49 ms·

Maps show how parking lots “eat” U.S. cities

270 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Columbus is sprawling, sad to see so much of that from parking and other pavement. As a driver though it is much better than Cleveland. Ultimately I do wish we had more biking trails and pedestrian friendly cities in Ohio. And I'd trade my car in for an electric bike if my city made it happen.
fnordian_slip 4y ago
As someone who visited the US as a kid and was even then shocked by the amount of space dedicated to cars, seeing this information on a map still blew me away. The space needed for these parking lots basically guarantees you can not walk or bike to get anywhere. I believe that unless there's big investment in public transportation, there might be no way for these cities to break out of this vicious circle. And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway, garnered so much attention even with its obvious downsides, so having actually useful public transportation should be a no-brainer imho.
- unsignedint 4y ago
  The concept of a 'big investment' takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to public transportation in the United States, especially considering the vast geographical expanse of many metropolitan areas. In most cases, unless one resides in the heart of a city, public transportation isn't a practical option. This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently.
  - slaymaker1907 4y ago
    I think that’s part of the point. This vast sprawl is somewhat caused by our over reliance on private vehicles. Also, a factor of more than 2 for travel times is VERY bad for public transit, even in the US.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I’ve previously written up “what would it take to make a 9 AM meeting at my office?” It’s a factor of 4 or 5 worse via public transit and I live in a probably top 5 (definitely top 10) US city as it pertains to our public transit system (Boston). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
      - htag 4y ago
        At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike would be cheaper and close to thirty minutes. It would be healthier. It wouldn't require a parking spot.
        quesera 4y ago
        > At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike GP said Boston.
        htag 4y ago
        I've never been. Are bicycles illegal there?
        quesera 4y ago
        Yes.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        One of the first search results for Boston bicycle declares it the fourth best biking city in the US, so you're going to need to be more specific about whatever criticism you're exaggerating.
        jen20 4y ago
        Boston sometimes gets 2 feet of snow in a single day, and often has sub-freezing temperatures. People just get on with life (but not really on e-bikes).
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    Because the US insists transit need to look like a big sexy expensive two mezzanine underground platform, when a decidedly unsexy painted bus lane on the already existing wide arterial would offer most of the same utility for orders of magnitude less money.
    - orangepurple 4y ago
      All of the commenters are missing a huge point. US commuter rail projects are hugely corrupt enterprises. Just look at Honolulu for a blatant example of corruption in infrastructure spending (their train NO-ONE wanted)
      - kjkjadksj 4y ago
        I’ve heard sometimes metros are forced to contract with certain contractors in particular because they have headhunted all the talent qualified to interpret the metros own requirements. You can imagine how much abuse this situation can lead to. The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
  - magicalist 4y ago
    > This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides. There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  I feel assured that the transition is going to be pretty quick, watching Waymos and Cruises going around SF and dealing with some challenging traffic situations and weather(Waymo is definitely better at not getting stuck, but the gap is not insurmountable). As soon as they proliferate at scale, the risk profile changes such that you can bike everywhere safely, and parking is no longer a major urban issue, because the fleet is going to have a more flexible usage pattern whether or not individuals own the vehicles: instead of one space per vehicle per destination, it's going to be compressed down to parking space for the neighborhood plus drop-off zones. So to me, it's obvious that the market is going at the problem just about as fast as it can, and once the adoption S-curve hits, "need to drive" relaxes because other potential uses aren't being suppressed. You'll still have many instances where mass transit and active transit present a lower cost structure than taxi, and they'll have a lot of leeway to grow.
  - htag 4y ago
    Maybe. From the outside looking in self driving cars are vaporware that are very late on delivery. I wouldn't want to bet my city's architecture on this promise. It might be nice if they deliver on this promise though.
- avar 4y ago
  The answer to this particular problem isn't public transportation. There's places elsewhere in the developed world where there's no public transportation, and everyone uses a car for longer trips. You can usually still cross the street safely as a pedestrian, and expect to reliably find a sidewalk next to the road. US roads, intersections, parking spots etc. are also absurdly large by the standards of most other countries, it all adds up.
  - klabb3 4y ago
    > The answer to this particular problem isn't public transportation. Public transport is not a self-goal, but it’s the best way by far to reduce the spatial requirements for transportation. In particular subways and commuter trains can move an absolutely insane amount of people for even the largest metropolitan areas, without obliterating the ability to walk and getting quickly from point A to B. Others include having motorcycles and bicycles for individual transport. That can work in small cities but usually impact walkability anyways. If you look at south east asia for instance, often lacking in good public transport, but having a lot of motorcycles in large cities making pedestrian movement hard.
    - seer 4y ago
      As someone who recently experienced hanoi traffic as both pedestrian and motorcyclist - I can attest that it can be scary, but after a certain learning period not that bad. The big problem there was the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians so you kinda had to go into traffic even if you were just following the streets. Crossing even the busiest boulevards was actually easy, if a bit nerve racking. The flow of scooters just parts around you as you cross, giving you the “I am Moses” feel - you only have to be visible and consistent with your movement. Honestly they should just get rid of all the zebra crossings and pedestrian lights - those don’t work anyway, and just build lots of pedestrian islands everywhere and they would be golden, oh and ban cars. The amount of people those scooters move throughout hanoi is just staggering - even if they are a bit slow, they make up for it being like an organic flow that doesn’t stop for anything as it can just ride around it.
  - ntonozzi 4y ago
- m463 4y ago
  I know many females who won't park far and walk somewhere because they don't feel safe. This goes 5x at night. Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population?
  - vegetablepotpie 4y ago
    As a man I don’t like the perception that I’m under suspicion of being a threat to half the population. And I shouldn’t be. The vast majority of violence against women is perpetuated by men they know, not strangers [1]. Domestic violence is not a reason why our cities should be filled with 1-ton death machines that spew soot, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide. Cars don’t solve that problem. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-violence-against-women-2022-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-vi...
    - tomjakubowski 4y ago
      The potential downside for a woman who misjudges a dangerous man is far more severe than the potential downside for a man who is misjudged as dangerous by a woman.
  - throw0101c 4y ago
    > Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population? Which is more of a reason to have more people walk: the more people in area going hither and thither the less isolated and vulnerable a person will feel. People often feel most vulnerable when they feel isolated, which is what happens on a lifeless street. If a street has a sidewalk cafes, bars, restaurants, and people waiting in lines to get into clubs, then there is a feeling of community.
    - RajT88 4y ago
      This /\ My wife and I a couple years back moved to the very edge of the suburbs. Like, across the street is forest preserves, and behind us is a river. We have only spoken with fewer than 10 neighbors since we moved in 2 years ago. Her, and her sisters all talk about it being like a "serial killer neighborhood". Even my fishing buddy nextdoor sort of rolls his eyes about how his wife says similar things sometimes. But I tell my fishing buddy: You'll never understand how vulnerable women feel. Ever. Honestly, being afraid of a place where nobody is around is statistically safer - people don't lock their doors in my neighborhood. I've started also not locking doors. It's that kind of place. That has been a point of friction for my wife and I too - I have been really diligent prior to this, because I always lived in really populous areas. My wife, thankfully, has never been a victim of any kind of violence. But she has had experiences where she avoided that. Once time some big guy late at night followed her into her apartment building asking to use her phone to call for a tow truck or some nonsense. She knew it was BS, but gave it to him anyways. He ran away. Men will never be able to understand how vulnerable women feel. We simply do not experience the world in the same way. I'll give another example to help anyone still reading get it: I once went to a haunted house (the Rob Zombie one in Chicagoland) with my buddy and his wife. Probably 10 times, actors working there tried to jump-scare her, and not me or my buddy. Every goddamned time. Whether she was in front, or behind, or between us. She does not scare easily, so she was just really annoyed. Predatory men see women as easy victims in ways they do not other men. > females They prefer "women", just FYI.
- donatj 4y ago
  > The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway The idea was for the Hyperloop was to do the 400 miles straight shot from LA to San Francisco at speeds up to 300mph. I don't see how a subway could do anything comparable.
  - anothernewdude 4y ago
