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When you total up the amount of land that we dedicate to cars, it's absolutely staggering. I read a stat a while back (can't find it right now), that something

• timjahn 12y ago
  Seriously! It's crazy. We live in such an auto centric society. I often think, why do we have the parking lot in shopping centers go all the way up to the front door (so you have to cross in the path of cars to enter the building)? Why don't the aisles go directly up to a big sidewalk/walking area in front of the building and that's it? You could have turnarounds every few for picking people up and something dedicated for emergency vehicles, but it's crazy that you have to cross in front of cars to enter the building, when there's 0 reason for those cars to drive right in front of the building!
  • criley2 12y ago
    Regardless of design you must let emergency services access the building simply. No lane in front means Fire Trucks cannot stop in front of the massive building. I'd bet that front lanes are a building code / safety requirement.
    • timjahn 12y ago
      I'm confident you could alter the current design to allow for extremely easy emergency service access to whatever part of the building needed, without having a giant ass road right in front of the building's front door.
      • toomuchtodo 12y ago
        Correct. You can indeed have an aisle that supports emergency and delivery vehicles without allowing daily vehicle traffic to the front of the building.
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
• baddox 12y ago
  I'm confident that some reduction of paved surface can be achieved in most or all cities, but I think your tone is making the situation seem a bit more ridiculous than it actually is. I would expect a significant portion of any densely populated city to be paved, for the simple reason that people need to be able to get to essentially every part of a city. Short of more fanciful solutions like fully elevated or underground passageways, you're going to need roughly the same grid of roads even if you eliminate cars. Granted, you could theoretically get significant constant factor reduction in the width of roads if you can remove lanes (through banning cars, encouraging carpooling/public transit, or increasing bicyclists and pedestrians).
  • rayiner 12y ago
    Of course, wide streets predate cars. Both Chicago's and NYC's street grids, with their wide avenues, predate the era in which everyone had a personal automobile. But take a look at older cities with narrower streets. You can get around Center City Philly, but the streets are so narrow in parts you barely notice crossing them.
  • eqdw 12y ago
    > Short of more fanciful solutions like fully elevated or underground passageways, you're going to need roughly the same grid of roads even if you eliminate cars. Not actually true. Grids come in many different shapes and sizes. As one easy example: the block size. As a city planner, you can choose any block size you like, and this will adjust the ratio of real estate to transportation infrastructure accordingly. Additionally, and this is fanciful futurism more than anything else: in a city that functions without ubiquitous private vehicle traffic, you can make the roads narrower, which also increases the real estate. To take an example from where I live: http://sfdpw.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=3690 http://sfdpw.org/modules/showdocument.aspx?documentid=3690 Potrero Avenue in SF is 100 feet wide. A hundred feet. If you naievely parceled this land out by drawing a line across the road every 5 feet, the each demarcated space would be worth $2k/mo rent. In a hypothetical future city without cars, you wouldn't need a road to be a hundred feet wide. More reading re: grid plans http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/10/14/places-and-non-places http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2014/10/14/places-and-non... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_plan (specifically this image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Block_Sizes_and_Street_Length.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Block_Sizes_and_Street_Len...)
• antr 12y ago
  You should take a look at the Madrid Rio project by Dutch studio West8, it's very similar to the mentioned idea in the BBC article: http://www.west8.nl/projects/madrid_rio/ http://www.west8.nl/projects/madrid_rio/ In Summary: - The city of Madrid buried a 6km section of their ring road - In this buried section, a total of 46km of roads/tunnels have been constructed - The above area is now a reclaimed riverbank and a huge park - IMO, a superb public realm initiative, although I'm guessing not cheap
  • Squallco 12y ago
    Thank you for this link. This is really impressive.
• egypturnash 12y ago
  I've lived in multiple cities over the years. Currently it's Seattle. If anything, I'd say Seattle is one of the less paved-over places I've been.
  • arcadius 12y ago
    All the bodies of water certainly help.
    • egypturnash 12y ago
      There's also just a lot of green space here. The city's got parks all over, in a bunch of different sizes. If you're downtown you have to trek a bit to get to a nice quiet park, but it's generally pretty easy to find somewhere you can just sit in a patch of dandelions and contemplate the ineffable.
• bduerst 12y ago
  I seem to remember someone saying that just over half of Los Angeles' land is paved for roads and parking lots. It's pretty ridiculous.
