from Hacker News

Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

by jbrins1 on 1/30/24, 7:13 PM with 382 comments

by wtp1saac on 1/30/24, 7:40 PM
Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread.
In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. More places to meet people too, there’s so few third places. And not needing to drive would be a really big convenience.
(To be clear, I doubt most of the US will urbanize given the rural nature of a lot of it, but I hope at least bigger cities can move in that direction)
by tomcar288 on 1/30/24, 9:47 PM
I think he really hit the nail on head here:
"Part of this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.”
by e_i_pi_2 on 1/30/24, 8:42 PM
I'd even go a step further and set a maximum amount of parking in a given area to disincentivize driving. As an extreme example, if a mall is only allowed to have 5 parking spaces then they'll need to design around supporting public transit. So many places in the US are almost impossible to live in without owning a car - you might have bike paths if you're lucky, and in many places there aren't even sidewalks
by jiggliemon on 1/30/24, 10:21 PM
I live on the border of an urban forest.
I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps. My homeless camp has is rife with crime, drug over doses, violence and fire. Last month I’ve had a leaf blower stolen, my car window broken, and an explosion due to them throwing a propane tank into a camp fire.
Since they’re tucked into a forest - the city won’t take any action. The city does take action on homeless camps that are more visible. I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness. However that’s very much the case here in Austin, Tx.
by mattmcknight on 1/30/24, 9:47 PM
I find this sort of logic absurd. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time"
So, if I have a two car garage in my house, a parking spot at work, and a parking spot at the local shopping district, how else is this going to work? I can't bring my parking spot with me. The idea that we should look at per existing car utilization as any kind of indicator is ridiculous. Now, if any of those spots is never used, that may be a good indicator- but it might be because a building isn't fully leased at the moment as well.
by datadrivenangel on 1/30/24, 7:41 PM
They (ought to) unpave the parking lot and put up a paradise!
More green spaces are good for cities.
by notacoward on 1/30/24, 9:01 PM
"I don’t know that anyone besides Grabar is even thinking about this"
A great many people are. Urbanist Xitter (Mastodon, Threads, whatever) is very much alive and well. The closest thing to a consensus about what to do with the reclaimed space is some trees, but primarily medium-density affordable housing, ideally with retail on the bottom. Sometimes the space can be used to make room for transit, too. By making these places denser and more livable, it prevents even more trees, meadows, etc. from being cleared for more exurbs.
I'd start with Suburban Nation, move on to StrongTowns and MissingMiddle, then take it from there.
by bloopernova on 1/30/24, 8:01 PM
Can we do the same with golf courses?
I think it was George Carlin that said put affordable housing on golf courses?
More seriously, if you have a brownfield ex industrial site, will trees etc grow ok there? Does converting brownfield sites to meadows or forests pose any risks to nearby humans?
by bluGill on 1/30/24, 10:14 PM
The problem I have is most cities have plenty of green parks already. In a few places they could use a new park, but in general there are far more parking lots (often 50% of a city is parking lot!) than there is need for green space. Much better is tear up a parking lot and replace it with a building that lets people do something in the city other than pretend they are in a rural area. Nothing wrong with rural areas and parks, but there is more to life than those. Put in more apartments, offices, restaurants, opera houses - all those other things that make a city great.
by osigurdson on 1/30/24, 7:50 PM
You could always put together a group and purchase the land from the current owners. Once you take possession, put the land in trust, tear it up and plant trees. You could potentially recover some costs by donating to the city but there is always a chance that they would decide to change the zoning in the future.
by trimethylpurine on 1/30/24, 10:21 PM
If only 75% of spaces are empty, while sad, that seems shockingly efficient. If you have a car you need at least one place to park for each location you will ever visit with it. That means most people are only driving their cars to 4 places. Home, work, school and the grocery store? Hopefully for store owners, not all at the same time. I would have expected a lot more unused spaces in parking lots. If we have cars we should be expecting a hell of a lot of empty parking lots. Maybe cities should just require some minimum amount of plant life in the lots themselves. I'm sure customers would approve.
Also any expectation of "the demise of malls and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail" is hasty. Globally, during the pandemic, 80%+ of retail was brick and mortar [1], and it actually increased in 2021, though it appears to be correcting. Research shows consumers don't trust stores with an online only presence [2]. I think banking on that will be too little too late. We need better solutions sooner.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA/
[2] https://www.kbbreview.com/6657/news/consumers-lack-trust-onl...
by throwawaaarrgh on 1/31/24, 5:30 AM
Baltimore has no money, ain't nobody paying for that.
In cities outside of Baltimore, where there aren't 20,000 abandoned buildings (when last I lived there), where there's a public housing shortage and a rising cost of living, they need affordable homes, not trees. I love trees but they're better for cities that don't have housing shortages, yet have the money to pay for trees.
