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> So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot The googling is taking too long for me to get numbers, but I'd

> So the best way to get more people in a sports stadium would be to get rid of the parking lot The googling is taking too long for me to get numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most stadiums have enough seating capacity that, if you were to pack every single space in their actual parking lots with cars, you'd completely fail to fill it up. > or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots? Walmart is a special case in that it's built around people who have cars: you don't go to a Walmart to buy only what you can carry. You go there to buy as much as you can so that you can avoid shopping for the rest of the week. But around here, Pike Place Market? Westlake Center? Pacific Place? Yeah. Most of their business comes from the fact that they're within walking distance from the Financial District and the Convention Center. Uwajimaya? Benefits immensely from the fact that it's located in Chinatown, where its main market is; I'm two blocks from it and I pick up something every other day on my way home from work. (Actually, Uwajimaya is brilliant in that it has apartments on top and parking below. A lot of residents are literally walking through the store to go home.) > Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park? No, you're reversing it. The question is about how many more customers a restaurant or small retailer would get. I didn't fully explain: it starts by recognizing that the number of customers you get is a percentage of the number of potential customers you get. If you already knew about that restaurant 50 miles out, then obviously, the only thing that matters is that you can get there. That's a transit issue: can you get to point B from point A in a reasonable amount of time, for a given understanding of reasonable. Some people cannot imagine reasonable amounts of time via public transit, so they cannot conceive of transit without cars. That's a different problem. The problem here is that, using a "cars = customers" model, you have two facts: (a) most people don't look at the storefronts as they drive by. They're actually looking for parking. Your parking space is a loss leader in order to get them to look at what you're selling in the first place, on their way somewhere else. And (b), people don't know you exist until they see you. If you already knew about it, then it's more akin to parking at your office. You have no need for discoverability, just availability. If you had magical public transit that was equally fast, you could use it instead and poof. No need for cars at all. The merits of cars versus other things isn't customers; it's speed. > I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots? In short, yes. What if those parking lots were cheap housing instead? You wouldn't need a car to get there, and you could walk across the street to shop. This isn't a silver bullet "delete parking lots = magically better". It's a functional component of many other much larger, much more complex solutions. I'm telling you why the component is being included--namely the space efficiency of pedestrians equals a higher customer base--but that isn't a complete solution by any means. I mentioned a and b earlier. There is a c. Anytime your parking lot isn't nearly full during business hours, you have a problem. Why? The reason that cars = customers is because cars forcibly disallow anyone else from being a customer. When you design your street for cars, you discourage pedestrians: especially the window shoppers. When you design your neighborhoods to be zoned between residential and commerce, you make it impossible to reach businesses except by car or long-distance public transit. My grandparents live in a suburban cul-de-sac in the Bay Area. Pretty place. Very calm and peaceful. And they're lonely. My parents and uncles and aunts have to regularly drive in from across town to visit with them. Couldn't they go down to the local store, rather than asking a son or daughter-in-law to buy groceries? Nope. They're too frail to drive, and walking the massive block to the huge nearby intersection, and then walking across the vast expanse of asphalt to the nearby Lucky's is basically impossible. Hell, I hate doing it and I jog the whole thing for fun. There isn't even anything on the way to stop at. There's like... one bench for the bus stop. A Radio Shack on the other side of the 3-lane road. There are actually quite a few other options; they're just even further away. You basically need a car to get to what is technically a block and a half away, if we count by intersection. My god-grandparents would be in a similar situation, but they're able to drive, so they can do the 20 or so blocks it takes to get to the Asian market. It wasn't always a Lucky's. It used to be an Albertson's, I think. And it was something else before that. That parking space keeps them alive, sure. That's about it. No one goes there unless they have to. (And if I'd spent the time googling rather than typing up these anecdotes, maybe I would have found some damn numbers.)

