19 ms·

To stop building heat islands, stop overbuilding parking lots

180 points by jseliger 5y ago

aaron695 5y ago
Proven 5y ago
throwawaysea 5y ago
No thanks. Parking lots are necessary to support driving, which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to travel. This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs. This article also makes vague claims of causation, and tries really hard to link the presence of parking lots to the PNW heat wave without any statistical rigor. It also then makes a misleading claim about the likelihood of increasing frequency of heat waves. The World Weather Attribution project’s own paper noted that the recent PNW heat wave would have have been a record breaking event even without climate change, and noted it as a 1 in 1000 years event. Finally, the article seems to completely ignore the trivial solution of simply putting some shade above a parking lot. It doesn’t have to be trees - it can be reflective tarp held up by poles or a low absorption roof on a parking garage.
- warning26 5y ago
  > No thanks. Parking lots are necessary to support driving, which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to travel. This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs. Driving is only the fastest and most convenient way to travel when you're the only one driving. In tech terms, it doesn't scale. Once you get to a certain point, you're allocating more space to wide roads, interchanges, and parking lots than to the places people are actually going.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    Isn’t this the same as claiming that “driving is not the fastest mode when the city is poorly governed”? If a city is not overbuilt and overpopulated to the point where the road infrastructure is overwhelmed, then driving works really well. For the vast majority of cities, there isn’t a conceivable point where you’re dedicating more spaces to roads/lots than destinations. But even if that were the case, I have to ask “so what”. If the people living there have fast access to the things they want to do and like it, and find the benefits to be worth the trade offs, then I don’t see the problem. It feels to me like the complaints are mostly from a very active and vocal urbanist activist crowd rather than residents at large.
    - baconmania 5y ago
      Charitably, this is a goofy take. Less charitably, your reference to a "vocal urbanist activist crowd" suggests that you're leaning more on partisan talking points than evidence. More to the point, here's where this argument breaks down: > If a city is not overbuilt and overpopulated to the point where the road infrastructure is overwhelmed Given current demographic trends within the United States, major cities are guaranteed to see population growth beyond what current American public infrastructure can sustain. Compounding this problem is the fact that there's significant overlap between the segment of the population which thinks that driving is a sacred right and folks who think that spending public money on efficient public transit is unacceptable. I enjoy driving. It doesn't work for major cities. And those same cities are inevitably going to get denser if trends continue. Everyone driving his or her own car to their job (or to "the things they want to do") in the name of personal convenience is not the answer.
      - klabb3 5y ago
        > Given current demographic trends within the United States, major cities are guaranteed to see population growth beyond what current American public infrastructure can sustain. Not speaking for parent but the typical response would be "but then people should stop moving there", to which I reply that any utopia can sound good if you disregard people's incentives, desires and needs. Let me try: communism is in fact great, it's just that every time the people at the top end up corrupt for unrelated reasons.
- wahern 5y ago
  The article is about building parking lots that are unnecessarily large (overbuilding) due to regulatory mandates, rather than building too many parking lots. This argument has little to do with a war on cars, and scholars (including conservative, car-agnostic scholars) had been making it long before zoning became yet another culture war battleground.
- motorist_hacker 5y ago
- vkou 5y ago
  > This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs. The only reason driving is convenient is because you make no consideration for your externalities. Noise, killing 38,000 people a year in crashes, 400 billion/year on road construction and maintenance, pollution killing people who live near highways, trillion-dollar imperial adventures to secure foreign oil, city designs that are absolutely unlivable without a car that costs ~$3,500/year to own and maintain...
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    Those externalities are minor compared to the massive utility we derive from being able to travel point to point at high speeds on our own schedule. In my opinion the reverse of what you say is true - it is fashionable for urbanists to claim these externalities are big when it is clear the time saved across the hundreds of millions who drive in the US alone is much larger in magnitude. The numbers you quote aren’t very meaningful without context. For example, 38000 road deaths doesn’t seem like much when you consider that there is only ~1 death for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled - and that number is going to keep falling as safety tech becomes more standardized. I also simply can’t take a claim like “city designs that are absolutely unlivable” seriously. Plenty of people live and thrive in car centric cities just fine, so this is clearly hyperbole.
    - wilgertvelinga 5y ago
      It is actually possible to be able to travel point to point on your own schedule in the same small amount of time without all those externalities. See Dutch cities like Utrecht and Amsterdam. Where everything is a bike ride away.
      - throwawaysea 5y ago
        As someone who has spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, this is simply not true. “Everything” is not a bike ride away. You’re equating a severely limited life to one with a lot more access and freedom to chose from more than what is just immediately nearby. It’s simply not the same thing. I’m glad for the people who are content with such a set up, but it’s not for everyone. For me, I found Amsterdam tremendously boring after a short time because of the relatively limited choice of activities compared to a car-centric US cities where intraday travel over longer distances is trivial. I would also say that the claim that you can travel in the “same small amount of time” is factually incorrect for other reasons. A one mile bike ride is simply not going to be faster than a 1 mile drive unless you’re in a city where they have overbuilt or have tremendously lagging driving infrastructure. I can only see the two being approximately the same for very short trips.