    I agree with you, but I would add: I don't see how a hyperloop could do that either.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
      Good point! My idea is to have people simply rocket launched via pods from LA to SF over the air about 200-300 meters off the ground on average. Sure, it’s unsafe, and probably has a ton of reasons that it won’t work. But isn’t it an innovative way to solve transportation problems that definitely isn’t a tactic intended to downplay public transit in CA so that my totally unrelated car business has less of a risk of succeeding?
  - bagels 4y ago
    The state can't even build a "high speed" (or as other countries might call it, regular speed) train track between those places.
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      The CAHSR plans were for ~350 km/h rail speed, which is basically the highest end of high-speed rail. It's the ~200 km/h speed of the NEC that is at best barely-high-speed rail.
      - bagels 4y ago
        The plans were for that. It's not built, and much of it, if built, is now not planned to support that speed.
  - aeyes 4y ago
- sublinear 4y ago
  > seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. Ever see that monorail episode of The Simpsons? Yeah that's where we're at. There's a strong desire from many people to slow things down and be more deliberate and careful before any more big changes. There's a sense of disillusionment about "progressivism" amongst even those who crave the most righteous of vibes. This is a weird time to be alive and people just don't want to wake up to construction crews ironically destroying their cities to make way for yet another wave of gentrification pretending not to be.
- kortilla 4y ago
  > And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. Because the majority of the people in the US don’t actually want to ride public transportation and they like houses. It’s not that difficult to grasp.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    That's like saying Americans love working at McDonald's and Walmart because they are America's largest employers. Americans not liking public transportation, and not willing to fund public transportation are two different things.
  - aquaticsunset 4y ago
    I'll counter this - the majority of the people in the US want to live somewhere and get around in the least difficult method. Due to decades of policymaking, that happens to be houses and cars. It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Why would someone prefer to live like ants? Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space. People can be happy in an apartment but most would trade that in for a house they could afford it.
      - Dylan16807 4y ago
        > Why would someone prefer to live like ants? Why would someone prefer to live like a snail? > Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space. A house does not imply a large backyard. Suburbs are the bigger problem, and they don't usually have much forest. And apartments don't have to be tiny. If you're comparing against a house in a similar location, that buys a lot of apartment space.
- loeg 4y ago
  Biking here in the states isn't a problem from a distance perspective -- the problems are road safety and destination security (bike theft is a big problem but typically not valued by police because of the nominally low dollar impact). Walking, yeah.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    That depends on the city, and where in it you live. If you live in a large suburban area (like many Americans), then biking distance is a huge problem. Sure, making an actually tractable amount of public transit in every suburb would resolve that problem, but that's a huge investment, and the overwhelming majority of Americans can't even imagine what the result might look like.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      I would argue biking distance isn't the problem in suburbia, it's biking safety. My rather spread out suburb is about 8 miles across. That's less than an hour for any cyclist and a fit cyclist could do it in half that time. The trouble is that most of those miles are on 45 mph stroads with either no bike lane or a thin stripe of paint for protection from cars and it's full of debris most of the year.
      - thomastjeffery 4y ago
        > That's less than an hour for any cyclist and a fit cyclist could do it in half that time. And how long for a car? 5min? 15min? If you have a car, then you will likely use it for some percentage of trips. That's a pretty serious motivation to not become "a fit cyclist". All of these problems work together. This also works in the inverse: a good solution would do something to resolve all of these problems.
  - antifa 4y ago
    Google maps says going to work would be a 6 hour bike ride. There is technically a train available to for half of the journey.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  > And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. That's because you are looking from the outside in. Every person who has grown up in the US has grown up in this situation. Having to drive nearly everywhere is our version of normal. Public transit in the US sucks. In practically every city that even has it, it's the worst way to get anywhere. It's often a last resort: a tool for the desperately poor. On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. It's a fool's errand to convince most people that they should drive and take public transit all in one trip, even if it would save them time and gas. There is more to this situation than the vicious cycle that perpetuates it. If we can be clear about how we intend to accommodate that reality, we might be able to do something about it politically.
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    The UK used to have rail links from all of the small villages into the cities. It was an expensive system, but now that has been ripped out for decades we can see that the alternative is far worse.
  - 29083011397778 4y ago
    > On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. Hang on though: I can't tell my neighbouring city to push for more housing because, while I want to live there in the future, the people that live there now like their lack of housing. Similarly, why can't the people that currently live in the city tell their local politicians that spending all this space for parking the residents don't need is stupid?
    - Avshalom 4y ago
      people commuting in is a large part of the work force in cities, tourism and generally shopping are important for their economies, also a lot of that parking space is needed by the residents because chicken/egg they all have cars too.
- vGPU 4y ago
  The last time I took a bus there was a homeless man openly touching himself. The time before a fight broke out between a couple of drunks. Can you understand why I avoid public transport at all costs and don’t wish to expose my family to it?
  - foxyv 4y ago
    I can understand for sure. However, you may want to consider why you only saw drunk and homeless people on the bus. It has nothing to do with public transit, but it has a lot to do with parking lots and how we build our cities. Cars insulate us from reality and allow us to ignore our problems. Our children will not be so lucky.
sdwr 4y ago
So true. Thinking about my city, it's gross how much space is used up by parking. Half the street space, plus lots for every store + destination. Self-driving cars will fix this, no? A combo of taxis, automatic parking garages, and just driving itself home to wait.
- slaymaker1907 4y ago
  It’ll be worse because the average number of people per vehicle will be less than 1.
lotsoweiners 4y ago
Who cares? If Americans want room to drive and get places and park then let them. If my suburban town 25 miles away from a major city’s downtown got rid of streets and places to park, me and 95% of the other residents would just move another 15 miles further.
- voisin 4y ago
  > Who cares? If Americans want room to drive and get places and park then let them. It’s terrible for the environment and leads to soulless shitty suburbs rather than vibrant, dense neighbourhoods.
  - donatj 4y ago
    How is having some open space worse for the environment than being tightly packed? That seems baseless
    - ripley12 4y ago
      Scenario 1: lots of land dedicated to car storage, people are spread out, commutes are longer and must be done by car Scenario 2: less land dedicated to parking, people live closer together, commutes are shorter and can more often be done by bike/transit/walking It's pretty clear which of those is better for the environment.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        Which one is better for your environment? Pollution filled cities or open country air?
        nayuki 4y ago
        Cars cause the pollution. Cities would be cleaner if suburbanites didn't drive in.
        4y ago
wasabinator 4y ago
[flagged]
ecliptik 4y ago
I've been fascinated with Milliron’s Department Store [1] from the late 1940s and it's use of parking on the roof of the department store. At the time "autotopia" was something developers cater too and seeing how architecture at the time responded is something in itself. Sadly the rooftop lot was removed with the rear X ramps blocked off, and the store is now a relatively generic Kolhs. In Southern California though a lot of the parking lots are getting retrofitted with solar, which while still taking up space, at least providing energy and shade. 1. https://www.gruenassociates.com/project/millirons-department-store/ https://www.gruenassociates.com/project/millirons-department...
steponlego 4y ago
[flagged]
rascul 4y ago
The title says cities but it's really about city centers. Edit: This is relevant because US cities tend to include a large amount of residential areas that don't have parking lots. When city centers are commercial areas that serve the city and surrounding areas inside and outside of the city, people are going to drive there and they need a place to park. There are potential ways to make parking less concentrated in the center though, which includes public transportation, one thing we're often not great at in the US.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Large amounts of residential areas filled with single family homes, all of which have their own private parking lots.
  - rascul 4y ago
    Maybe they all do, maybe they don't. Maybe it's more than 1/5, but maybe it's less. The article doesn't touch on it.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      Look around you. How many SFH homes have been built in the last 80 years that don't have a driveway or an off-street parking spot? Maybe 1%? Probably far fewer than that.
      - rascul 4y ago
        The article title claimed that 1/5 of cities are parking lots but that wasn't what the article was about. I doubt that 1/5 of cities are parking lots (including driveways) but reading the article doesn't attempt to show that.