• ars 12y ago
  Travel is the driver of all human progress and development. What, you think the amount of roads we have now is a lot? We've always had roads, they were for carts, or horses, or anything else. There is nothing special about cars here. > Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime. We did. We made travel cheap and easy and it has benefited us massively.
  • swayvil 12y ago
    > Travel is the driver of all human progress and development. Actually, people with lots of free time and access to drugs is the driver of all human progress and development.
    • s73v3r 12y ago
      Really? What drugs did Sir Tim Berners-Lee do when he created the World Wide Web?
      • breischl 12y ago
        I think it was that radioactive spider venom stuff. I hear Peter Parker was on it, too.
      • lifeisstillgood 12y ago
        Sir Tim, as a UK citizen in the late 20thC would have used many drugs in his lifetime, paracetamol, aspirin, penicillin, vaccines... I think you may have leapt to a conclusion about the drugs the parent post meant. Are you thinking about those recreational drugs a bit too much ... :-)
        • Dylan16807 12y ago
          Please do not insult the reader. Honestly, your comment offends me. I know you're making a joke but it's so condescending I can't stand it.
          • 12y ago
• eqdw 12y ago
  Food for thought: A ~450 sqft studio apartment in SF costs about $2k/mo in rent. a ~150 sqft monthly parking spot (as per http://sanfrancisco.bestparking.com/ http://sanfrancisco.bestparking.com/), costs about $400 Three parking spots takes up the same square footage as a studio apartment. It costs a little over half of that. Then consider how much parking in SF is free parking. Just straight up free. Parking lots for stores. Street parking on most residential streets. Driveways and garages. It's fucking insane how much space is wasted on car storage. It's even more fucking insane that so much of this storage is de-facto free (which is implicitly a subsidy from the person providing the space to car owners; in a sense it's a subsidy from renters, since any parking space could be a sorely needed living space instead) I can't wait, I just can't wait until Uber-like on-demand ride tech + self driving cars means we can massively reduce our vehicle stock. Think of all the things that could be more awesome
  • BrainInAJar 12y ago
    > I can't wait, I just can't wait until Uber-like on-demand ride tech + self driving cars means we can massively reduce our vehicle stock. Think of all the things that could be more awesome First, get rid of the zoning laws that require those spots, then they'll disappear. You can cram (depending on building height restrictions) dozens of apartments in to the same 2 dimensional plane as those 3 parking spots.
    • Crito 12y ago
      Perhaps all hard limits on building height could be removed, but with the addition of a new rule that requires every new residential building to have 1 level of parking garage for every 3 stories it has (or some other similar ratio). Then, if you wanted to build a 15 story apartment building you would be allowed to, but you'd have to provide enough parking garage to satisfy all of those people. The problem then is parking in commercial districts. Street parking is good for businesses on that street, but a better solution could be more city-run parking garages in good locations, and city streets in commercial areas that are optimized for pedestrians. The best example of this I have ever seen is down-town Silver Spring in Maryland. That was several years ago, I hear they tore a bunch of it up, but it at least used to be great.
• BrainInAJar 12y ago
  > Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime. We can figure it out with pure market forces; currently building codes across the continent require businesses to have a certain amount of off-street parking. That also has the effect of killing small local businesses. Own a restaurant? Doing well? Want to expand? Your 6 table restaurant requires no off street parking, but an 8 table restaurant requires (for example) 6 spaces, meaning you can't just add another couple tables, you need to buy / lease the entire building next to yours, demolish it, and use it for parking. Get rid of these anti-business pro-car zoning laws, and the problem takes care of itself.
  • balabaster 12y ago
    I'm unfamiliar with this - does it pertain to physical tables or number of seats? If for instance you take an approach such as Bennihana where you have large tables and just add people to the table until it's full, is that counted differently than 8 tables for 4? If two parties of 4 show up, they're both seated at the same table... if the table is for 10, then when another couple show up, they're added to the same table. Does this count as 1 table or 3?
    • BrainInAJar 12y ago
      Depends entirely on the city's zoning law. Max occupancy or floor space ratio are fairly common
    • WildUtah 12y ago
      http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/ http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/ Minimum parking laws are the most important of many command-and-control policies and mandates that created the car-oriented American city. More than minimum setbacks, minimum lot sizes, FAR limits, single use zoning, ploughing heavily subsidized freeways through cities, and the rest, parking policy is why American cities have decayed. Returning to free markets would let American cities be great again. As for restaurant parking minima, they're usually based on inside area and sometimes on seating. There are minima for offices, factories, schools, homes, ana every land use in most cities.