- rektide 5y ago
  > which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to scorch the earth. there, fixed it for you.
- prawn 5y ago
  There's a shopping centre carpark here in South Australia where the shade structures are solar panels. Useful for customers in rain or heat, and obviously practical beyond that. You can see it here, plus the panels on the shopping centre also. https://binged.it/3nIyoRV https://binged.it/3nIyoRV (Bing, since Google Maps has old imagery)
  - andylynch 5y ago
    Looking around that map it’s surprising to see just how many buildings of all sizes have solar panels fitted. Impressive!
    - prawn 5y ago
      In that suburb, 41% of residential properties have solar. In my area (a couple of kilometres away) it's about 45%. The payback period is very favourable even without a reduction in feed-in tariffs, last I checked. So the hold-outs might include people expecting to sell their house within a few years, renters, etc. Data from: https://pv-map.apvi.org.au/historical#10/-34.9043/138.6463 https://pv-map.apvi.org.au/historical#10/-34.9043/138.6463 And it should be even more attractive for commercial properties operating and running A/C or heating during peak sunlight time.
- noahtallen 5y ago
  Firstly, I think you are mistaken about heat. It is objectively true that cities are hotter places to live in general, disregarding climate change. This is partly due to the large amount of materials which absorb heat from the sun, such as black asphalt in massive parking lots. It makes cities less pleasant, for sure. I also don’t think you understand the “war on driving”… the point is that you have less freedom in a car dependent world. You can’t conveniently choose to walk to the grocery store a few blocks away when there are 6 lane roads which pay no respect to pedestrians. You can’t choose to take a train to a concert, since passenger trains are rarer and rarer. You have fewer choices and less freedom if the only convenient choice is a car. And what if you don’t have or can’t get a car? Your mobility is extremely limited. The “war on driving” is all about creating more choices and freedom for transit. It’s not saying all cars should be outlawed. It’s saying that the bus or train should be just as convenient as driving in a city, and that biking and cycling within a mile or two of home should be even more convenient than driving. And, most importantly for you, in a city where everyone has many transit choices, driving is much more pleasant. With fewer people driving cars for trips that don’t really need them, there will be less traffic and less need for massive roads which are dangerous even for drivers. This video is very illuminating: https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k In fact, I’d recommend watching even more videos on that channel to really understand why having more alternatives to cars is a good thing.
- baq 5y ago
  I own two large cars to ferry my kids around the city and have enough time to get anything else done in a day. I hate that I need a car to do that and a backup in case one breaks down. I’d rather not have any cars and be able to use public transit. Alas, everybody has a car, so public transit is crap, because not enough people care. This causes a feedback loop, which in extreme cases in USA creates neighborhoods you can’t walk out of: I’ve been to a place literally surrounded by highways. The only way to leave was by car.
stephen_g 5y ago
This article was better than I expected, since I misinterpreted the title as if it meant building over car-parks (i.e. putting buildings over them with the parking underneath), which is a good idea! The amount of surface parking in the US does always astound me when I see photos and videos of US cities... The country I live in isn't especially short on space (Australia) but land is expensive in cities so car parks are usually either pretty small, or they're multi-story or under the building (either ground floor parking with the building above, or underground parking under the building). Just seems like such a waste of space to have these massive surface car-parks. Doing it like it's done in Australia has the advantage of things being a bit closer together, which is better for walking between properties or just walking/cycling in general. But the interesting thing is that surface parking seems like it used to be a lot more common here from what I remember from my childhood, and development and zoning laws seem to have encouraged what were car parks to be re-developed into much more space efficient use. So it is possible - kind of like The Netherlands and cycling - I wish my city and cities in my country were more like that, but they're better now than Amsterdam was in the 1970s, and slowly going in the right direction. The change is possible.
- prawn 5y ago
  There's a new Bunnings near me where the entire building footprint (including outdoor, etc) is above the ground-level carpark. Once in the building or garden centre, there's every impression you're at ground level because the experience is like every other Bunnings, but without exposure to the elements. Then there are solar panels on the roof. The total footprint as a result is far, far smaller than other large Bunnings buildings in the state.
  - waste_monk 5y ago
    Normal Bunnings locations have a drive-thru area for people picking up bulk or oversized goods, and there would have to be a cargo dock to actually get stuff into the store - how is this handled at your location?
    - prawn 5y ago
d--b 5y ago
The new trend in France is car parks covered by solar panels. It provides shades for the cars and deflect the excess heat back to the sky.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Solar panels are not reflective
  - mirashii 5y ago
    Solar panels have an albedo of ~0.3. Asphalt around ~0.05. That makes it 6x better in terms of heat reflected back right out the gate. There are many other, more complicated factors that make this even better in practice.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    No, they absorb the sunlight and turn it into electricity.
    - baq 5y ago
      But because they absorb sunlight, they get hot. Basic thermodynamics. Still better than asphalt.
      - frosted-flakes 5y ago
        To a point, because 100%-efficient panels don't exist. If they did, then my naive understanding is that they wouldn't get hot.
        starbase 5y ago
        Perfectly black and doesn't get hot in the sun. I love it.
        baq 5y ago
        again, thermodynamics: > The maximum theoretical efficiency calculated is 86.8% for a stack of an infinite number of cells, using the incoming concentrated sunlight radiation. When the incoming radiation comes only from an area of the sky the size of the sun, the efficiency limit drops to 68.7%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Thermodynamic_efficiency_limit_and_infinite-stack_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Thermody...