briandon 13y ago
As someone who lives with their spouse in a highrise dozens of stories tall built on top of a MTR (mass transit rail) station in a city (Hong Kong) that has what is widely considered a wonderful mass transit system and who regularly walks everywhere, including to and from my local supermarket, and who does not own a vehicle, I would like to respond to your post. Imagine that you wanted to cook chili for dinner (and leftovers for lunch the next day and or chili dogs a few days on -- YUM!). Recipes differ, but let's say that you went with ground beef, canned beans, tomato sauce of some kind, fresh onions and garlic, and maybe some bell peppers. You might have bought some cheese to grate over bowls of the finished chili and sour cream to spoon onto the cheese. Assume that you already had chili powder and any other spices that you needed at home. Since you're at the supermarket, you also bought the other things that you needed: a bottle of shampoo, some toilet tissue, a lightbulb(it would be slightly cheaper to get a 6-pack of bulbs but you only need one right now and don't want to carry anything absolutely unnecessary home) like, a couple of cartons of milk, some coffee or tea, a carton or two of eggs, some chicken breasts, more vegetables, etc. At the checkout, you bagged your own purchases or had them bagged for you and began the five-to-ten-minute walk home. (1.) Unfortunately, it was warm out and the cartons of milk sweated and the condensation soaked through that bag (the supermarket uses eco-friendly, recyclable paper bags) and the bottom tore out and everything from that bag fell onto the sidewalk. Time to set your bags on the pavement or the grass next to the sidewalk and try to distribute those items between the remaining bags. The bag holding the ground beef and chicken breasts is looking a bit iffy too, but it'll probably hold (fingers crossed!) until you get home. The milk cartons have warmed up a bit and hopefully won't sweat enough to take the bag(s) into which you've placed them before you get home. (2.) Wait. Suppose that you opted for the (biodegradable) plastic bags. Condensation wouldn't affect them. As you were walking home, however, one of the corners of one of the milk cartons, with the help of gravity and the movements to which the bag containing the milk was subjected as you walked home, made a whole in the bottom of the bag, with the same result as if you had been using paper bags. (3.) OK, so you wisely double-bagged (in plastic) your groceries and you made it home without any bags failing. Unfortunately, something in the bag with the carton(s) of eggs shifted while you were humping the bags home and a coupel of the eggs broke, making a bit of a mess in the bag. (4.) No, of course you wouldn't haul all of your groceries home at once. That's sheer madness. You only took the perishable items and left the rest to be delivered. That meant an extra few minutes spent at the checkout, at the head of a long line of people, each of whom also had to spend a bit longer in line themselves, giving the store your home address and telephone number and checking with the cashier to find out when your stuff would be delivered (answer: 12PM to 8PM the next day, but the delivery person will phone you first). What's a few extra minutes here or there, right? You also aren't paranoid, so you have no problem giving the store your home address and phone number and don't care whether or not the company owning the supermarket aggregates your purchases with your name, address, and phone number and resells the information to marketers. It's a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to lug all of your stuff home yourself. Not having all of the ingredients for chili (the cans of beans and jars of tomato sauce are amongst those purchases that were to be delivered), you had something else for dinner instead. You weren't planning to make chili that night anyway, since you took the delivery delay into account when you made your grocery list. The next day, the delivery guy called you a few times while you were in a meeting and couldn't answer your phone. Jeez, his last message sure sounded irate. He was still annoyed with you when you phoned him back and even more annoyed when you told him that nobody would be home to take delivery until at least 6PM. The earlier he can finish his deliveries, the sooner he can get home and spend time with his own family. When you got home, at 6 PM, he was waiting for you in the hallway outside your apartment door with your stuff packed in half a dozen repurposed cardboard boxes (from the labels printed on the boxes, you can tell that some of them had held bananas and others had held cartons of eggs) stacked on a little cart. Cardboard is better than plastic (even the biodegradable plastic used in the supermarket's bags), so that was good. Unfortunately, after you transferred the boxes inside your apartment, tipped the delivery guy, and began unpacking the items you had purchased the day before, you discovered that the shampoo had been packed upside down and half its contents had slowly leaked out. It only took a few minutes to wash the shampoo off the cans of beans. No big deal. And you can always get another bottle of shampoo when you go back to the store. Maybe you ought to tighten the top of the bottle a bit before going to the checkout next time, just in case, or carry it home. Carrying a bit more weight will just help build up the muscles in your arms and shoulders, right? As a matter of fact, your shoulders were a bit sore from carrying the perishables home yesterday. Feel the burn, baby! [to be continued]