  • e40 12y ago
• jseliger 12y ago
  Gosh I hope we can figure this out in my lifetime. Me too. BTW, The High Cost of Free Parking by Shoup is amazing on this issue (http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193236496X http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/1932...). Totally changed my perspective when I read it.
• forrestthewoods 12y ago
  No way in hell is Seattle 33% paved vehicle surface. Not even remotely possible. City blocks account for more than 66% of surface area in the city core. And there aren't sprawling parking lots everywhere. You're gonna have to provide a citation for this one.
  • brenschluss 12y ago
    "About 27 percent of all land in Seattle is public right-of-way. SDOT manages the land through a permitting process, said Jennifer Wieland, an SDOT program manager." [1](http://realchangenews.org/2013/05/01/parking-spaces-could-become-mini-parks-under-new-sdot-program http://realchangenews.org/2013/05/01/parking-spaces-could-be...)
    • refurb 12y ago
      I would assume that includes sidewalks?
      • drcoopster 12y ago
        Yes. Paved doesn't necessarily mean that it's vehicle-accessible.
        • forrestthewoods 12y ago
          Does 'public right-of-way' include green parks? Spaces such as sculpture park, volunteer park, botanical garden, discovery park, and many more?
          • peatmoss 12y ago
            No, those aren't considered part of the ROW by any accounting I'm familiar with.
    • mason240 12y ago
      ROWs usually extend far beyond the edge of the road. You'd be surprised how far into your yard the ROW for your street extends.
• Crito 12y ago
  Even if we banned cars from Seattle, I would hope that we wouldn't tear up those roads and put buildings on them. Turning them into elongated parks for pedestrians would be a better option. Of the arguments against cars in cities, I think that "streets waste space" is the weakest. I rarely drive, but I wouldn't want to be in a city without some sort of streets, that would just be claustrophobic.
  • BrainInAJar 12y ago
    visit old Europe. The tiny little avenues between buildings are quite cozy and beautiful
  • lmm 12y ago
    Have you been to a European city, somewhere built before cars? Open space is good but you don't need the width of American streets, and it's important to get the pedestrian density up high enough that people feel like there's something going on.
    • Crito 12y ago
      Yes, and I find it claustrophobic. Pedestrian density should be targeted using a "pedestrians per block" metric, not a "pedestrians per square meter" metric. 100 people on a wide pedestrian path is preferable to 100 people on a narrow pedestrian path of the same length. I don't think that constantly getting in the way of other people, getting stuck behind other people, and constantly bumping into other people helps anyone. Then again, I also avoid concerts because crowd density, so maybe I'm just the odd one out here.
      • anigbrowl 12y ago
        Well, it depends where you go. Amsterdam is certainly dense and claustrophobic, so are a lot of smaller towns built around markets. Then you have cities like Edinburgh or Paris that are built around the notion of wide boulevards. Most likely you'd find some fractal pattern in the distribution of wide vs narrow streets in most older cities.
    • 12y ago
• chrismealy 12y ago
  In one picture: https://urbanful.org/2014/12/12/swedish-artist-captures-importance-complete-streets-one-image/ https://urbanful.org/2014/12/12/swedish-artist-captures-impo...
  • DenisM 12y ago
    Perhaps we should embrace this view, and extend it just a tiny bit further: Since the tunnels for cars are already dug up, all we need to do is cover them with concrete slabs, cover the slabs over with asphalt for bikes/pedestrians and vegetation for sitting around, and declare the entire city pedestrian only. The cars can continue to hurry back and forth underground.
    • Apofis 12y ago
      There's some really nice futurist art from the 1930's depicting NYC in 2000. All cars are underground in tunnels under the streets, just like subways are. It's beautiful and the city would be amazing if this happened at some point, which honestly with overpopulation just might in the next 100 years or so.
  • cpeterso 12y ago
    After the Great Seattle Fire in the late 19th century, Seattle had the opposite problem of the one illustrated there: the city rebuilt the streets higher than before to avoid flooding problems, but merchants didn't want raise their buildings. So the city streets were 12–30 feet higher than the sidewalks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground
• easytiger 12y ago
  > When you total up the amount of land that we dedicate to cars, it's absolutely staggering. What a narrow minded blinkered and oblique view of reality. Without the invention of the internal combustion engine and our ability to efficiently do as we please whenever we please we wouldn't have almost any of the economic freedom we enjoy today. If you wish to be a luddite and which a rural localised way of life on everyone that's another matter