by caiobegotti on 7/14/18, 3:56 PM with 291 comments
by angarg12 on 7/14/18, 4:24 PM
Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.
by jjeaff on 7/14/18, 6:14 PM
But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends.
Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems.
You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.
by jaysonelliot on 7/14/18, 4:40 PM
American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it's dangerous. Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000 pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you're riding something that can't be carried into a building with you, it's inconvenient at best to park it outside.
Just removing parking from new construction won't solve the problem, it will compound it. People still won't want to get on slow, crowded, uncomfortable buses or packed, unreliable, dirty trains. We'll just get more people driving endlessly around the block looking for parking and polluting the air, more accidents from drivers hitting people in the road, more sprawl as people shun the city so they can drive in the suburbs instead.
Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc.
Public transit needs a major overhaul, major investment, and a new attitude. It has to be about riders' comfort, convenience, and happiness, not just jamming people into routes as if they were statistics in a planning meeting.
New development should be aimed at walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, planned for people first, not cars.
All these things have to happen to solve the problem. It won't be easy, but unless we do something like that, we'll be living with the car problem for a very long time to come.
by fencepost on 7/14/18, 5:50 PM
Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are closed for construction or eliminated completely, the city has to pay the private company for those spaces as if they were being used. Want bike lanes? Don't forget to account for the paying for all those eliminated parking spaces. Pedestrian only areas? See above. Ride sharing cutting into driving? Guess they'll have plenty of empty space to pick up and drop off in - unless there's a way for the parking meter company to charge for that couple of minutes in a parking space.
But it's not all bad - the city only has to put up with it until 2083.
http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-...
by mattlondon on 7/14/18, 5:04 PM
When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister.
There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks like 08:30-17:00 would set you back anywhere from £25 to £50 a day (about the same as half to a full tank of petrol or diesel). Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor of the traffic and paying for fuel
Understandably, as a result a lot of people use public transport. Sure its fairly decent in London, but thats only because people use it and pay for it so there are funds to reinvest into making it run effectively.
If suddenly the average US driver was looking at paying $100/day to drive to work (or $2000 a month), I am sure that they could handle sitting on a bus for $10/day and pocket the $90 change, while the public transit gets better and better as a result.
This is a solvable problem.
1 - https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_...
by kosei on 7/14/18, 5:56 PM
Honestly, this number seems reasonable to me, when you consider that people could be parking at a) their home, b) their work, and c) at any number of other places (restaurant, grocery store, mall, etc). Not to mention, each household may have more than one car. It's probably too high in aggregate, but we don't park by average, we park for specific means, and if the lot at the grocery store is full, or at our work, or at home, we consider that to be an inconvenience and want more spots.
The only way to change this is to move away from the 1-2 car-per-family model we live in right now.
by lisper on 7/14/18, 6:28 PM
You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-private vehicles (which includes things like taxis and Uber). But having fully utilized parking is the worst of all possible worlds.
by burfog on 7/14/18, 4:28 PM
Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very little room for surges. Business is impacted when the availability of parking isn't 100% reliable.
by oneplane on 7/14/18, 6:01 PM
by brudgers on 7/14/18, 5:09 PM
The marginal cost of a parking space is low. The heuristic for structured parking has long been $10,000 per space. Over a 30 year building life cycle that's less than $1/day. Private surface parking is a few cents and on street public parking is nothing...and often so is even that expensive structured parking because the $1/day of capital costs makes parking a potentially lucrative business. This means that the most cost effective way to avoid scheduling bottlenecks is with capacity that far exceeds the average rate or median demand.
To put it another way, all that parking is what a working system looks like. Sure Des Moines might not need 1.6 million parking spaces -- but it's probably not far from what's necessary to provide required for reasonable livability at the density and geography [3] of Des Moines. Recovering all those parking spaces for development doesn't do a lot for Des Moines. It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower.
To put it another way, land use for parking in Des Moines (or other cities) largely reflects an economic equilibrium in the real-estate market. When there's too much, it gets converted to other uses over time...and when regulations are impediments, major local real-estate interests get those regulations relaxed/modified/removed. [4]
[1]: The size of the 'local' may vary, but it's much much smaller than Des Moines and difficult even down to the scale of on-street parking for a single urban block.
[2]: Based on the heuristic of 1/4 mile reasonable walking radius in urban environments.