  - erik_seaberg 4y ago
    California relaxed the requirements on converting a garage to housing, which potentially doubles the drivers while removing parking spaces.
seri4l 4y ago
Looking on the bright side all that open space means there is more sunlight, a scarce resource in many cities.
- notsound 4y ago
  In what cities is sunlight a "scarce resource"? Many cities actively plant trees to create shade. Also, who the hell sunbathes in a parking lot? Nice pun tho
  - seri4l 4y ago
    When you live in front of a tall building that blocks the Sun the days are shorter and it's harder to keep the house warm during the Winter. Maybe I went too far calling it a "scarce resource" but tall buildings that are too close to each other increase the lighting and heating costs a great deal.
    - kirel33 4y ago
      A lot of European countries tend to regulate the height of buildings to avoid such problems, density doesn't have to come at the expense of basic standards of living
deleted 4y ago
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htag 4y ago
I like these maps. I do think it glosses over many details of vertical parking. It's hard to compare how tall the parking garages are. It's unclear if it covers underground parking for buildings with other uses or not. It's hard to determine exactly how much parking is provided in the red shaded regions. It's hard to determine what are parking garages and what are parking lots. I also would have liked to compare street parking options in various cities, but this doesn't seem to document it. Street parking can have just a big of an impact as garages and lots, as it leads to wider roads, people hunting for a spot, and a hazard for bicyclist.
- causality0 4y ago
  Street parking can have just a big of an impact as garages and lots, as it leads to wider roads, people hunting for a spot, and a hazard for bicyclist. Street parking has always seemed slightly insane to me. You take a dense city that's already tough to get around by road and then you sacrifice half your road area for people to park on. Instead of one car park entrance you have to keep an eye on for emerging vehicles, any one of a thousand cars could suddenly move into the road with no notice. It's a safety and efficiency nightmare.
  - LanceH 4y ago
    The smell of urine is less present with street parking. And I'm not trying to be glib. Off hours especially, parking garages can be places people don't want to go.
kbos87 4y ago
There's an entire genre of anti-car content popular on social media right now that completely overlooks the reality of how most US cities are dispersed. I agree that the utopian ideal of a car-free existence is appealing, but it's far from realistic for a lot of places and there's an awful lot of shaming and shunning going on of regular people living their lives right now.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Trends come and go, but the suburbs will continue to grow. Anti-car posts are fun because they are escapism from the worst part of the suburbs. However, you lose all of the best parts when you switch to the current alternatives (expensive density and shared public transportation).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ripley12 4y ago
  I don't see the "shaming and shunning" aspect much, myself. When I do see it it's usually directed at people who are driving dangerously or fighting policy that would make it easier to live without a car.
- xracy 4y ago
  It's not about shaming and shunning. It's about educating, so that people are more amenable to non-car-centric changes to public transit and their cities that will improve everyone's way of life. I think the thing about Public Transit, is if you truly love driving your car, you should still be in favor of public transit, because better public transit means less traffic for you.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Someone has to pay for transit and it usually comes from drivers
    - 4y ago
DangitBobby 4y ago
I'm curious if there are any bright ideas on practical first and last mile transportation for people who want to take the bus or train. Say my house is 1.5-3 miles from the closest bus stop and my destination is 1.5-3 miles from its closest bus stop. Should I be bringing my scooter on the bus? Is there room for everyone's scooter on the bus? Curious to hear from people who use the bus or train daily, how do you get to and from the bus stop in a timely manner and in the cold.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Add more bus stops. Beyond that, I think the most honest answer is, "Wear a coat, and give yourself more time."
- htag 4y ago
  1. Bus stops can be as cheap as a sign on the road. We should embrace cheaper bus stops to build more bus stops. Another benefit of cheap bus stops is under-utilized stops can be removed with less investment lost. 2. There's rooms for lots of scooters on buses. It's pretty common for there to be places for bicycles on buses too. Have you been inside of a city bus? There pretty big. 3. Real estate near train stations is almost always more expensive. This is a type of amenity you have to look into while choosing your home.
  - 29083011397778 4y ago
    > Another benefit of cheap bus stops is under-utilized stops can be removed with less investment lost According to the public transit authority around here, if you remove a bus stop (due to, say, a drop in transit usage) and try to bring it back later (after usage of transit goes back up), it can take up to five years to see ridership recognize that, and start to use the stop at the same rate as when it was removed. It may be cheaper to leave the stop there long-term.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      Buses can drive past unused stops as if they aren't there. There is little cost to keeping little used stops open and available.
xracy 4y ago
This feels like a positive feedback loop (not the good kind), where the more parking is needed, the more people feel they need to drive. And the more people feel they need to drive, the more they need parking and the more space between stores gets added.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Have the parking minimums actually been increased lately, though?
  - xracy 4y ago
    I sure hope not, but that doesn't really solve the parking issues? You need a parking space for your car permanently, and one for every place you might visit. (up to as many people as are likely to be visiting it). In a popular place to visit, that could be a lot if people don't have some other way to get there. So, you have to build in extra space between you and that place to account for parking, and the roads required to get there.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      My point is that if the parking minimums haven't gone up, then the loop you describe doesn't actually exist, since more space between stores doesn't actually get added.
      - xracy 4y ago
        What? If the law that requires an absolute minimum number of parking spaces hasn't increased, then the total number of parking spaces hasn't increased? People can build more parking spaces than the parking minimums? Also, Parking minimums themselves increase parking for new businesses? Any new structure you build being subject to parking minimums contributes to the loop I'm describing.
  - dublinben 4y ago
    Much of a city will predate these regulations. Even without increasing the minimums, as grandfathered properties are redeveloped they must increase their parking. New developments will also bring up the amount of parking as they comply with current minimums.
0x53 4y ago
I think of the hardest things to believe when I learned about it was that almost everywhere in the United States has laws that force anyone building a business to build parking. Often the parking has to be more in square foot terms then the building itself! In my town if you build a place that serves alcohol you have to build more parking than for any other type of building. It’s crazy to me that we mandate paving over large sections of our town. I used to blame Walmart for moving into an area and buying up local businesses and destroying them to build a parking lot, but now I know they were legally required to do that!
- spockz 4y ago
  Aside from that. If you sell alcohol you need more parking spots? That seems like promoting drink and drive.
keenboy 4y ago
I think the answer to this is to adopt Land Value Taxes. This would naturally incentivize property improvement and dis-incentivize people from owning large swaths of unproductive land. Communities would grow upward before they grow outward. Infrastructure costs would drop significantly and communities (over time) would become more walkable.
favflam 4y ago
Step 1 to fix out of control real estate prices and suburbia depression is not public transit. Step 1 is to deprioritize cars. No more free parking, no single family home zoning, free-for-all zoning around train stations and bus stops. Step 2 is to keep deprioritizing cars. Ban highway expansion beyond 2 lanes in both directions. Match demand and supply with tolls. Excess revenue goes towards funding public transit. Step 3 is to fund public transit. Private sector will see massive opportunity to build out private bus lines and trains (see Brightline in Florida). The real play is not ticket revenue, but real estate appreciation around public transit. Republicans should get around this idea with private equity guys. This is a no brainer to me. In conclusion, the key to this morass to make car owners suffer and switch to real estate appreciation to incentivize private development of transit systems.
- xracy 4y ago
  Yeah, real estate appreciation has its own costs that we're going to pay for down the line... in particular increased costs of housing/living is causing more homelessness.
  - favflam 4y ago
    The increase in density will cancel out the increase in real estate cost (land). In fact, capital investment in increasing the output from a piece of land is the correct way to profit from real estate, not just squatting as people profit in current markets.
- bojangleslover 4y ago
  Step 1: "Control" house prices (how?) Step 2: Change ALL zoning and monetize ALL parking spaces in a country of >0.3B people overnight Step 3: Create money from thin air to build transit, thereby reversing Step 1
cafard 4y ago
Downtown Washington, DC, has plenty of parking (especially since the pandemic). However, for the most part it is under office buildings.
oliwarner 4y ago
"Maps show how a lack of forward planning, well-structured free parking and public link-transport cause retroactively developed parking to be a commodity that is valued higher than a business sector nobody can drive to" The rest of the world fixes this by banning cars in these areas, making it a nice place to be, providing out-of-town link-transport (eg Park & Ride) for people driving in. The car is eating US cities but only because people don't have a better option.
