to back and side-by-side underneath the front half: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75.15h,91.16t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-bqQmiu-VhaU5mt2H5TjUQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75... Not exactly a pretty example. Down the block from me a single story ranch with a big back yard was bought by a developer, demolished and three two family homes built with the easy ability to add an illegal basement apartment with a little modding (it was so obvious when we toured them during sale). There used to be more parking on weekends before those homes went in. Now even weekend parking can be tough. And this type of development is happening all over NYC. Single family homes are bought up demolished and replaced with 4+ apartments each of which usually bring one car into the neighborhood. They also build little or no parking in. The requirements for parking are easily cheated with a long driveway that is only practical for one or two cars to use as you can't practically park six cars back to back. No one is building single family homes anymore. Summary: it's a damn mess.

fencepost 8y ago

If anyone in city government is smart Chicago is going to have no real choice but to go against this trend because of its utterly atrocious parking meter deal 10+ years ago - or they're going to have to take that glut of spaces and make them free parking to try to get out of the deal. Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are closed for construction or eliminated completely, the city has to pay the private company for those spaces as if they were being used. Want bike lanes? Don't forget to account for the paying for all those eliminated parking spaces. Pedestrian only areas? See above. Ride sharing cutting into driving? Guess they'll have plenty of empty space to pick up and drop off in - unless there's a way for the parking meter company to charge for that couple of minutes in a parking space. But it's not all bad - the city only has to put up with it until 2083. http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-lease-slow-motion-train-wreck-only-has-65-more-years-to-go/ http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-...

gok 8y ago
The alternative was bankruptcy. And as the market for street parking vaporizes over the next couple decades, this may end up being a great deal.
- fiter 8y ago
  This will still be a sour deal. What a waste of urban space to just leave empty parking spots due to the fees for repurposing them.
  - gok 8y ago
    Presumably as the market for parking goes away the owners of it will find a more profitable use for the space.
    - fencepost 8y ago
      The ones in buildings and lots, sure, or they'll just set prices lower than street parking. The whole thing is still going to hurt the city by making it not worth going into. I know of "destination" specialty stores that have closed because adding an extra $4+ of parking to the cost of going there to shop made it not worthwhile. I personally was part of a group that used to meet for dinner at different restaurants every week, but Chicago restaurants got dropped from choices because an extra $8-10 on a meal gets you a much nicer (or less expensive) meal in the suburbs with free parking.

kosei 8y ago

> In Philadelphia, there are 3.7 times more parking spaces than households Honestly, this number seems reasonable to me, when you consider that people could be parking at a) their home, b) their work, and c) at any number of other places (restaurant, grocery store, mall, etc). Not to mention, each household may have more than one car. It's probably too high in aggregate, but we don't park by average, we park for specific means, and if the lot at the grocery store is full, or at our work, or at home, we consider that to be an inconvenience and want more spots. The only way to change this is to move away from the 1-2 car-per-family model we live in right now.

oneplane 8y ago

Maybe it's just me, but in larger cities, cars seem like an incredibly inefficient and impractical idea to transport people inside those cities. Maybe just dump the cars outside when you want to get in? Or just don't own cars and share them as a stopgap until a better solution is put in place?

wool_gather 8y ago
You're absolutely right, and this is the problem. In aggregate, they are horribly inefficient. At the level of the individual, they're generally much much faster and convenient than other options (i.e., public transit), even accounting for traffic. So -- in game theory terms -- many people defect. One of the reasons is frequency. Depending on time of day, a subway or bus may not come for 10 minutes. A car is basically infinite frequency: when you want to go, you go right away. The other is more direct routing. To get to my favorite bookstore, about 5 miles due north, on transit takes an hour because I either have to take the rail into the city center first and transfer (or take one of the most infrequent and slow bus routes in the system). It's maybe 35 minutes by bike or car, as long as it's not rush hour. I don't own a car, but I can't say I wouldn't be tempted some days, if I did.

pentagonpapers 8y ago

All these articles are b* I'm sorry try living in South Philly and get back to me on how much parking there is

Felz 8y ago

We can build over all of the parking lots once driverless cars become a thing, can't we? Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.

antoineMoPa 8y ago
Public transport also reduces the amount of congestion in roads that driverless cars can only worsen.
- Felz 8y ago
  Probably true, but completely missing my point. Buses are inflexible solutions, far from ideal transport. You have to find the bus, abide by its schedule, and the bus can only deliver its passengers sort of near its destination. If the bus isn't near full, it's also very wasteful. A better solution would be on-demand, and could come much closer to the passenger for pickup and dropoff. It would be cheaper to scale as needed. I think that describes driverless cars, and less perfectly Uber/Lyft. Improving congestion is a matter of improving thoroughput, and our society would be better off focusing on ways to pack more driverless cars into less road, or have more roads, or have more road alternatives (point to point electric scooters), or have better traffic routing, than make a bunch of buses and have people drive them around all day. And I don't even need to mention the crushing inflexibility of subways and trains.

jjeaff 8y ago

This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends. Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems. You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.

DINKDINK 8y ago
>...averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty: > an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states in its phase space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity
- haste410 8y ago
  Seems like a useful term to know. Too bad the wikipedia article is too dense to understand.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    Consider editing the Wikipedia page to make the term more approachable.
- xapata 8y ago
  I'm not sure ergodic is what you're looking for here. Ergodic is like a gas particle in a box. Over time, it'll have been at every position in the box. Non-ergodic is like a house of cards. Eventually, it'll collapse and stay down.

lisper 8y ago

If you think about it, it has to be this way. The whole point of parking is that it has to be available on demand, which means you need to build enough capacity to satisfy peak usage at the destination. If you had full parking utilization, people have to queue to park, and that would defeat the purpose of getting to your destination quickly. You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-private vehicles (which includes things like taxis and Uber). But having fully utilized parking is the worst of all possible worlds.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
It's partly an information availability problem. Parking usage patterns tend to be based around factors other than availability, which leads to more extreme peaks and valleys than are necessary. If people could see what the mall parking lot was like at any given time and decide when to go based on whether parking was likely to be available, you could probably make the lot half the size. You already see this in many places around traffic; people in LA seem to plan their lives around when the freeways are known to be backed up.

gok 8y ago

I wonder what we’ll do with all this space once AVs take over.

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yuhong 8y ago

It would be fun to do the math if every one of the parking spots had EV charging

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

Another problem begging for self-driving cars. Have the car drop you off, then self-drive to an offsite parking, and then return when summoned. This model would also support mobile "gear boxes" where you have activity-focused mobile storage pods of gear (think toolboxes for trade work, or a surfing/beach pod with your beach gear, or a biking/triathlon pod with all your triathlon gear), which I think will be a huge benefit once self-driving hits reality. Rather than have storage units where you can't easily get to your stuff because of the side trip and annoyance of loading/unloading, you have modular storage that can be summoned to a spot and purpose needed. That would reduce storage needs in urban areas as well, so you could further enhance density.

loonyballoonys 8y ago

In the USA, from what I have seen, public transportation is a punishment for being poor.