There's a lot to unpack here... We don't need to replace surface parking lots all in one go. We can do that over time while we introduce good transit options a

There's a lot to unpack here... We don't need to replace surface parking lots all in one go. We can do that over time while we introduce good transit options and make our cities a lot better. We can also construct stacked parking garages instead of having surface parking lots. There are a lot of options here. As we replace inefficient and economically draining parking lots we can introduce housing and areas for business. As we introduce these we increase the viability of transit. It's a bad idea to focus on supporting or building parking lots which are not used that often. It's not good for anyone except those who are extracting economic rent. > If people need to drive they need to store the car someplace. People need housing too. We also need more small businesses and economic opportunity. Car storage is not a priority. We have an overabundance of it anyway. > Not only are parking lots cheap, they also spread out all the traffic which is a big problem car oriented cities face. Parking lots are cheap for the owners to build and operate, but they're incredibly expensive for cities. I don't follow the logic here about spreading out traffic. Typically traffic problems [1] are due to everyone using the same highways at the same times. That's not really solved or addressed by parking lots. If it were, we could just build parking lots instead of expanding highways, but in addition to that being economically stupid, it wouldn't solve the problem. > Parking lots are a solution to the problems of density, if you don't need it you need to solve traffic first, otherwise cities need to get less dense to support the limits of cars. It's kind of a chicken-egg problem, but the Overton window is shifted so far to the left that we need to shift it back to something sensible. So instead of even caring about cars and parking lots, we need to care only about housing, small and local businesses, and transit and just neglect cars/parking lots. Otherwise we'll just continue to build more parking lots and highways which drain the local economy and never actually do anything economically productive. Today society invests 99% of its effort toward car-only infrastructure which is brittle, expensive for taxpayers, and bad for citizens. We should flip that around for a few years. [1] We don't have traffic problems, and if we did they'd be solved by getting people out of cars. When people think about traffic problems they are thinking about the time they use the highways at the peak times. We shouldn't optimize society to cater toward "car traffic between the hours of 4PM and 6PM at the costs of all other development patterns".