kazinator 4y ago
Surely, new development can hide the parking in multi-level underground parkades. That solution isn't being rolled in those specific lots for whatever reason. We would have to interview the land owners to understand why they don't develop it into something more useful, and possibly with more parking than it has now. Might it be they are hanging on to the land as an investment, hoping to get more money in the future, and the taxation of parking lots is favorable, not to mention operating costs? Next to no utility bills, no roofs to patch, ...
JeremyNT 4y ago
Link to the actual tool: https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/
- z3ugma 4y ago
  I checked out some of the 50 cities they name on here and there's a curious way they decide what counts as "central city" for some of them. e.g. Denver's map does cover the central business district but it misses a lot of the neatly adjacent places that _are_ designed for people and not cars. If the whole thesis is "make our downtowns places that are desirable to get to, and not just office parks" then the raw percentages are a little disingenuous. Mind, the root cause that only office towers and their associated parking can really be built in that CBD...that's the big problem
  - JeremyNT 4y ago
    I agree, I don't think the way they distill this to a single number and present it as an apples-to-apples comparison is very helpful. There's too much variability in what the "central city" is, and I think it's quite challenging to determine a useful number to compare between metros as they are laid out so very differently. The maps themselves are interesting and potentially even useful, on the other hand.
wilg 4y ago
Based on the comments in here (and on related stories) I think the US transportation conversation needs to change in some way. Mostly, it's a lot of people complaining about cars. Which is fine, I mostly agree. But the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and parroting half-remembered tweets about induced demand, finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines, and good old-fashioned liberal American self-flagellation. We're past the point where it's transgressive to point out the problems with cars, we need to actually have some kind of a sensible discussion that involves practical considerations. In particular, anti-car people need to have a good handle on why people actually like cars. Otherwise, it'll just be more of trying to punish people, like the guy in this thread who says "the key to this morass to make car owners suffer". We've got to do better than that!
- kohidavez 4y ago
  Yea! Won’t someone finally think about the cars?
  - wilg 4y ago
    This is an example of the toxic bullshit I'm unhappy with.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  One major issue is that if you as an individual attempt to go car-free, the resulting lifestyle makes cars into such an incredible intrusion into your daily life that it is hard not to become more radicalized. That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off. If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.
ThinkBeat 4y ago
From many cities I have visited and some I have lived one of the major problems are sports stadium and related are located within dense cities. When you need to shuffle in 10.000 to 100.000 cars (at worse, none of these have enough parking spaces for it) you need parking spaces. Moving these venues outside of the cites is a good solution. It does not require forced behavioural modifications. Then the city can arrange busses to and from the stadium for those that need it. Or a high speed dedicated train. Any other establishment with a huge number of visitor should be moved out as well. Huge hospitals are also entities that take up a huge amount of space and can have a lot of parking. These should be moved outside the city to lower density areas. The space these things take up, and their huge parking lots can then be converted into parks and green lungs within the city. Greed real estate developers who wish to increase density for big profit should be barred from any activity. The density is already far too high. It is a win win situation all the way around.
- slifin 4y ago
  All that does is create more car dependent infrastructure No one will walk anywhere if you keep artificially spacing everything out Watch videos from not just bikes and strong towns there are plenty of solutions That don't amount to build more expensive tarmac that has to be replaced every 25 years
- AlecSchueler 4y ago
  You can also build solutions with public transport hubs. The Netherlands can have large stadiums and venues without giving their cities to cars. Look at the Zandvoort grand prix. The media was amazed that the whole (small, historic) town was cleared of the almost 200,000 attendees about an hour after the event. Compare to the Circuit of Americas in Austin which had people still stuck in the carpark several hours after the race ended, still in a queue to get out to join the traffic jam on the road. Building roads and carparks to fight your traffic problems only creates more traffic that will become a problem later. It's "just one more lane" type of thinking.
bojangleslover 4y ago
In America, driving is far and away the best UX. You go where you want when you want with up to four passengers even in a very small starter car. With the exception of Manhattan and a few other big cities, cost per mile is far lower than transit. Obviously traffic sucks. Nobody likes traffic. I refuse to sit in traffic unless I am picking someone up from the airport. Even in the UK, it's often cheaper to drive. The other day I drove into Central London (!) from Cambridge in a VW Polo. I calculated the cost per mile, including the car depreciation and the onerous and ever-increasing vehicle tax, and it was STILL a far better deal than the train. Not to mention the non-negligible chance of an encounter with a risky, mentally ill passenger on transit. My wife was harassed by a man with piss-soaked sweatpants on the SF Bart and nearly missed her flight because she had to get off early. And that ticket was not cheap. I've been called homophobic and racial slurs on the London tube, for wearing short shorts on the way to go play squash. OF COURSE these events are few and far between but in my car they never happen. Despite this, the subway is still a better UX in Manhattan and London. When I'm in these places I don't drive (obviously). In the Randstad, I also never drive. Because the UX is great. When I'm in my home in North Carolina, I drive everywhere. It's great. Everything is 10 minutes away. There's always parking. Massive boost to quality of life. Cars are not some revelations-esque phenomenon and parking lots do not "eat" anything. They can always be converted to decks, as they literally always are when the demand is there. There is nothing wrong with that.
- nerdchum 4y ago
  Hate to say it but homeless people and sketch people have ruined west coast cities mass transit for me. Im uncomfortable like 50% of the time riding San Fran, L.A., or San Diego mass transit. Riding Chicago mass transit is nice because the cold weather eliminates most of the homeless people in one way or another. One possible solution is a premium model where there are Premium edition trains that you can pay a little extra for and have security and be around normal middle class people and relax and read a book. I.e. have a capitalist run transit service trains along side the government one. I'd ride transit a lot more if this was a thing. I'll stick to my car until west coast mass transit has figured out a way to where I don't have to sit next to a person who has literally peed them selves and looks desperate enough to rob me. (This doesn't seem to be a high bar)
steelframe 4y ago
I'm reading in the comments on this HN story about how things like lack of showers or longer distances or hills make bicycling impractical. As a lifelong cyclist and a recent electric bike owner, I view recent technological advancement in electrified micro-mobility to be a game changer. I've made a significant investment in a custom-built steel frame electric bike that I have outfitted with racks and panniers for shopping trips and commuting to the office. As a former Trek customer who hasn't been inclined to purchase another bike from them, they still send me their new product line magazines. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I was astonished when I grabbed the latest edition from my mailbox yesterday and thumbed through it. Trek is going ALL IN on electric bicycles. Pages 4-5 have a big flow chart helping people decide what type of electric bike to buy, depending on factors such as whether you're on dirt trails or paved streets, whether you will be transporting cargo and children, whether you value speed or comfort, and so on. Non-electric bikes are now sort of an afterthought. If you flip to the back of the magazine you'll still find them, but the electric versions of several models are still interspersed. For example they have the Domane SLR (a model I still have in my garage), but on the next page they pimp the electric Domane+. Their blitz on electric bikes might be working for me, since I'm seriously considering being a Trek customer again and "trading up" for it, in spite of the bad experiences I've had trying to get them to support the Domane SLR they sold me in 2017. America is facing a reckoning with its transportation infrastructure and car culture. Electric bikes are so compelling in terms of cost, convenience, fun, and practicality, more and more people will be riding them on the "stroads" and will be demanding changes so they feel safer doing so. If that means taking away lanes and parking spots from vehicular traffic, adding separated cycle tracks, reducing speed limits, adding traffic-calming measures, introducing safe-passing laws, and stepping up enforcement and penalties, then in my book that can't happen soon enough.
- bootlooped 4y ago
  We have a long way to go. In the US I think bikes are still primarily seen as toys for either children or upper middle class adults. Car culture is deeply ingrained here, and discouraging personal automobile use is going to be seen by a large part of the population as practically anti-American. There's also the fact that we have a flood of low quality and outright dangerous electric micro-mobility devices catching on fire. On the hopeful side, I see e-bikes as being part of the wave towards sustainability, a swing back towards childhood independence, and increased interest in fitness. We'll see how far it goes, but there's going to be resistance every step of the way.
ETH_start 4y ago
I sometimes wonder, if building underground parking lots and tunnels becomes affordable due to advances in boring machines, AI and robots, how far underground could you build? How many stories worth of space underground would be practical?