adrianN 5y ago
I don't understand why cities mandate so much surface parking. It makes the city worse for everyone, including drivers. Why not have the parking under buildings? Sure it's a bit more expensive to build, but saves so much space! And the cars don't sit out in the sun while you shop. Maybe it would be best if there were no parking mandates at all and cities let the market figure out the right amount of parking space.
- kube-system 5y ago
  I’m not aware of any US cities that mandate surface parking. It is normally a denoted in a number of spaces per some estimate of what would be needed. The spaces can be configured however. Developers choose surface lots when the cost of land is less than the cost of a garage.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Oh that makes a lot of sense. Then perhaps the cost of land is just too low in US cities? How are parking lots taxed?
    - kube-system 5y ago
      They’re taxed as many different ways as there are cities. The main factor is the space available and the cost of the land when the parking was built. Density, land value, and taxes on that land tend to move together. Huge surface lots are most common in the sprawling parts of the US that were developed post-automobile: particularly suburbs and sprawling western cities. Some of that land that is now part of a city, wasn’t, when it was developed. It was cheap land outside of a city at the time.
    - midasuni 5y ago
      It’s crazy there are surface lots in Manhattan.
    - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
      > Then perhaps the cost of land is just too low in US cities? Land generally is cheap in the USA because the USA is pretty damn big. Europeans often don't think about how large the USA is. California alone is larger than every European country except Sweden, Spain, France, and Ukraine, and Texas is bigger than any of those. We have 10 states that are each bigger than the UK on their own. It's why nobody in the USA takes a train anywhere. Even with a 200 mph train, it would take 15 hours to cross the country, and that's assuming no stops. In some states, you could ride that train for 3 hours in a straight line and not even leave the state.
richardfey 5y ago
Seriously, who will own a car 20 years from now?
- causi 5y ago
  Not everybody wants to live in a hive city where you can hear your neighbors. I'm all for making cities as walkable as they can be, even ban cars from them. Just don't ever make me set foot in one again.
  - klabb3 5y ago
    Then your choices would be rural, which I can understand, and car-centric suburbia, which seems like the worst compromise to me.. This is obviously subjective though.
    - causi 5y ago
      Indeed. Suburbia only exists because of people like me who'd prefer to live rurally but can't make a living there. I can't have fifty acres of woods but I can have trees and grass and birds.
      - timeon 5y ago
        And huge amount of public infrastructure.
        causi 5y ago
        If my taxes and utility bills are not covering the cost then they should be adjusted to match.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    You don't hear your neighbors in modern buildings. But of course we won't replace all buildings in the next twenty years.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
patates 5y ago
I'm all for reducing parking lots generally, I just can't realistically expect that many others feel like I do. As a temporary solution, can't they start planting trees in the parking lots? Just give up a single lot for every N lots, and turn it into a garden with a tree that can provide a lot of shade and is low-maintenance.
- automatic6131 5y ago
  This is answered in the article
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Better, instead of solid pavement, use perforated blocks that grass can grow up through, and rain seep through. That also eliminates much of the drainage problem.
rehamelbasha 5y ago
Huge parking lots? try finding a place to park in Portland during timbers game good luck...
- bongoman37 5y ago
bsza 5y ago
How about: stop building parking lots altogether and replace the ones we already built with things that are actually useful. Cars are nothing but a huge waste of space.
- aronpye 5y ago
  - bsza 5y ago
    I have used public transport since I was 14. I'm twice that age now. I never needed a car to get anywhere.
    - em-bee 5y ago
      i grew up in europe without a car. when i moved to san diego i thought, that's it, i'll finally have to learn how to drive. but i didn't. i made sure that i lived somewhere with a direct bus to work and it turned out to be fine. same in los angeles later. also auckland, nz. with that experience i concluded that i won't need a car, ever. it is all about arranging how you live.
      - ulimn 5y ago
        Let's inform the other few billions of humans on Earth to move closer to bus stops. Some people act so entitled... Not everyone has the same circumstances and infrastructure around them. Go to a poor part of eastern Europe. My mother has 2 buses to the nearest city in an entire day... (Not mentioning it takes like 5-6x more time.)
        avianlyric 5y ago
        Cars aren’t exactly cheap either. Why should we force every human to own a $1000 asset, and feed it with oil every week, just to participate is basic society? Why is building more bus stops, more metro stops, more train stops, more bike lanes, so terrible? And how is forcing car ownership better?
amelius 5y ago
Paint them white. And roads too.
jake_morrison 5y ago
In my home town in Oklahoma, the worst offenders are the churches. Huge parking lots which are only used on Sunday.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Church parking lots are the perfect example how things fail when your capacity planning only looks at averages. What would your solution be for venues that have spiky attendance? Concert venues, nightlife, sports arenas, seasonal tourism? Because sure you can centralize parking and then make people walk but there’s a reason we have many different tiers of caches.
  - softcactus 5y ago
    As someone from Oklahoma, just use grass. Lots of overflow lots already have grass. It's literally a prairie with wildgrass that has deep roots. If continuous high-traffic isn't a concern then grass is a perfect alternative.
- xeromal 5y ago
  Not sure how your churches work in Oklahoma but I grew up in the south and there was Sunday morning and night church, wednesday church, some kind of Friday prayer group or teen socialization night, a soup kitchen day, and probably others. The entire congregation isn't going to these but I'd wager most churches are actively using their lots throughout the week.
- dont__panic 5y ago
