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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 o

• 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?
          • ulimn 5y ago
            Of course improving infrastructure to support better public transport would be a good thing. But I also think urbanization in itself is a big part of the problem. Most of the hate on cars comes from people living in big cities (my own observation).
          • aronpye 5y ago
            An annual London travel card is £2,568, and that only lets you travel around London. So why should be instead force people to buy something more expensive and less useful than a car?
            • adrianN 5y ago
              An annual Berlin travel card is about 720€, I believe it's about the same in Paris. An annual Vienna travel card is 365€. At least in Berlin car ownership correlates very strongly with household income. The majority of poor households don't have access to a car, whereas rich households have multiple cars.
              • ratww 5y ago
                > An annual Berlin travel card is about 720€ Or 480€ if you get it trough your employer, which amounts to 40€ a month.
            • iso1631 5y ago
              Average cost of owning a car in the UK is more than that, especially in London where there is limited land And very few people have a travelcard for the entire city, just you payg on your phone/watch/card for what you use. Unless you literally are crossing London 10 times a week an annual travel card is meaningless.
              • multjoy 5y ago
                Ackshually, an annual Z1-3 travel card (other zones are available) costs the same as 40 weeks at the weekly cap (£43.50 vs £1740). If your weekly travel sees you routinely hitting the cap then a travel card may represent better value.
        • watwut 5y ago
          Alternative option is to build more frequent bus stops. Also, poor Eastern Europe people use more public transport, vause cars are more expensive.
        • adrianN 5y ago
          You're commenting in a discussion about changing the infrastructure to be less car centric so that more people can live without having a car.
          • ulimn 5y ago
            I was directly replying to a specific comment. My comment is not really about the article.
        • iso1631 5y ago
          There's only 1.4 billion cars in the world, with 300 million of them in the US, so "billions" is a somewhat odd statement.
        • em-bee 5y ago
          i have travelled eastern europe extensively and lived there too. public transport in most places is better than the US. a similar location in the US would have no busses at all. remote places exist. if you live there you may need a car. but that doesn't translate to needing a car everywhere.
    • Aldqueath 5y ago
      i live in a rural area with zero public transportation and would have a very hard time doing anything in nearby town if there was nowhere to park my car.
      • avianlyric 5y ago
        But you don’t need to park your car right next to the shop you’re visiting. You could park your car near a metro stop, or train station on the edge of the city and use public transport to complete your journey. That way city dwellers don’t need to sacrifice huge amounts of space for cars they don’t use, along with dealing with the consequences of urban heat islands. And you don’t need to spend you life sat in traffic because there will never be enough roads in major cities for everyone to travel by car.
        • iso1631 5y ago
          Parking lot 2 miles out of town, with plenty of electric bikes you can take into town (And the other way have bikes with trailers to get back to the car) Get rid of cars in town, leave a few single-lane roads with a 10mph limit for deliveries etc at specific times.
          • chongli 5y ago
            What about all your groceries? Your wife at the fertility clinic? Little Sally at the community pool? Grandpa at the doctor’s office? Bikes for everyone and a little cart for the groceries? What if grandpa walks with a cane and your wife is 9 months pregnant? What if it’s below freezing and there’s 8 inches of snow on the ground? All of this to cut out a handful of parking spaces for a town of 500 in the middle of the Great Plains?
            • avianlyric 5y ago
              Electric bikes and electric tricycles solve your accessibility problem. As for snow, do the same think you do for cars, plough your bike paths and grit them. It’ll be quicker and cheaper than ploughing and gritting roads because bike paths are physically much smaller to serve the same number of people. Or you take a half way approach, only have accessibility spaces in town, so those unable to use a bike, or similar small personal transport device, can drive and park. As for groceries, we solved that a long time ago. They’re called cargo bikes, you can even get electric versions. Great for filling up with groceries and children. Also we’re not talking about towns of 500 in the great planes. We’re talking about towns and cities of thousands to millions of people. You would have be an either an idiot or trying to be deliberately obtuse to assume this discussion is talking about villages in arse end of nowhere.
    • FpUser 5y ago
      And because of that everybody else has to do the same. Seems to be very understanding and tolerant approach.
      • bsza 5y ago
        1. The average car occupancy is 1.5 persons per vehicle. 2. The total parking area in NYC adds up to TWELVE Central Parks. 3. Cars are a leading cause of death by accident in the world. 4. Driving a car for 1 hour reduces your life expectancy by 20 minutes. 5. They emit toxic fumes and greenhouse gases. 6. Car tires shed microplastics, which might be even more harmful than the toxic fumes they emit. 7. This article. Now please tell me, what tolerance do these glorified killing machines deserve?
        • FpUser 5y ago
          Not gonna tell you anything. You obviously have you mind made up and I do not really care. I have car and use it for my benefit. That's all that matters to me.
          • bsza 5y ago
            Tragedy of the commons.
        • kqr 5y ago
          > 4. Driving a car for 1 hour reduces your life expectancy by 20 minutes. Surely driving a car for 60 minutes ought to reduce your life expectancy by something like 59 minutes, at least -- much like anything you do for 60 minutes. I'm not just trying to be funny, there's a point here: you'll say "yeah, but it's 20 minutes more than otherwise" and I'll ask "so what is this otherwise?" Obviously, if you compare to riding an ultralight airplane for 60 minutes, I think the car is going to be better – especially in bad weather. So what's the comparison for this number? If you're just comparing demographics, I'm forced to point out that correlation is not, in general, direct causation. We might just be observing something else that happens to affect both car usage and life expectancy. (To be clear, I'm doing this to find the steel man of your argument. I dislike car-centric infrastructure as much as anyone, but I wouldn't want to use weak arguments.)