270 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

Columbus is sprawling, sad to see so much of that from parking and other pavement. As a driver though it is much better than Cleveland. Ultimately I do wish we had more biking trails and pedestrian friendly cities in Ohio. And I'd trade my car in for an electric bike if my city made it happen.

fnordian_slip 4y ago

As someone who visited the US as a kid and was even then shocked by the amount of space dedicated to cars, seeing this information on a map still blew me away. The space needed for these parking lots basically guarantees you can not walk or bike to get anywhere. I believe that unless there's big investment in public transportation, there might be no way for these cities to break out of this vicious circle. And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway, garnered so much attention even with its obvious downsides, so having actually useful public transportation should be a no-brainer imho.

unsignedint 4y ago
The concept of a 'big investment' takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to public transportation in the United States, especially considering the vast geographical expanse of many metropolitan areas. In most cases, unless one resides in the heart of a city, public transportation isn't a practical option. This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently.
- slaymaker1907 4y ago
  I think that’s part of the point. This vast sprawl is somewhat caused by our over reliance on private vehicles. Also, a factor of more than 2 for travel times is VERY bad for public transit, even in the US.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I’ve previously written up “what would it take to make a 9 AM meeting at my office?” It’s a factor of 4 or 5 worse via public transit and I live in a probably top 5 (definitely top 10) US city as it pertains to our public transit system (Boston). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31723197
    - htag 4y ago
      At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike would be cheaper and close to thirty minutes. It would be healthier. It wouldn't require a parking spot.
      - quesera 4y ago
        > At 8.5 miles a commute by bicycle or e-bike GP said Boston.
        htag 4y ago
        I've never been. Are bicycles illegal there?
        quesera 4y ago
        Yes.
        Dylan16807 4y ago
        One of the first search results for Boston bicycle declares it the fourth best biking city in the US, so you're going to need to be more specific about whatever criticism you're exaggerating.
        jen20 4y ago
        Boston sometimes gets 2 feet of snow in a single day, and often has sub-freezing temperatures. People just get on with life (but not really on e-bikes).
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Because the US insists transit need to look like a big sexy expensive two mezzanine underground platform, when a decidedly unsexy painted bus lane on the already existing wide arterial would offer most of the same utility for orders of magnitude less money.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    All of the commenters are missing a huge point. US commuter rail projects are hugely corrupt enterprises. Just look at Honolulu for a blatant example of corruption in infrastructure spending (their train NO-ONE wanted)
    - kjkjadksj 4y ago
      I’ve heard sometimes metros are forced to contract with certain contractors in particular because they have headhunted all the talent qualified to interpret the metros own requirements. You can imagine how much abuse this situation can lead to. The US needs to drop the contractor model and just directly staff labor for public works. If there is enough work going around to maintain a contracting company, then there’s therefore enough work to staff a public rail building division, and build out some standardized and therefore cheaper designs for this infrastructure.
- magicalist 4y ago
  > This is evident in the fact that a 20-minute drive can easily transform into a commute of 90 minutes or longer when relying on public transit. I truly wish there were a way for me to avoid driving and still get to my destination efficiently It's not like it's the natural state of things that 25% of the Atlanta city center is dedicated to parking so we just have to accept the downsides. There's a reason everything is so spread out and so it's difficult to walk places or design efficient public transit, and it's the same reason driving and parking your car is the most efficient transportation method.
syntheweave 4y ago
I feel assured that the transition is going to be pretty quick, watching Waymos and Cruises going around SF and dealing with some challenging traffic situations and weather(Waymo is definitely better at not getting stuck, but the gap is not insurmountable). As soon as they proliferate at scale, the risk profile changes such that you can bike everywhere safely, and parking is no longer a major urban issue, because the fleet is going to have a more flexible usage pattern whether or not individuals own the vehicles: instead of one space per vehicle per destination, it's going to be compressed down to parking space for the neighborhood plus drop-off zones. So to me, it's obvious that the market is going at the problem just about as fast as it can, and once the adoption S-curve hits, "need to drive" relaxes because other potential uses aren't being suppressed. You'll still have many instances where mass transit and active transit present a lower cost structure than taxi, and they'll have a lot of leeway to grow.
- htag 4y ago
  Maybe. From the outside looking in self driving cars are vaporware that are very late on delivery. I wouldn't want to bet my city's architecture on this promise. It might be nice if they deliver on this promise though.
avar 4y ago
The answer to this particular problem isn't public transportation. There's places elsewhere in the developed world where there's no public transportation, and everyone uses a car for longer trips. You can usually still cross the street safely as a pedestrian, and expect to reliably find a sidewalk next to the road. US roads, intersections, parking spots etc. are also absurdly large by the standards of most other countries, it all adds up.
- klabb3 4y ago
  > The answer to this particular problem isn't public transportation. Public transport is not a self-goal, but it’s the best way by far to reduce the spatial requirements for transportation. In particular subways and commuter trains can move an absolutely insane amount of people for even the largest metropolitan areas, without obliterating the ability to walk and getting quickly from point A to B. Others include having motorcycles and bicycles for individual transport. That can work in small cities but usually impact walkability anyways. If you look at south east asia for instance, often lacking in good public transport, but having a lot of motorcycles in large cities making pedestrian movement hard.
  - seer 4y ago
    As someone who recently experienced hanoi traffic as both pedestrian and motorcyclist - I can attest that it can be scary, but after a certain learning period not that bad. The big problem there was the lack of sidewalks for pedestrians so you kinda had to go into traffic even if you were just following the streets. Crossing even the busiest boulevards was actually easy, if a bit nerve racking. The flow of scooters just parts around you as you cross, giving you the “I am Moses” feel - you only have to be visible and consistent with your movement. Honestly they should just get rid of all the zebra crossings and pedestrian lights - those don’t work anyway, and just build lots of pedestrian islands everywhere and they would be golden, oh and ban cars. The amount of people those scooters move throughout hanoi is just staggering - even if they are a bit slow, they make up for it being like an organic flow that doesn’t stop for anything as it can just ride around it.
- ntonozzi 4y ago
m463 4y ago
I know many females who won't park far and walk somewhere because they don't feel safe. This goes 5x at night. Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population?
- vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  As a man I don’t like the perception that I’m under suspicion of being a threat to half the population. And I shouldn’t be. The vast majority of violence against women is perpetuated by men they know, not strangers [1]. Domestic violence is not a reason why our cities should be filled with 1-ton death machines that spew soot, carbon monoxide, and nitrous oxide. Cars don’t solve that problem. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-violence-against-women-2022-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americas-deadly-epidemic-vi...
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    The potential downside for a woman who misjudges a dangerous man is far more severe than the potential downside for a man who is misjudged as dangerous by a woman.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > Do folks realize that walking somewhere in a city is like running a gauntlet to some of the population? Which is more of a reason to have more people walk: the more people in area going hither and thither the less isolated and vulnerable a person will feel. People often feel most vulnerable when they feel isolated, which is what happens on a lifeless street. If a street has a sidewalk cafes, bars, restaurants, and people waiting in lines to get into clubs, then there is a feeling of community.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    This /\ My wife and I a couple years back moved to the very edge of the suburbs. Like, across the street is forest preserves, and behind us is a river. We have only spoken with fewer than 10 neighbors since we moved in 2 years ago. Her, and her sisters all talk about it being like a "serial killer neighborhood". Even my fishing buddy nextdoor sort of rolls his eyes about how his wife says similar things sometimes. But I tell my fishing buddy: You'll never understand how vulnerable women feel. Ever. Honestly, being afraid of a place where nobody is around is statistically safer - people don't lock their doors in my neighborhood. I've started also not locking doors. It's that kind of place. That has been a point of friction for my wife and I too - I have been really diligent prior to this, because I always lived in really populous areas. My wife, thankfully, has never been a victim of any kind of violence. But she has had experiences where she avoided that. Once time some big guy late at night followed her into her apartment building asking to use her phone to call for a tow truck or some nonsense. She knew it was BS, but gave it to him anyways. He ran away. Men will never be able to understand how vulnerable women feel. We simply do not experience the world in the same way. I'll give another example to help anyone still reading get it: I once went to a haunted house (the Rob Zombie one in Chicagoland) with my buddy and his wife. Probably 10 times, actors working there tried to jump-scare her, and not me or my buddy. Every goddamned time. Whether she was in front, or behind, or between us. She does not scare easily, so she was just really annoyed. Predatory men see women as easy victims in ways they do not other men. > females They prefer "women", just FYI.
donatj 4y ago
> The hyperloop, a ridiculously bad alternative to a subway The idea was for the Hyperloop was to do the 400 miles straight shot from LA to San Francisco at speeds up to 300mph. I don't see how a subway could do anything comparable.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  I agree with you, but I would add: I don't see how a hyperloop could do that either.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    Good point! My idea is to have people simply rocket launched via pods from LA to SF over the air about 200-300 meters off the ground on average. Sure, it’s unsafe, and probably has a ton of reasons that it won’t work. But isn’t it an innovative way to solve transportation problems that definitely isn’t a tactic intended to downplay public transit in CA so that my totally unrelated car business has less of a risk of succeeding?
- bagels 4y ago
  The state can't even build a "high speed" (or as other countries might call it, regular speed) train track between those places.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    The CAHSR plans were for ~350 km/h rail speed, which is basically the highest end of high-speed rail. It's the ~200 km/h speed of the NEC that is at best barely-high-speed rail.
    - bagels 4y ago
      The plans were for that. It's not built, and much of it, if built, is now not planned to support that speed.
- aeyes 4y ago
sublinear 4y ago
> seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. Ever see that monorail episode of The Simpsons? Yeah that's where we're at. There's a strong desire from many people to slow things down and be more deliberate and careful before any more big changes. There's a sense of disillusionment about "progressivism" amongst even those who crave the most righteous of vibes. This is a weird time to be alive and people just don't want to wake up to construction crews ironically destroying their cities to make way for yet another wave of gentrification pretending not to be.
kortilla 4y ago
> And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. Because the majority of the people in the US don’t actually want to ride public transportation and they like houses. It’s not that difficult to grasp.
- rchaud 4y ago
  That's like saying Americans love working at McDonald's and Walmart because they are America's largest employers. Americans not liking public transportation, and not willing to fund public transportation are two different things.
- aquaticsunset 4y ago
  I'll counter this - the majority of the people in the US want to live somewhere and get around in the least difficult method. Due to decades of policymaking, that happens to be houses and cars. It's very nearsighted to think our model is the penultimate in structuring society. Plenty of people are happy, fulfilled, and productive living in apartments & townhouses while taking trains to work.
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    Why would someone prefer to live like ants? Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space. People can be happy in an apartment but most would trade that in for a house they could afford it.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Why would someone prefer to live like ants? Why would someone prefer to live like a snail? > Moving from a large place with a forest backyard to a tiny apartment is a lower standard of living. You live in an apartment and trade away personal space and still have to take a train to work where you get little personal space. A house does not imply a large backyard. Suburbs are the bigger problem, and they don't usually have much forest. And apartments don't have to be tiny. If you're comparing against a house in a similar location, that buys a lot of apartment space.
loeg 4y ago
Biking here in the states isn't a problem from a distance perspective -- the problems are road safety and destination security (bike theft is a big problem but typically not valued by police because of the nominally low dollar impact). Walking, yeah.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  That depends on the city, and where in it you live. If you live in a large suburban area (like many Americans), then biking distance is a huge problem. Sure, making an actually tractable amount of public transit in every suburb would resolve that problem, but that's a huge investment, and the overwhelming majority of Americans can't even imagine what the result might look like.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    I would argue biking distance isn't the problem in suburbia, it's biking safety. My rather spread out suburb is about 8 miles across. That's less than an hour for any cyclist and a fit cyclist could do it in half that time. The trouble is that most of those miles are on 45 mph stroads with either no bike lane or a thin stripe of paint for protection from cars and it's full of debris most of the year.
    - thomastjeffery 4y ago
      > That's less than an hour for any cyclist and a fit cyclist could do it in half that time. And how long for a car? 5min? 15min? If you have a car, then you will likely use it for some percentage of trips. That's a pretty serious motivation to not become "a fit cyclist". All of these problems work together. This also works in the inverse: a good solution would do something to resolve all of these problems.
- antifa 4y ago
  Google maps says going to work would be a 6 hour bike ride. There is technically a train available to for half of the journey.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
> And that seems to be politically unfeasible at the moment, for reasons that elude me. That's because you are looking from the outside in. Every person who has grown up in the US has grown up in this situation. Having to drive nearly everywhere is our version of normal. Public transit in the US sucks. In practically every city that even has it, it's the worst way to get anywhere. It's often a last resort: a tool for the desperately poor. On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. It's a fool's errand to convince most people that they should drive and take public transit all in one trip, even if it would save them time and gas. There is more to this situation than the vicious cycle that perpetuates it. If we can be clear about how we intend to accommodate that reality, we might be able to do something about it politically.
- pharmakom 4y ago
  The UK used to have rail links from all of the small villages into the cities. It was an expensive system, but now that has been ripped out for decades we can see that the alternative is far worse.
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  > On top of that, most of the US is made up of small towns that public transit wouldn't make any sense for. A significant percentage of Americans must regularly travel between a major city and a small town. That means they must have a car, and a place in the city to park it. Hang on though: I can't tell my neighbouring city to push for more housing because, while I want to live there in the future, the people that live there now like their lack of housing. Similarly, why can't the people that currently live in the city tell their local politicians that spending all this space for parking the residents don't need is stupid?
  - Avshalom 4y ago
    people commuting in is a large part of the work force in cities, tourism and generally shopping are important for their economies, also a lot of that parking space is needed by the residents because chicken/egg they all have cars too.
vGPU 4y ago
The last time I took a bus there was a homeless man openly touching himself. The time before a fight broke out between a couple of drunks. Can you understand why I avoid public transport at all costs and don’t wish to expose my family to it?
- foxyv 4y ago
  I can understand for sure. However, you may want to consider why you only saw drunk and homeless people on the bus. It has nothing to do with public transit, but it has a lot to do with parking lots and how we build our cities. Cars insulate us from reality and allow us to ignore our problems. Our children will not be so lucky.