  In my city, churches actually made a choice that's even worse than that: on the weekends, it seems that there's some kind of deal with the police, and churchgoers just park right in the bike lanes all down my street. It makes my street, which contains two bike lanes, absolute hell to bike down on weekends.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > Huge parking lots which are only used on Sunday. For venues that hold 'large events', if they have a capacity of X people then zoning often dictates that they need Y parking spots. See page 24: * https://www.oklahomacounty.org/Portals/0/OKCo%20Zoning%20%282021_04_27%29%20-%20accepted.pdf https://www.oklahomacounty.org/Portals/0/OKCo%20Zoning%20%28...
kukx 5y ago
Let's cover parkings with PV roofs then we can make use of this energy.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Let's build a building over them and put the solar panels on the building's roof.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    So like this but with solar panels on the roof? https://i.pinimg.com/736x/84/9e/62/849e6294c5c5ce739fd1656ab1fcb005.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/84/9e/62/849e6294c5c5ce739fd1656ab... They're already very common, especially in hilly areas where the garage can also be the basement. Multi-unit versions also exist.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Yeah like that, but also for commercial buildings.
hackeraccount 5y ago
There is an upside to heat islands - the winters tend to be a bit more pleasant. I'm not sure what's worse though if you're living in the city - a cold winter or a hot summer; depends upon where you are I suppose.
- avianlyric 5y ago
  It’s generally cheaper and easier to heat a home than it is to cool a home. Anyone can plug in a cheap electric heater. But an AC is a trickier proposition for most.
  - fomine3 5y ago
    For AC, cooling is far cheaper than heating. Cheap electric heater also not cheap for bill.
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      If you can install an AC, then it’s not hard to use them for heating as well. Heat pumps get better COPs when heating, than cooling. You would expect a COP of 2 for cooling (I.e. 1000W of electricity removes 2000W heat), and a COP of 3 for heating (I.e. 1000W of electricity produces 3000W of useful heat). For heating a number of options exist from cheap electric heaters (which cost a lot to run); to gas or oil burners which require more infrastructure to build, but are cheap to run; and of course heat pumps, either air or ground sourced. For cooling, your only practical options are a heat pump, or an evaporative cooler if your in a dry climate. Both are more experienced up from than an electric heater, and require infrastructure. Finally insulating a home to retain heat naturally produced by those living inside can significantly reduce costs, along with insulating the humans (coats, jumpers etc). But cooling will always require a active component to move heat, and addition energy input. Although with good building design you can scavenge some of that energy using stuff like the stack effect.
bryanmgreen 5y ago
Ooooh, related one of my favorite topics. Part of the reason modern lots are so big and why parking covers so much area is simply because cars are too big! There is zero reason a person needs to own a 7 seat SUV to transport 3 people or five 2x4s twice a year. The proliferation of oversized vehicles continues to exacerbate a significant number of local and global issues and I'm of the belief that we need strong regulation to limit the size of vehicles.
- tw04 5y ago
  >Part of the reason modern lots are so big and why parking covers so much area is simply because cars are too big! There is zero reason a person needs to own a 7 seat SUV to transport 3 people or five 2x4s twice a year. The proliferation of oversized vehicles continues to exacerbate a significant number of local and global issues and I'm of the belief that we need strong regulation to limit the size of vehicles. I'll ignore for a second that I completely disagree the size of cars are the issue with parking lots. As someone who has a large truck, the spots are not designed for it, they're designed for a mid-size sedan. So, you aren't shrinking parking spots unless you're planning on massively increasing insurance costs due to all the door dings and bumper scrapes that will follow by making parking spaces smaller. Who decides what is "large enough"? The family with 3 or 4 kids who has to take them to sporting events on the weekend like football or hockey and ALL of the requisite gear just have to take multiple cars now to fit everything? And that's going to be better for the environment or society? What about a weekend trip to the cabin, they need to buy and store a trailer now to have enough room for their stuff? Because unless you've got a solution to those among dozens of other issues, no legislator in their right mind is going to back significantly decreasing the size of cars. If you want to find an issue opposed from both sides of the aisle, try telling people they are going to have to start towing a trailer everywhere to get their kids to sports on the weekend.
  - Tiktaalik 5y ago
    > Who decides what is "large enough"? Maybe the market can decide. We could be levying higher prices in taxes on the cars that occupy more space, damage roads more and are more dangerous to pedestrians.
Pacers31Colts18 5y ago
The town next to me in Indiana has giant oversized parking lots. I swear the Target parking lot is 3 times as large as the Target itself.
drak0n1c 5y ago
Rather than the dream of ubiquitous public transit (which even in compact rail/bus-friendly Japan is often lacking in suburban and rural areas), outside of city centers it seems like a more attainable goal is self-driving cars. With self-driving cars, you can consolidate parking to single vertical parking structures that service the area, and have businesses and condos in its surroundings build more closely together in aesthetic walkable clusters. As long as the automated valet "fetch" of your car takes only a few minutes people will be happy.
- DaedPsyker 5y ago
  I really don't see how buying more buses to service areas that are lacking is somehow harder or more expensive than a technology that hasn't matured yet to the level that will satisfy the public. I very much hope that the tech does massively improve but my opinion of it getting there soon is much more dim (although I'd say in the above case, lots of self driving tram like buses would be still better).
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Do you seriously think it's more practical to expect a fleet of self-driving cars instead of a bus with priority signaling? What's the reason? Fiscal? Environmental? Generate commerce?
johnatthebar 5y ago
Folks interested in this subject should consider joining the Parking Reform Network for connections to a bunch of people working on the subject around the world: https://parkingreform.org/ https://parkingreform.org/