  • avianlyric 5y ago
    I have these noodley appendages attached to my body below my waist. If I place one in front of the other repeatedly I can perform an ambulatory action called walking. Amazingly I can use this action to move between locations without mechanical assistance from a car. I would strongly recommend you try it sometime. I live in a city with very few car parks, and lots of closely packed homes, shops, parks and paths. I haven’t needed a car for grocery shopping in the past 5 years, I didn’t even have easy access to car until summer 2021.
    • aronpye 5y ago
      • eloisius 5y ago
        But the topic at hand is heat islands, which is inherently an urban problem. I don’t think anyone here is meaning to suggest rural Montana should ban cars.
      • adrianN 5y ago
        This thread is about heat islands and wasted space in cities.
      • kqr 5y ago
        Funnily enough, if you replace parking lots with homes, businesses, entertainment, education, and commercial buildings, you are likely to get - More and better public transport - Disabled people can go where they need to more easily - Streets will be less dangerous - You have more shops nearby Excessive parking lots are the cause of almost all of the problems you mention. Keeping parking lots around won't fix the problems caused by parking lots. (The exceptions are vacations and transporting equipment. You probably need a car for that. Depending on how often you go on vacation or transport equipment, you may or may not need your own personal car sitting idle 98 % of the year. But if you do, great, you're in the small minority we should build parking lots for. We don't need very many parking lots for you.)
      • globular-toast 5y ago
  • moritonal 5y ago
    In UK cities few people own cars. Cycling, running and buses are all valid transports. Cars are really for the too-rich-to-travel-alone and the disabled who can't use public transport for one reason or another.
    • aronpye 5y ago
      Which UK cities? A London year travel pass costs £2,568, so public transport is hardly cheaper either, plus it’s a whole lot less convenient. Unless you enjoy spending all of your time in an urban group think bubble with the only option is to use public transport to travel to more of the same.
      • iso1631 5y ago
        Do you live in London? Or visit? In 2017, pre pandemic, there were only 166,000 annual travelcards sold. No idea where your £2,568 comes from.
      • cameronh90 5y ago
        While I disagree with GP about this applying to most cities in the UK, it's certainly the case that most people in inner London (Z1-3) don't own a car. The people who do own cars mostly don't use them for commuting. Kids seem to be the biggest reason people get a car. Driving in London is expensive and inconvenient. Parking is extortionate, there's the congestion charge, road taxes, fuel duty and insurance. A car is something you get if you're reasonably well off or you need it for work (e.g. you're a tradesman). Travelcards are expensive too - London is just expensive unfortunately. But that's a Z1-5 travelcard I think you've quoted. There are other ones and IME a lot of very poor people cycle, use the bus pass (£900) or get a Z2-6 (£1800) then walk from there, if indeed they even work in the centre. Also there are discounted rates for the travelcard depending on circumstances.
    • lbriner 5y ago
      It's more complicated than that. In many cases, those in the cities that have decent public transport might not have parking spaces so they are forced into the decision rather than it being a choice. In places where car ownership is possible, most people will have a car even if they use public transport for work. Why? Families are spread out, shops are in many different places, public transport tends to favour centralised areas like city centres and not other cross-city journeys and even a half mile walk to a bus stop or metro station is signficant if every journey is made that way. Children are often part of a club or whatever and in many cases, getting between all of these things is much quicker in a car than waiting for buses that don't turn up. I like the idea of low-carbon environmentally friendly transport but it is a choice that in many cases is too big an ask, otherwise everyone would just do it. My car journey to work is 30 minutes. Doing the same journey on public transport would take at least 3 buses and probably 2 hours. Not happening. Also, a lot of public transport seems expensive but I don't just want to jump on the "why is it so expensive in the UK and not elsewhere" because I don't think the economics are well understood.
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• refurb 5y ago
  Actually cars are incredibly useful and people who don’t need them still buy out of convenience despite the cost. Maybe not useful to you, but we don’t design cities around just your needs.
  • adrianN 5y ago
    Cars are incredibly useful because we spent trillions building our cities to be friendly to cars.
    • chongli 5y ago
      Wouldn’t it have cost even more to build a bunch of Manhattans to pack everyone into? The issue is that North America has tons of space available. People aren’t going to spend the big money to build large buildings if there’s empty lots on the cheap just across the street. And so it goes that sprawl spreads across the landscape like microbial culture across a Petri dish. And for similar reasons we don’t expect the microbes to grow into a tower at the centre.
      • adrianN 5y ago
        That's a false dichotomy. Walkable cities existed for millennia before we figured out how to build Manhattans.
        • chongli 5y ago
          A millennium ago cities were overcrowded, smelly, dangerous, disease-infested slums with no plumbing or electricity. People living in the country were much better off, even if they were peasants who had to pay extortionate shares of their crop to the local lord.
          • adrianN 5y ago
            And somehow even people in the countryside had no cars. I don't see your point.
• easytiger 5y ago
  They have no utility whatsoever? This is what a cult looks like
• deleted 5y ago
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