sdwr 4y ago

So true. Thinking about my city, it's gross how much space is used up by parking. Half the street space, plus lots for every store + destination. Self-driving cars will fix this, no? A combo of taxis, automatic parking garages, and just driving itself home to wait.

slaymaker1907 4y ago
It’ll be worse because the average number of people per vehicle will be less than 1.

lotsoweiners 4y ago

Who cares? If Americans want room to drive and get places and park then let them. If my suburban town 25 miles away from a major city’s downtown got rid of streets and places to park, me and 95% of the other residents would just move another 15 miles further.

voisin 4y ago
> Who cares? If Americans want room to drive and get places and park then let them. It’s terrible for the environment and leads to soulless shitty suburbs rather than vibrant, dense neighbourhoods.
- donatj 4y ago
  How is having some open space worse for the environment than being tightly packed? That seems baseless
  - ripley12 4y ago
    Scenario 1: lots of land dedicated to car storage, people are spread out, commutes are longer and must be done by car Scenario 2: less land dedicated to parking, people live closer together, commutes are shorter and can more often be done by bike/transit/walking It's pretty clear which of those is better for the environment.
    - ipaddr 4y ago
      Which one is better for your environment? Pollution filled cities or open country air?
      - nayuki 4y ago
        Cars cause the pollution. Cities would be cleaner if suburbanites didn't drive in.
        4y ago

wasabinator 4y ago

[flagged]

ecliptik 4y ago

I've been fascinated with Milliron’s Department Store [1] from the late 1940s and it's use of parking on the roof of the department store. At the time "autotopia" was something developers cater too and seeing how architecture at the time responded is something in itself. Sadly the rooftop lot was removed with the rear X ramps blocked off, and the store is now a relatively generic Kolhs. In Southern California though a lot of the parking lots are getting retrofitted with solar, which while still taking up space, at least providing energy and shade. 1. https://www.gruenassociates.com/project/millirons-department-store/ https://www.gruenassociates.com/project/millirons-department...

steponlego 4y ago

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rascul 4y ago

The title says cities but it's really about city centers. Edit: This is relevant because US cities tend to include a large amount of residential areas that don't have parking lots. When city centers are commercial areas that serve the city and surrounding areas inside and outside of the city, people are going to drive there and they need a place to park. There are potential ways to make parking less concentrated in the center though, which includes public transportation, one thing we're often not great at in the US.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
Large amounts of residential areas filled with single family homes, all of which have their own private parking lots.
- rascul 4y ago
  Maybe they all do, maybe they don't. Maybe it's more than 1/5, but maybe it's less. The article doesn't touch on it.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Look around you. How many SFH homes have been built in the last 80 years that don't have a driveway or an off-street parking spot? Maybe 1%? Probably far fewer than that.
    - rascul 4y ago
      The article title claimed that 1/5 of cities are parking lots but that wasn't what the article was about. I doubt that 1/5 of cities are parking lots (including driveways) but reading the article doesn't attempt to show that.
- erik_seaberg 4y ago
  California relaxed the requirements on converting a garage to housing, which potentially doubles the drivers while removing parking spaces.

seri4l 4y ago

Looking on the bright side all that open space means there is more sunlight, a scarce resource in many cities.