180 points by jseliger 5y ago

No thanks. Parking lots are necessary to support driving, which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to travel. This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs. This article also makes vague claims of causation, and tries really hard to link the presence of parking lots to the PNW heat wave without any statistical rigor. It also then makes a misleading claim about the likelihood of increasing frequency of heat waves. The World Weather Attribution project’s own paper noted that the recent PNW heat wave would have have been a record breaking event even without climate change, and noted it as a 1 in 1000 years event. Finally, the article seems to completely ignore the trivial solution of simply putting some shade above a parking lot. It doesn’t have to be trees - it can be reflective tarp held up by poles or a low absorption roof on a parking garage.

warning26 5y ago
> No thanks. Parking lots are necessary to support driving, which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to travel. This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs. Driving is only the fastest and most convenient way to travel when you're the only one driving. In tech terms, it doesn't scale. Once you get to a certain point, you're allocating more space to wide roads, interchanges, and parking lots than to the places people are actually going.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Isn’t this the same as claiming that “driving is not the fastest mode when the city is poorly governed”? If a city is not overbuilt and overpopulated to the point where the road infrastructure is overwhelmed, then driving works really well. For the vast majority of cities, there isn’t a conceivable point where you’re dedicating more spaces to roads/lots than destinations. But even if that were the case, I have to ask “so what”. If the people living there have fast access to the things they want to do and like it, and find the benefits to be worth the trade offs, then I don’t see the problem. It feels to me like the complaints are mostly from a very active and vocal urbanist activist crowd rather than residents at large.
  - baconmania 5y ago
    Charitably, this is a goofy take. Less charitably, your reference to a "vocal urbanist activist crowd" suggests that you're leaning more on partisan talking points than evidence. More to the point, here's where this argument breaks down: > If a city is not overbuilt and overpopulated to the point where the road infrastructure is overwhelmed Given current demographic trends within the United States, major cities are guaranteed to see population growth beyond what current American public infrastructure can sustain. Compounding this problem is the fact that there's significant overlap between the segment of the population which thinks that driving is a sacred right and folks who think that spending public money on efficient public transit is unacceptable. I enjoy driving. It doesn't work for major cities. And those same cities are inevitably going to get denser if trends continue. Everyone driving his or her own car to their job (or to "the things they want to do") in the name of personal convenience is not the answer.
    - klabb3 5y ago
      > Given current demographic trends within the United States, major cities are guaranteed to see population growth beyond what current American public infrastructure can sustain. Not speaking for parent but the typical response would be "but then people should stop moving there", to which I reply that any utopia can sound good if you disregard people's incentives, desires and needs. Let me try: communism is in fact great, it's just that every time the people at the top end up corrupt for unrelated reasons.
wahern 5y ago
The article is about building parking lots that are unnecessarily large (overbuilding) due to regulatory mandates, rather than building too many parking lots. This argument has little to do with a war on cars, and scholars (including conservative, car-agnostic scholars) had been making it long before zoning became yet another culture war battleground.
motorist_hacker 5y ago
vkou 5y ago
> This whole war on driving hot take is completely tired because it makes no consideration of the tradeoffs. The only reason driving is convenient is because you make no consideration for your externalities. Noise, killing 38,000 people a year in crashes, 400 billion/year on road construction and maintenance, pollution killing people who live near highways, trillion-dollar imperial adventures to secure foreign oil, city designs that are absolutely unlivable without a car that costs ~$3,500/year to own and maintain...
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  Those externalities are minor compared to the massive utility we derive from being able to travel point to point at high speeds on our own schedule. In my opinion the reverse of what you say is true - it is fashionable for urbanists to claim these externalities are big when it is clear the time saved across the hundreds of millions who drive in the US alone is much larger in magnitude. The numbers you quote aren’t very meaningful without context. For example, 38000 road deaths doesn’t seem like much when you consider that there is only ~1 death for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled - and that number is going to keep falling as safety tech becomes more standardized. I also simply can’t take a claim like “city designs that are absolutely unlivable” seriously. Plenty of people live and thrive in car centric cities just fine, so this is clearly hyperbole.
  - wilgertvelinga 5y ago
    It is actually possible to be able to travel point to point on your own schedule in the same small amount of time without all those externalities. See Dutch cities like Utrecht and Amsterdam. Where everything is a bike ride away.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      As someone who has spent a lot of time in the Netherlands, this is simply not true. “Everything” is not a bike ride away. You’re equating a severely limited life to one with a lot more access and freedom to chose from more than what is just immediately nearby. It’s simply not the same thing. I’m glad for the people who are content with such a set up, but it’s not for everyone. For me, I found Amsterdam tremendously boring after a short time because of the relatively limited choice of activities compared to a car-centric US cities where intraday travel over longer distances is trivial. I would also say that the claim that you can travel in the “same small amount of time” is factually incorrect for other reasons. A one mile bike ride is simply not going to be faster than a 1 mile drive unless you’re in a city where they have overbuilt or have tremendously lagging driving infrastructure. I can only see the two being approximately the same for very short trips.
rektide 5y ago
> which is by a long shot the most convenient and fastest way to scorch the earth. there, fixed it for you.
prawn 5y ago
There's a shopping centre carpark here in South Australia where the shade structures are solar panels. Useful for customers in rain or heat, and obviously practical beyond that. You can see it here, plus the panels on the shopping centre also. https://binged.it/3nIyoRV https://binged.it/3nIyoRV (Bing, since Google Maps has old imagery)
- andylynch 5y ago
  Looking around that map it’s surprising to see just how many buildings of all sizes have solar panels fitted. Impressive!
  - prawn 5y ago
    In that suburb, 41% of residential properties have solar. In my area (a couple of kilometres away) it's about 45%. The payback period is very favourable even without a reduction in feed-in tariffs, last I checked. So the hold-outs might include people expecting to sell their house within a few years, renters, etc. Data from: https://pv-map.apvi.org.au/historical#10/-34.9043/138.6463 https://pv-map.apvi.org.au/historical#10/-34.9043/138.6463 And it should be even more attractive for commercial properties operating and running A/C or heating during peak sunlight time.
noahtallen 5y ago
Firstly, I think you are mistaken about heat. It is objectively true that cities are hotter places to live in general, disregarding climate change. This is partly due to the large amount of materials which absorb heat from the sun, such as black asphalt in massive parking lots. It makes cities less pleasant, for sure. I also don’t think you understand the “war on driving”… the point is that you have less freedom in a car dependent world. You can’t conveniently choose to walk to the grocery store a few blocks away when there are 6 lane roads which pay no respect to pedestrians. You can’t choose to take a train to a concert, since passenger trains are rarer and rarer. You have fewer choices and less freedom if the only convenient choice is a car. And what if you don’t have or can’t get a car? Your mobility is extremely limited. The “war on driving” is all about creating more choices and freedom for transit. It’s not saying all cars should be outlawed. It’s saying that the bus or train should be just as convenient as driving in a city, and that biking and cycling within a mile or two of home should be even more convenient than driving. And, most importantly for you, in a city where everyone has many transit choices, driving is much more pleasant. With fewer people driving cars for trips that don’t really need them, there will be less traffic and less need for massive roads which are dangerous even for drivers. This video is very illuminating: https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k https://youtu.be/d8RRE2rDw4k In fact, I’d recommend watching even more videos on that channel to really understand why having more alternatives to cars is a good thing.
baq 5y ago
I own two large cars to ferry my kids around the city and have enough time to get anything else done in a day. I hate that I need a car to do that and a backup in case one breaks down. I’d rather not have any cars and be able to use public transit. Alas, everybody has a car, so public transit is crap, because not enough people care. This causes a feedback loop, which in extreme cases in USA creates neighborhoods you can’t walk out of: I’ve been to a place literally surrounded by highways. The only way to leave was by car.

