3 ms·

When I moved to LA, I did the following calculation. Average number of cars per person, 2/3 x Number of people in greater LA area, 16M = 10M. 10M cars x averag

by titzer 5y ago

When I moved to LA, I did the following calculation. Average number of cars per person, 2/3 x Number of people in greater LA area, 16M = 10M. 10M cars x average parking spot is 7ft x 15, 105 sq ft = 1 billion sq ft. 1 billion sq ft to square miles = 36 square miles. That's a square 6 miles on a side. Just to park the cars once. There is at least 3x that number of spots in the city. A hundred square miles of parking. No kidding. Also, the city of LA maintains 5000+ miles of street parking. The scale is mind boggling. And the cost is astronomical. The cost of real estate is estimated at $2.7 million per acre. Those hundred square miles are worth close to $200 billion.

newyankee 5y ago
Someone had calculated that the urban sprawl king city of Houston was 40% parking space or something
- duskwuff 5y ago
  I have to wonder how much of the city overall is used for cars -- roads, highways, and the "buffer" land surrounding them (like the land in and around a highway interchange); parking lots and their access streets; businesses dedicated to servicing cars, like gas stations... It's probably a lot.
- Fricken 5y ago
  Houston leads the USA and, and I would assume the world in parking, with an estimated 30 parking spaces per resident. Office parking lots in Houston during work hours are, on average, 30% empty.
jjoonathan 5y ago
Speaking of real estate, does anyone have data on the impact of personal range on the ability of land owners to extract rent? The feeling I get from sampling shopping experiences at various levels of density is that higher density means higher rent and higher prices. Cars are enormously wasteful in a physics sense, but in an economic sense they do wonders to commoditize our complements, and I fear that getting rid of high-range infrastructure would take us out of the frying pan and into the fire.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Density and rent are definitely correlated, but I think the causation mostly works the other way: in areas with high value (high rent), people will build more densely to take advantage of the high-value location.
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    That's how density increases naturally due to market forces, but we are talking about enacting policy to directly spur increased density and what its effects will be. I would expect the policy to create lots of value, but because of the way land ownership works, I would expect most, all, or more than all of that created value to accrue to the people who own the correct land. More importantly, I would expect it to bleed away from those who don't. Shops away from Main St would be screwed, while the new lovely walkable storefronts would have $5 coffee and $15 sandwiches and the apartments within walking distance would have $5000/mo rent. Those massive flows of money wouldn't go to shop owners or workers or maintaining the infrastructure (see: NY, SF), the money would go into the pocket of whoever owned the land, because our policy choices would have just gone towards ensuring that owning the correct land was all that mattered. It just seems crazy to me how eager people are to build an economic steamroller and then throw themselves in front of it. Fight to commoditize your complement, don't fight to help your complement commoditize you!

by titzer 5y ago

newyankee 5y ago

Someone had calculated that the urban sprawl king city of Houston was 40% parking space or something

duskwuff 5y ago
I have to wonder how much of the city overall is used for cars -- roads, highways, and the "buffer" land surrounding them (like the land in and around a highway interchange); parking lots and their access streets; businesses dedicated to servicing cars, like gas stations... It's probably a lot.
Fricken 5y ago
Houston leads the USA and, and I would assume the world in parking, with an estimated 30 parking spaces per resident. Office parking lots in Houston during work hours are, on average, 30% empty.

jjoonathan 5y ago

Speaking of real estate, does anyone have data on the impact of personal range on the ability of land owners to extract rent? The feeling I get from sampling shopping experiences at various levels of density is that higher density means higher rent and higher prices. Cars are enormously wasteful in a physics sense, but in an economic sense they do wonders to commoditize our complements, and I fear that getting rid of high-range infrastructure would take us out of the frying pan and into the fire.

HPsquared 5y ago
Density and rent are definitely correlated, but I think the causation mostly works the other way: in areas with high value (high rent), people will build more densely to take advantage of the high-value location.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  That's how density increases naturally due to market forces, but we are talking about enacting policy to directly spur increased density and what its effects will be. I would expect the policy to create lots of value, but because of the way land ownership works, I would expect most, all, or more than all of that created value to accrue to the people who own the correct land. More importantly, I would expect it to bleed away from those who don't. Shops away from Main St would be screwed, while the new lovely walkable storefronts would have $5 coffee and $15 sandwiches and the apartments within walking distance would have $5000/mo rent. Those massive flows of money wouldn't go to shop owners or workers or maintaining the infrastructure (see: NY, SF), the money would go into the pocket of whoever owned the land, because our policy choices would have just gone towards ensuring that owning the correct land was all that mattered. It just seems crazy to me how eager people are to build an economic steamroller and then throw themselves in front of it. Fight to commoditize your complement, don't fight to help your complement commoditize you!