notsound 4y ago
In what cities is sunlight a "scarce resource"? Many cities actively plant trees to create shade. Also, who the hell sunbathes in a parking lot? Nice pun tho
- seri4l 4y ago
  When you live in front of a tall building that blocks the Sun the days are shorter and it's harder to keep the house warm during the Winter. Maybe I went too far calling it a "scarce resource" but tall buildings that are too close to each other increase the lighting and heating costs a great deal.
  - kirel33 4y ago
    A lot of European countries tend to regulate the height of buildings to avoid such problems, density doesn't have to come at the expense of basic standards of living

deleted 4y ago

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htag 4y ago

I like these maps. I do think it glosses over many details of vertical parking. It's hard to compare how tall the parking garages are. It's unclear if it covers underground parking for buildings with other uses or not. It's hard to determine exactly how much parking is provided in the red shaded regions. It's hard to determine what are parking garages and what are parking lots. I also would have liked to compare street parking options in various cities, but this doesn't seem to document it. Street parking can have just a big of an impact as garages and lots, as it leads to wider roads, people hunting for a spot, and a hazard for bicyclist.

causality0 4y ago
Street parking can have just a big of an impact as garages and lots, as it leads to wider roads, people hunting for a spot, and a hazard for bicyclist. Street parking has always seemed slightly insane to me. You take a dense city that's already tough to get around by road and then you sacrifice half your road area for people to park on. Instead of one car park entrance you have to keep an eye on for emerging vehicles, any one of a thousand cars could suddenly move into the road with no notice. It's a safety and efficiency nightmare.
- LanceH 4y ago
  The smell of urine is less present with street parking. And I'm not trying to be glib. Off hours especially, parking garages can be places people don't want to go.

kbos87 4y ago

There's an entire genre of anti-car content popular on social media right now that completely overlooks the reality of how most US cities are dispersed. I agree that the utopian ideal of a car-free existence is appealing, but it's far from realistic for a lot of places and there's an awful lot of shaming and shunning going on of regular people living their lives right now.

kortilla 4y ago
Trends come and go, but the suburbs will continue to grow. Anti-car posts are fun because they are escapism from the worst part of the suburbs. However, you lose all of the best parts when you switch to the current alternatives (expensive density and shared public transportation).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ripley12 4y ago
I don't see the "shaming and shunning" aspect much, myself. When I do see it it's usually directed at people who are driving dangerously or fighting policy that would make it easier to live without a car.
xracy 4y ago
It's not about shaming and shunning. It's about educating, so that people are more amenable to non-car-centric changes to public transit and their cities that will improve everyone's way of life. I think the thing about Public Transit, is if you truly love driving your car, you should still be in favor of public transit, because better public transit means less traffic for you.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Someone has to pay for transit and it usually comes from drivers
  - 4y ago

DangitBobby 4y ago

I'm curious if there are any bright ideas on practical first and last mile transportation for people who want to take the bus or train. Say my house is 1.5-3 miles from the closest bus stop and my destination is 1.5-3 miles from its closest bus stop. Should I be bringing my scooter on the bus? Is there room for everyone's scooter on the bus? Curious to hear from people who use the bus or train daily, how do you get to and from the bus stop in a timely manner and in the cold.

thomastjeffery 4y ago
Add more bus stops. Beyond that, I think the most honest answer is, "Wear a coat, and give yourself more time."
htag 4y ago
1. Bus stops can be as cheap as a sign on the road. We should embrace cheaper bus stops to build more bus stops. Another benefit of cheap bus stops is under-utilized stops can be removed with less investment lost. 2. There's rooms for lots of scooters on buses. It's pretty common for there to be places for bicycles on buses too. Have you been inside of a city bus? There pretty big. 3. Real estate near train stations is almost always more expensive. This is a type of amenity you have to look into while choosing your home.
- 29083011397778 4y ago
  > Another benefit of cheap bus stops is under-utilized stops can be removed with less investment lost According to the public transit authority around here, if you remove a bus stop (due to, say, a drop in transit usage) and try to bring it back later (after usage of transit goes back up), it can take up to five years to see ridership recognize that, and start to use the stop at the same rate as when it was removed. It may be cheaper to leave the stop there long-term.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Buses can drive past unused stops as if they aren't there. There is little cost to keeping little used stops open and available.

xracy 4y ago

This feels like a positive feedback loop (not the good kind), where the more parking is needed, the more people feel they need to drive. And the more people feel they need to drive, the more they need parking and the more space between stores gets added.

josephcsible 4y ago
Have the parking minimums actually been increased lately, though?
- xracy 4y ago
  I sure hope not, but that doesn't really solve the parking issues? You need a parking space for your car permanently, and one for every place you might visit. (up to as many people as are likely to be visiting it). In a popular place to visit, that could be a lot if people don't have some other way to get there. So, you have to build in extra space between you and that place to account for parking, and the roads required to get there.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    My point is that if the parking minimums haven't gone up, then the loop you describe doesn't actually exist, since more space between stores doesn't actually get added.
    - xracy 4y ago
      What? If the law that requires an absolute minimum number of parking spaces hasn't increased, then the total number of parking spaces hasn't increased? People can build more parking spaces than the parking minimums? Also, Parking minimums themselves increase parking for new businesses? Any new structure you build being subject to parking minimums contributes to the loop I'm describing.
- dublinben 4y ago
  Much of a city will predate these regulations. Even without increasing the minimums, as grandfathered properties are redeveloped they must increase their parking. New developments will also bring up the amount of parking as they comply with current minimums.

0x53 4y ago

I think of the hardest things to believe when I learned about it was that almost everywhere in the United States has laws that force anyone building a business to build parking. Often the parking has to be more in square foot terms then the building itself! In my town if you build a place that serves alcohol you have to build more parking than for any other type of building. It’s crazy to me that we mandate paving over large sections of our town. I used to blame Walmart for moving into an area and buying up local businesses and destroying them to build a parking lot, but now I know they were legally required to do that!

spockz 4y ago
Aside from that. If you sell alcohol you need more parking spots? That seems like promoting drink and drive.

keenboy 4y ago

I think the answer to this is to adopt Land Value Taxes. This would naturally incentivize property improvement and dis-incentivize people from owning large swaths of unproductive land. Communities would grow upward before they grow outward. Infrastructure costs would drop significantly and communities (over time) would become more walkable.

favflam 4y ago

Step 1 to fix out of control real estate prices and suburbia depression is not public transit. Step 1 is to deprioritize cars. No more free parking, no single family home zoning, free-for-all zoning around train stations and bus stops. Step 2 is to keep deprioritizing cars. Ban highway expansion beyond 2 lanes in both directions. Match demand and supply with tolls. Excess revenue goes towards funding public transit. Step 3 is to fund public transit. Private sector will see massive opportunity to build out private bus lines and trains (see Brightline in Florida). The real play is not ticket revenue, but real estate appreciation around public transit. Republicans should get around this idea with private equity guys. This is a no brainer to me. In conclusion, the key to this morass to make car owners suffer and switch to real estate appreciation to incentivize private development of transit systems.

xracy 4y ago
Yeah, real estate appreciation has its own costs that we're going to pay for down the line... in particular increased costs of housing/living is causing more homelessness.
- favflam 4y ago
  The increase in density will cancel out the increase in real estate cost (land). In fact, capital investment in increasing the output from a piece of land is the correct way to profit from real estate, not just squatting as people profit in current markets.
bojangleslover 4y ago
Step 1: "Control" house prices (how?) Step 2: Change ALL zoning and monetize ALL parking spaces in a country of >0.3B people overnight Step 3: Create money from thin air to build transit, thereby reversing Step 1

cafard 4y ago

Downtown Washington, DC, has plenty of parking (especially since the pandemic). However, for the most part it is under office buildings.

oliwarner 4y ago

"Maps show how a lack of forward planning, well-structured free parking and public link-transport cause retroactively developed parking to be a commodity that is valued higher than a business sector nobody can drive to" The rest of the world fixes this by banning cars in these areas, making it a nice place to be, providing out-of-town link-transport (eg Park & Ride) for people driving in. The car is eating US cities but only because people don't have a better option.

kazinator 4y ago

Surely, new development can hide the parking in multi-level underground parkades. That solution isn't being rolled in those specific lots for whatever reason. We would have to interview the land owners to understand why they don't develop it into something more useful, and possibly with more parking than it has now. Might it be they are hanging on to the land as an investment, hoping to get more money in the future, and the taxation of parking lots is favorable, not to mention operating costs? Next to no utility bills, no roofs to patch, ...