stephen_g 5y ago

This article was better than I expected, since I misinterpreted the title as if it meant building over car-parks (i.e. putting buildings over them with the parking underneath), which is a good idea! The amount of surface parking in the US does always astound me when I see photos and videos of US cities... The country I live in isn't especially short on space (Australia) but land is expensive in cities so car parks are usually either pretty small, or they're multi-story or under the building (either ground floor parking with the building above, or underground parking under the building). Just seems like such a waste of space to have these massive surface car-parks. Doing it like it's done in Australia has the advantage of things being a bit closer together, which is better for walking between properties or just walking/cycling in general. But the interesting thing is that surface parking seems like it used to be a lot more common here from what I remember from my childhood, and development and zoning laws seem to have encouraged what were car parks to be re-developed into much more space efficient use. So it is possible - kind of like The Netherlands and cycling - I wish my city and cities in my country were more like that, but they're better now than Amsterdam was in the 1970s, and slowly going in the right direction. The change is possible.

prawn 5y ago
There's a new Bunnings near me where the entire building footprint (including outdoor, etc) is above the ground-level carpark. Once in the building or garden centre, there's every impression you're at ground level because the experience is like every other Bunnings, but without exposure to the elements. Then there are solar panels on the roof. The total footprint as a result is far, far smaller than other large Bunnings buildings in the state.
- waste_monk 5y ago
  Normal Bunnings locations have a drive-thru area for people picking up bulk or oversized goods, and there would have to be a cargo dock to actually get stuff into the store - how is this handled at your location?
  - prawn 5y ago

d--b 5y ago

The new trend in France is car parks covered by solar panels. It provides shades for the cars and deflect the excess heat back to the sky.

baybal2 5y ago
Solar panels are not reflective
- mirashii 5y ago
  Solar panels have an albedo of ~0.3. Asphalt around ~0.05. That makes it 6x better in terms of heat reflected back right out the gate. There are many other, more complicated factors that make this even better in practice.
- frosted-flakes 5y ago
  No, they absorb the sunlight and turn it into electricity.
  - baq 5y ago
    But because they absorb sunlight, they get hot. Basic thermodynamics. Still better than asphalt.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      To a point, because 100%-efficient panels don't exist. If they did, then my naive understanding is that they wouldn't get hot.
      - starbase 5y ago
        Perfectly black and doesn't get hot in the sun. I love it.
      - baq 5y ago
        again, thermodynamics: > The maximum theoretical efficiency calculated is 86.8% for a stack of an infinite number of cells, using the incoming concentrated sunlight radiation. When the incoming radiation comes only from an area of the sky the size of the sun, the efficiency limit drops to 68.7%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Thermodynamic_efficiency_limit_and_infinite-stack_limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#Thermody...

adrianN 5y ago

I don't understand why cities mandate so much surface parking. It makes the city worse for everyone, including drivers. Why not have the parking under buildings? Sure it's a bit more expensive to build, but saves so much space! And the cars don't sit out in the sun while you shop. Maybe it would be best if there were no parking mandates at all and cities let the market figure out the right amount of parking space.