briandon 13y ago

As someone who lives with their spouse in a highrise dozens of stories tall built on top of a MTR (mass transit rail) station in a city (Hong Kong) that has what is widely considered a wonderful mass transit system and who regularly walks everywhere, including to and from my local supermarket, and who does not own a vehicle, I would like to respond to your post. Imagine that you wanted to cook chili for dinner (and leftovers for lunch the next day and or chili dogs a few days on -- YUM!). Recipes differ, but let's say that you went with ground beef, canned beans, tomato sauce of some kind, fresh onions and garlic, and maybe some bell peppers. You might have bought some cheese to grate over bowls of the finished chili and sour cream to spoon onto the cheese. Assume that you already had chili powder and any other spices that you needed at home. Since you're at the supermarket, you also bought the other things that you needed: a bottle of shampoo, some toilet tissue, a lightbulb(it would be slightly cheaper to get a 6-pack of bulbs but you only need one right now and don't want to carry anything absolutely unnecessary home) like, a couple of cartons of milk, some coffee or tea, a carton or two of eggs, some chicken breasts, more vegetables, etc. At the checkout, you bagged your own purchases or had them bagged for you and began the five-to-ten-minute walk home. (1.) Unfortunately, it was warm out and the cartons of milk sweated and the condensation soaked through that bag (the supermarket uses eco-friendly, recyclable paper bags) and the bottom tore out and everything from that bag fell onto the sidewalk. Time to set your bags on the pavement or the grass next to the sidewalk and try to distribute those items between the remaining bags. The bag holding the ground beef and chicken breasts is looking a bit iffy too, but it'll probably hold (fingers crossed!) until you get home. The milk cartons have warmed up a bit and hopefully won't sweat enough to take the bag(s) into which you've placed them before you get home. (2.) Wait. Suppose that you opted for the (biodegradable) plastic bags. Condensation wouldn't affect them. As you were walking home, however, one of the corners of one of the milk cartons, with the help of gravity and the movements to which the bag containing the milk was subjected as you walked home, made a whole in the bottom of the bag, with the same result as if you had been using paper bags. (3.) OK, so you wisely double-bagged (in plastic) your groceries and you made it home without any bags failing. Unfortunately, something in the bag with the carton(s) of eggs shifted while you were humping the bags home and a coupel of the eggs broke, making a bit of a mess in the bag. (4.) No, of course you wouldn't haul all of your groceries home at once. That's sheer madness. You only took the perishable items and left the rest to be delivered. That meant an extra few minutes spent at the checkout, at the head of a long line of people, each of whom also had to spend a bit longer in line themselves, giving the store your home address and telephone number and checking with the cashier to find out when your stuff would be delivered (answer: 12PM to 8PM the next day, but the delivery person will phone you first). What's a few extra minutes here or there, right? You also aren't paranoid, so you have no problem giving the store your home address and phone number and don't care whether or not the company owning the supermarket aggregates your purchases with your name, address, and phone number and resells the information to marketers. It's a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to lug all of your stuff home yourself. Not having all of the ingredients for chili (the cans of beans and jars of tomato sauce are amongst those purchases that were to be delivered), you had something else for dinner instead. You weren't planning to make chili that night anyway, since you took the delivery delay into account when you made your grocery list. The next day, the delivery guy called you a few times while you were in a meeting and couldn't answer your phone. Jeez, his last message sure sounded irate. He was still annoyed with you when you phoned him back and even more annoyed when you told him that nobody would be home to take delivery until at least 6PM. The earlier he can finish his deliveries, the sooner he can get home and spend time with his own family. When you got home, at 6 PM, he was waiting for you in the hallway outside your apartment door with your stuff packed in half a dozen repurposed cardboard boxes (from the labels printed on the boxes, you can tell that some of them had held bananas and others had held cartons of eggs) stacked on a little cart. Cardboard is better than plastic (even the biodegradable plastic used in the supermarket's bags), so that was good. Unfortunately, after you transferred the boxes inside your apartment, tipped the delivery guy, and began unpacking the items you had purchased the day before, you discovered that the shampoo had been packed upside down and half its contents had slowly leaked out. It only took a few minutes to wash the shampoo off the cans of beans. No big deal. And you can always get another bottle of shampoo when you go back to the store. Maybe you ought to tighten the top of the bottle a bit before going to the checkout next time, just in case, or carry it home. Carrying a bit more weight will just help build up the muscles in your arms and shoulders, right? As a matter of fact, your shoulders were a bit sore from carrying the perishables home yesterday. Feel the burn, baby! [to be continued]