JeremyNT 4y ago

Link to the actual tool: https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/ https://parkingreform.org/resources/parking-lot-map/

z3ugma 4y ago
I checked out some of the 50 cities they name on here and there's a curious way they decide what counts as "central city" for some of them. e.g. Denver's map does cover the central business district but it misses a lot of the neatly adjacent places that _are_ designed for people and not cars. If the whole thesis is "make our downtowns places that are desirable to get to, and not just office parks" then the raw percentages are a little disingenuous. Mind, the root cause that only office towers and their associated parking can really be built in that CBD...that's the big problem
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  I agree, I don't think the way they distill this to a single number and present it as an apples-to-apples comparison is very helpful. There's too much variability in what the "central city" is, and I think it's quite challenging to determine a useful number to compare between metros as they are laid out so very differently. The maps themselves are interesting and potentially even useful, on the other hand.

wilg 4y ago

Based on the comments in here (and on related stories) I think the US transportation conversation needs to change in some way. Mostly, it's a lot of people complaining about cars. Which is fine, I mostly agree. But the anti-car stuff is becoming extremely toxic and parroting half-remembered tweets about induced demand, finding slightly different ways to describe cars as death machines, and good old-fashioned liberal American self-flagellation. We're past the point where it's transgressive to point out the problems with cars, we need to actually have some kind of a sensible discussion that involves practical considerations. In particular, anti-car people need to have a good handle on why people actually like cars. Otherwise, it'll just be more of trying to punish people, like the guy in this thread who says "the key to this morass to make car owners suffer". We've got to do better than that!

kohidavez 4y ago
Yea! Won’t someone finally think about the cars?
- wilg 4y ago
  This is an example of the toxic bullshit I'm unhappy with.
actionablefiber 4y ago
One major issue is that if you as an individual attempt to go car-free, the resulting lifestyle makes cars into such an incredible intrusion into your daily life that it is hard not to become more radicalized. That has been my story at least. My bus is late and slow, because it's stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic from all these people driving motor vehicles with a single occupant. I need ear protection on my commute because the 14th Street Bridge into DC pairs pedestrians and cyclists side-by-side with 60mph motor traffic with no noise protections. I lost a day at work because I got hit on my bike by a truck driver who was on his phone, and had to go to the ER. I am shaken and my heart rate is pounding and I am pondering my own mortality because someone gunned their engine through a left turn while I was walking across the street with a pedestrian signal - they accelerated instead of stopping to yield and I had to jump out of the way to save my own life while they sped off. If you recognize how awful cars are for the environment and how they make city life inconvenient, unpleasant and expensive, and so you make the personal decision to forgo them to be part of the solution rather than the problem, you are taking a step into a life that will nudge you more and more to truly despise motor vehicles because your daily life will be filled with only negative interactions with them.

ThinkBeat 4y ago

From many cities I have visited and some I have lived one of the major problems are sports stadium and related are located within dense cities. When you need to shuffle in 10.000 to 100.000 cars (at worse, none of these have enough parking spaces for it) you need parking spaces. Moving these venues outside of the cites is a good solution. It does not require forced behavioural modifications. Then the city can arrange busses to and from the stadium for those that need it. Or a high speed dedicated train. Any other establishment with a huge number of visitor should be moved out as well. Huge hospitals are also entities that take up a huge amount of space and can have a lot of parking. These should be moved outside the city to lower density areas. The space these things take up, and their huge parking lots can then be converted into parks and green lungs within the city. Greed real estate developers who wish to increase density for big profit should be barred from any activity. The density is already far too high. It is a win win situation all the way around.

slifin 4y ago
All that does is create more car dependent infrastructure No one will walk anywhere if you keep artificially spacing everything out Watch videos from not just bikes and strong towns there are plenty of solutions That don't amount to build more expensive tarmac that has to be replaced every 25 years
AlecSchueler 4y ago
You can also build solutions with public transport hubs. The Netherlands can have large stadiums and venues without giving their cities to cars. Look at the Zandvoort grand prix. The media was amazed that the whole (small, historic) town was cleared of the almost 200,000 attendees about an hour after the event. Compare to the Circuit of Americas in Austin which had people still stuck in the carpark several hours after the race ended, still in a queue to get out to join the traffic jam on the road. Building roads and carparks to fight your traffic problems only creates more traffic that will become a problem later. It's "just one more lane" type of thinking.

bojangleslover 4y ago

In America, driving is far and away the best UX. You go where you want when you want with up to four passengers even in a very small starter car. With the exception of Manhattan and a few other big cities, cost per mile is far lower than transit. Obviously traffic sucks. Nobody likes traffic. I refuse to sit in traffic unless I am picking someone up from the airport. Even in the UK, it's often cheaper to drive. The other day I drove into Central London (!) from Cambridge in a VW Polo. I calculated the cost per mile, including the car depreciation and the onerous and ever-increasing vehicle tax, and it was STILL a far better deal than the train. Not to mention the non-negligible chance of an encounter with a risky, mentally ill passenger on transit. My wife was harassed by a man with piss-soaked sweatpants on the SF Bart and nearly missed her flight because she had to get off early. And that ticket was not cheap. I've been called homophobic and racial slurs on the London tube, for wearing short shorts on the way to go play squash. OF COURSE these events are few and far between but in my car they never happen. Despite this, the subway is still a better UX in Manhattan and London. When I'm in these places I don't drive (obviously). In the Randstad, I also never drive. Because the UX is great. When I'm in my home in North Carolina, I drive everywhere. It's great. Everything is 10 minutes away. There's always parking. Massive boost to quality of life. Cars are not some revelations-esque phenomenon and parking lots do not "eat" anything. They can always be converted to decks, as they literally always are when the demand is there. There is nothing wrong with that.

nerdchum 4y ago
Hate to say it but homeless people and sketch people have ruined west coast cities mass transit for me. Im uncomfortable like 50% of the time riding San Fran, L.A., or San Diego mass transit. Riding Chicago mass transit is nice because the cold weather eliminates most of the homeless people in one way or another. One possible solution is a premium model where there are Premium edition trains that you can pay a little extra for and have security and be around normal middle class people and relax and read a book. I.e. have a capitalist run transit service trains along side the government one. I'd ride transit a lot more if this was a thing. I'll stick to my car until west coast mass transit has figured out a way to where I don't have to sit next to a person who has literally peed them selves and looks desperate enough to rob me. (This doesn't seem to be a high bar)

steelframe 4y ago

I'm reading in the comments on this HN story about how things like lack of showers or longer distances or hills make bicycling impractical. As a lifelong cyclist and a recent electric bike owner, I view recent technological advancement in electrified micro-mobility to be a game changer. I've made a significant investment in a custom-built steel frame electric bike that I have outfitted with racks and panniers for shopping trips and commuting to the office. As a former Trek customer who hasn't been inclined to purchase another bike from them, they still send me their new product line magazines. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but I was astonished when I grabbed the latest edition from my mailbox yesterday and thumbed through it. Trek is going ALL IN on electric bicycles. Pages 4-5 have a big flow chart helping people decide what type of electric bike to buy, depending on factors such as whether you're on dirt trails or paved streets, whether you will be transporting cargo and children, whether you value speed or comfort, and so on. Non-electric bikes are now sort of an afterthought. If you flip to the back of the magazine you'll still find them, but the electric versions of several models are still interspersed. For example they have the Domane SLR (a model I still have in my garage), but on the next page they pimp the electric Domane+. Their blitz on electric bikes might be working for me, since I'm seriously considering being a Trek customer again and "trading up" for it, in spite of the bad experiences I've had trying to get them to support the Domane SLR they sold me in 2017. America is facing a reckoning with its transportation infrastructure and car culture. Electric bikes are so compelling in terms of cost, convenience, fun, and practicality, more and more people will be riding them on the "stroads" and will be demanding changes so they feel safer doing so. If that means taking away lanes and parking spots from vehicular traffic, adding separated cycle tracks, reducing speed limits, adding traffic-calming measures, introducing safe-passing laws, and stepping up enforcement and penalties, then in my book that can't happen soon enough.

bootlooped 4y ago
We have a long way to go. In the US I think bikes are still primarily seen as toys for either children or upper middle class adults. Car culture is deeply ingrained here, and discouraging personal automobile use is going to be seen by a large part of the population as practically anti-American. There's also the fact that we have a flood of low quality and outright dangerous electric micro-mobility devices catching on fire. On the hopeful side, I see e-bikes as being part of the wave towards sustainability, a swing back towards childhood independence, and increased interest in fitness. We'll see how far it goes, but there's going to be resistance every step of the way.

ETH_start 4y ago

I sometimes wonder, if building underground parking lots and tunnels becomes affordable due to advances in boring machines, AI and robots, how far underground could you build? How many stories worth of space underground would be practical?