kube-system 5y ago
I’m not aware of any US cities that mandate surface parking. It is normally a denoted in a number of spaces per some estimate of what would be needed. The spaces can be configured however. Developers choose surface lots when the cost of land is less than the cost of a garage.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Oh that makes a lot of sense. Then perhaps the cost of land is just too low in US cities? How are parking lots taxed?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    They’re taxed as many different ways as there are cities. The main factor is the space available and the cost of the land when the parking was built. Density, land value, and taxes on that land tend to move together. Huge surface lots are most common in the sprawling parts of the US that were developed post-automobile: particularly suburbs and sprawling western cities. Some of that land that is now part of a city, wasn’t, when it was developed. It was cheap land outside of a city at the time.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    It’s crazy there are surface lots in Manhattan.
  - Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    > Then perhaps the cost of land is just too low in US cities? Land generally is cheap in the USA because the USA is pretty damn big. Europeans often don't think about how large the USA is. California alone is larger than every European country except Sweden, Spain, France, and Ukraine, and Texas is bigger than any of those. We have 10 states that are each bigger than the UK on their own. It's why nobody in the USA takes a train anywhere. Even with a 200 mph train, it would take 15 hours to cross the country, and that's assuming no stops. In some states, you could ride that train for 3 hours in a straight line and not even leave the state.

richardfey 5y ago

Seriously, who will own a car 20 years from now?

causi 5y ago
Not everybody wants to live in a hive city where you can hear your neighbors. I'm all for making cities as walkable as they can be, even ban cars from them. Just don't ever make me set foot in one again.
- klabb3 5y ago
  Then your choices would be rural, which I can understand, and car-centric suburbia, which seems like the worst compromise to me.. This is obviously subjective though.
  - causi 5y ago
    Indeed. Suburbia only exists because of people like me who'd prefer to live rurally but can't make a living there. I can't have fifty acres of woods but I can have trees and grass and birds.
    - timeon 5y ago
      And huge amount of public infrastructure.
      - causi 5y ago
        If my taxes and utility bills are not covering the cost then they should be adjusted to match.
- adrianN 5y ago
  You don't hear your neighbors in modern buildings. But of course we won't replace all buildings in the next twenty years.
Jtsummers 5y ago

patates 5y ago

I'm all for reducing parking lots generally, I just can't realistically expect that many others feel like I do. As a temporary solution, can't they start planting trees in the parking lots? Just give up a single lot for every N lots, and turn it into a garden with a tree that can provide a lot of shade and is low-maintenance.

automatic6131 5y ago
This is answered in the article
ncmncm 5y ago
Better, instead of solid pavement, use perforated blocks that grass can grow up through, and rain seep through. That also eliminates much of the drainage problem.

rehamelbasha 5y ago

Huge parking lots? try finding a place to park in Portland during timbers game good luck...

bongoman37 5y ago

bsza 5y ago

How about: stop building parking lots altogether and replace the ones we already built with things that are actually useful. Cars are nothing but a huge waste of space.

aronpye 5y ago
- bsza 5y ago
  I have used public transport since I was 14. I'm twice that age now. I never needed a car to get anywhere.
  - em-bee 5y ago
    i grew up in europe without a car. when i moved to san diego i thought, that's it, i'll finally have to learn how to drive. but i didn't. i made sure that i lived somewhere with a direct bus to work and it turned out to be fine. same in los angeles later. also auckland, nz. with that experience i concluded that i won't need a car, ever. it is all about arranging how you live.
    - ulimn 5y ago
      Let's inform the other few billions of humans on Earth to move closer to bus stops. Some people act so entitled... Not everyone has the same circumstances and infrastructure around them. Go to a poor part of eastern Europe. My mother has 2 buses to the nearest city in an entire day... (Not mentioning it takes like 5-6x more time.)
      - avianlyric 5y ago
        Cars aren’t exactly cheap either. Why should we force every human to own a $1000 asset, and feed it with oil every week, just to participate is basic society? Why is building more bus stops, more metro stops, more train stops, more bike lanes, so terrible? And how is forcing car ownership better?

amelius 5y ago

Paint them white. And roads too.

jake_morrison 5y ago

In my home town in Oklahoma, the worst offenders are the churches. Huge parking lots which are only used on Sunday.

Spivak 5y ago
Church parking lots are the perfect example how things fail when your capacity planning only looks at averages. What would your solution be for venues that have spiky attendance? Concert venues, nightlife, sports arenas, seasonal tourism? Because sure you can centralize parking and then make people walk but there’s a reason we have many different tiers of caches.
- softcactus 5y ago
  As someone from Oklahoma, just use grass. Lots of overflow lots already have grass. It's literally a prairie with wildgrass that has deep roots. If continuous high-traffic isn't a concern then grass is a perfect alternative.
xeromal 5y ago
Not sure how your churches work in Oklahoma but I grew up in the south and there was Sunday morning and night church, wednesday church, some kind of Friday prayer group or teen socialization night, a soup kitchen day, and probably others. The entire congregation isn't going to these but I'd wager most churches are actively using their lots throughout the week.
dont__panic 5y ago
In my city, churches actually made a choice that's even worse than that: on the weekends, it seems that there's some kind of deal with the police, and churchgoers just park right in the bike lanes all down my street. It makes my street, which contains two bike lanes, absolute hell to bike down on weekends.
throw0101a 5y ago
> Huge parking lots which are only used on Sunday. For venues that hold 'large events', if they have a capacity of X people then zoning often dictates that they need Y parking spots. See page 24: * https://www.oklahomacounty.org/Portals/0/OKCo%20Zoning%20%282021_04_27%29%20-%20accepted.pdf https://www.oklahomacounty.org/Portals/0/OKCo%20Zoning%20%28...