[3]: Consider that the Des Moines river runs through the city and a parking space on one side of the river is not generally fungible with a parking space on the other side. The river complicates public transit by bottlenecking surface transit with bridges and subsurface transit with tunnels.
[4]: Institutions with teams of $600/hr real estate lawyers and fifty year investment horizons.
by daviator88 on 7/14/18, 4:37 PM
by AtlasBarfed on 7/14/18, 10:01 PM
Have the car drop you off, then self-drive to an offsite parking, and then return when summoned.
This model would also support mobile "gear boxes" where you have activity-focused mobile storage pods of gear (think toolboxes for trade work, or a surfing/beach pod with your beach gear, or a biking/triathlon pod with all your triathlon gear), which I think will be a huge benefit once self-driving hits reality.
Rather than have storage units where you can't easily get to your stuff because of the side trip and annoyance of loading/unloading, you have modular storage that can be summoned to a spot and purpose needed.
That would reduce storage needs in urban areas as well, so you could further enhance density.
by stretchwithme on 7/14/18, 4:40 PM
Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. Parking will be built underground for off peak storage of vehicles, allowing the repurposing of surface parking spots. Maybe agricultural robots will make use of them.
Cities will get quieter.
by nlawalker on 7/14/18, 4:42 PM
I imagine most people will perceive that there's not enough parking unless there's an open spot right out front of where they're going when they get there.
Services that facilitate parking further away from your destination might help.
by loonyballoonys on 7/15/18, 5:11 PM
by yuhong on 7/14/18, 8:17 PM
by gok on 7/14/18, 6:31 PM
by nickthemagicman on 7/14/18, 4:38 PM
by amelius on 7/14/18, 4:59 PM
by MisterTea on 7/14/18, 5:48 PM
I think the main problem is not the amount of parking but the distribution of parking. I live in NYC and avoid driving around the city as much as possible except off peak and short local runs.
The big problem is commercial centers tend to be high density and clustered together. For example, queens boulevard between Forest Hills and Rego Park has dozens of restaurants and shops where the number of parking spots on the block vs. the number of people concentrated on that block is where the problem begins. A restaurant with one or two parking spots in front might have two dozen people people inside including staff requiring at least six parking spots (assuming couples).
My neighborhood Ozone Park is in south Queens and live is a part that is a block from the A train. Super convenient location as everything is in walking distance of a few blocks including the train. There is also a school around the block. So every morning dozens of commuters pack the neighborhood looking for parking for the train and then add the teachers and other school staff who only get about two dozen reserved spots and half are blocked by construction. Your driveway is frequently partly blocked and finding street parking during weekdays is brutal until about 7-8PM.
So the blocks along the train stations are municipal free-for all parking lots. As you push out into the back areas away from the commercial cacophony there is street parking so long as the neighborhood was built with sanity meaning homes have functional driveways (most don't or can only fit a single car). And there are plenty of those areas spread throughout the city but the parking goes to waste. Then throw in neighborhoods of row houses with no driveways and again, the housing density outweighs the parking.
Face it, no planning was done for the automobile in major cities. Parking allotment is abysmal and to make things worse, maximizing the dwelling square footage is what all developers aim for to maximize the value. So there is zero incentive to build in sane parking. This is an example of a nearby 10 apartment home that was built with parking for about 8-10 vehicles if people park front to back and side-by-side underneath the front half: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75...
Not exactly a pretty example. Down the block from me a single story ranch with a big back yard was bought by a developer, demolished and three two family homes built with the easy ability to add an illegal basement apartment with a little modding (it was so obvious when we toured them during sale). There used to be more parking on weekends before those homes went in. Now even weekend parking can be tough. And this type of development is happening all over NYC. Single family homes are bought up demolished and replaced with 4+ apartments each of which usually bring one car into the neighborhood. They also build little or no parking in. The requirements for parking are easily cheated with a long driveway that is only practical for one or two cars to use as you can't practically park six cars back to back. No one is building single family homes anymore.
Summary: it's a damn mess.
by Semirhage on 7/14/18, 4:57 PM
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-reme...
by dawhizkid on 7/14/18, 5:06 PM
by 21 on 7/14/18, 4:48 PM
Say what? It's a fucking concrete slab.
Maybe they mean expensive in land cost.
by paulsutter on 7/14/18, 4:35 PM
by RickJWagner on 7/14/18, 4:34 PM
by Felz on 7/14/18, 6:14 PM
Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.