kukx 5y ago

Let's cover parkings with PV roofs then we can make use of this energy.

adrianN 5y ago
Let's build a building over them and put the solar panels on the building's roof.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  So like this but with solar panels on the roof? https://i.pinimg.com/736x/84/9e/62/849e6294c5c5ce739fd1656ab1fcb005.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/84/9e/62/849e6294c5c5ce739fd1656ab... They're already very common, especially in hilly areas where the garage can also be the basement. Multi-unit versions also exist.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Yeah like that, but also for commercial buildings.

hackeraccount 5y ago

There is an upside to heat islands - the winters tend to be a bit more pleasant. I'm not sure what's worse though if you're living in the city - a cold winter or a hot summer; depends upon where you are I suppose.

avianlyric 5y ago
It’s generally cheaper and easier to heat a home than it is to cool a home. Anyone can plug in a cheap electric heater. But an AC is a trickier proposition for most.
- fomine3 5y ago
  For AC, cooling is far cheaper than heating. Cheap electric heater also not cheap for bill.
  - avianlyric 5y ago
    If you can install an AC, then it’s not hard to use them for heating as well. Heat pumps get better COPs when heating, than cooling. You would expect a COP of 2 for cooling (I.e. 1000W of electricity removes 2000W heat), and a COP of 3 for heating (I.e. 1000W of electricity produces 3000W of useful heat). For heating a number of options exist from cheap electric heaters (which cost a lot to run); to gas or oil burners which require more infrastructure to build, but are cheap to run; and of course heat pumps, either air or ground sourced. For cooling, your only practical options are a heat pump, or an evaporative cooler if your in a dry climate. Both are more experienced up from than an electric heater, and require infrastructure. Finally insulating a home to retain heat naturally produced by those living inside can significantly reduce costs, along with insulating the humans (coats, jumpers etc). But cooling will always require a active component to move heat, and addition energy input. Although with good building design you can scavenge some of that energy using stuff like the stack effect.

bryanmgreen 5y ago

Ooooh, related one of my favorite topics. Part of the reason modern lots are so big and why parking covers so much area is simply because cars are too big! There is zero reason a person needs to own a 7 seat SUV to transport 3 people or five 2x4s twice a year. The proliferation of oversized vehicles continues to exacerbate a significant number of local and global issues and I'm of the belief that we need strong regulation to limit the size of vehicles.

tw04 5y ago
>Part of the reason modern lots are so big and why parking covers so much area is simply because cars are too big! There is zero reason a person needs to own a 7 seat SUV to transport 3 people or five 2x4s twice a year. The proliferation of oversized vehicles continues to exacerbate a significant number of local and global issues and I'm of the belief that we need strong regulation to limit the size of vehicles. I'll ignore for a second that I completely disagree the size of cars are the issue with parking lots. As someone who has a large truck, the spots are not designed for it, they're designed for a mid-size sedan. So, you aren't shrinking parking spots unless you're planning on massively increasing insurance costs due to all the door dings and bumper scrapes that will follow by making parking spaces smaller. Who decides what is "large enough"? The family with 3 or 4 kids who has to take them to sporting events on the weekend like football or hockey and ALL of the requisite gear just have to take multiple cars now to fit everything? And that's going to be better for the environment or society? What about a weekend trip to the cabin, they need to buy and store a trailer now to have enough room for their stuff? Because unless you've got a solution to those among dozens of other issues, no legislator in their right mind is going to back significantly decreasing the size of cars. If you want to find an issue opposed from both sides of the aisle, try telling people they are going to have to start towing a trailer everywhere to get their kids to sports on the weekend.
- Tiktaalik 5y ago
  > Who decides what is "large enough"? Maybe the market can decide. We could be levying higher prices in taxes on the cars that occupy more space, damage roads more and are more dangerous to pedestrians.

Pacers31Colts18 5y ago

The town next to me in Indiana has giant oversized parking lots. I swear the Target parking lot is 3 times as large as the Target itself.

drak0n1c 5y ago

Rather than the dream of ubiquitous public transit (which even in compact rail/bus-friendly Japan is often lacking in suburban and rural areas), outside of city centers it seems like a more attainable goal is self-driving cars. With self-driving cars, you can consolidate parking to single vertical parking structures that service the area, and have businesses and condos in its surroundings build more closely together in aesthetic walkable clusters. As long as the automated valet "fetch" of your car takes only a few minutes people will be happy.

DaedPsyker 5y ago
I really don't see how buying more buses to service areas that are lacking is somehow harder or more expensive than a technology that hasn't matured yet to the level that will satisfy the public. I very much hope that the tech does massively improve but my opinion of it getting there soon is much more dim (although I'd say in the above case, lots of self driving tram like buses would be still better).
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Do you seriously think it's more practical to expect a fleet of self-driving cars instead of a bus with priority signaling? What's the reason? Fiscal? Environmental? Generate commerce?

johnatthebar 5y ago

Folks interested in this subject should consider joining the Parking Reform Network for connections to a bunch of people working on the subject around the world: https://parkingreform.org/ https://parkingreform.org/