Baltimore (and Philly, similar in some respects) has large concrete and brick deserts. But they also have large and small parks with lots of trees. That's where you get mugged after dusk (and sometimes during the day). You don't walk through Patterson Park at night.
IMO it's a privileged thing to think of first. Certain websites that cater to this kind of post don't seem to discuss civic issues from the perspective of the people who need the most help. It's more a certain kind of person who's more interested in a closer walk to the Starbucks and Trader Joe's.
by mytailorisrich on 1/30/24, 8:01 PM
Trees are great to provide shade in parking lots.
I have been to parking lots covered in mature Aleppo Pines (which smell great in the heat) and from far away you couldn't really tell there was a parking lot there.
by falcolas on 1/30/24, 7:37 PM
I'd rather they put in an indigenous meadow. Trees are awesome, but so are open green spaces that maintain themselves.
by ortusdux on 1/30/24, 7:57 PM
I'd like to see more solar covered parking lots. Bonus points for integrated EV charging stations. They would be great in the hotter parts of the country. How much fuel/energy is spent cooling cars back down after they have sat in the sun for an hour?
by gfs on 1/30/24, 7:17 PM
The book mentioned in this article (Paved Paradise) is eye-opening. I'm nearly done reading it and have a whole new perspective on the matter.
by uudecoded on 1/30/24, 7:41 PM
How long does it take to break even on the carbon output of asphalt demolition and haul-away vs carbon input of optimal density trees planted in the same space?
by notorandit on 1/31/24, 10:16 AM
Planting trees is not trivial. Nor a green-ish solution.
1. What to plant is important as not all places/soils are the same.
2. Are you also thinking about maintenance (watering and pruning included)?
3. Are you also thinking about environmental compatibility with existing fauna and flora?
Planting trees is not trivial!
by JR1427 on 1/31/24, 11:27 AM
It's interesting reading the comments that are from a US perspective, where there are vast amounts of untamed land for wildlife and recreation. Many US commenters are highlighting that they would rather that cities be cities, because there is already plenty of green space outside cities.
In the UK, most land is either farmland, or built on, so urban green areas are much more important for wildlife. There is a drive in the UK to create more "green corridors" linking green areas together, but this is facing stiff competition with the drive to develop second cities.
Ripping up parking lots (car parks) and planting trees would be even more important in the UK.
by efields on 1/30/24, 11:30 PM
Baltimore resident. I went to that staples for the first time a week ago and thought the parking lot was strangely huge. I don’t think an urban forest makes sense there tho.
Baltimore actually has a decent amount of forest and park per capita. The Roland park country club is becoming a public/private thing.
Getting around town without a car sucks though. There’s no growth to incentivize bigger transit projects. More busses would be nice.
I don’t think Baltimore and other hollowed out blue collar cities need trees as much as they need to enable entirely different industries. And I don’t know what those industries are! But there’s a lot of talented craftspeople here, and not enough capital to pay them.
Or we go anarcho-collectivism.
by kulahan on 1/31/24, 8:19 AM
As of a few years ago, all parking lot sizes were effectively guesstimates, at least for a not-insignificant number of companies. iirc, the problem
Donald Shoup is an economist with a seemingly infinite hatred for our massive waste of parking. Cool ideas for how to fix it (e.g. metered parking that goes up as parking goes down, money goes to the neighborhood that's being metered directly) and he helps drive home how insane the entire thing is.
He's got some old lectures and interviews on youtube that can be pretty damn interesting, for a video of an economist talking about parking lots...
by aurizon on 1/31/24, 2:12 PM
We need denser housing = low rise densification with roof terraces/gardens on impenetrable = never leak roofs with zero structural maintenance using stainless steel rebar = never corrode, but add only 2-3% to base costs. We have millions of structures failing after 30-50 years due to steel rebar corrosion. The construction industry is aware of this, but does not implement it by intent. With impending zero population growth looming in many areas, we need zero cost growth housing.
by SoftTalker on 1/30/24, 11:02 PM
In general, if you don't like how a piece of property is being used, you should buy it and then use it the way you see fit.
by silexia on 1/31/24, 4:32 PM
What a dumb idea. The massive amount of fuel it would take to build and run the huge machines necessary to tear up a parking lot, then just move it to another lot of land far outstrips the benefits of a few trees. Simply let plants and trees grow up through the lot and go back to a natural state over time.
by housebear on 1/30/24, 8:48 PM
Does anyone have an idea of what it would roughly cost to purchase an unused parking lot, tear it up, dispose of the asphalt waste, re-soil, and plant 30 or so trees? Is this something some enterprising person could start a kickstarter for just as a public experiment? Is it even possible with zoning requirements or the like?
by xnx on 1/30/24, 7:59 PM
Much easier to let farmland go wild than tear up parking lots and destroy any chance of recouping the embodied energy of asphalt for something useful. Most farmland is in support of animal agriculture (boooo) and wouldn't make economic sense if farms had to pay municipal rates for the water they use.
by RecycledEle on 1/31/24, 7:13 PM
Parking lots are a capital investment. The vast majority of "unused" parking lots will be used if they remain in place and receive a small amount of maintenance.
Tearing up a parking lot and later building a new one is not only expensive but it does significant environmental damage.
by midasuni on 1/30/24, 10:59 PM
Soon you’ll have to pay a dollar and a half just to see the parking lots in the parking lot museum.
by nraynaud on 1/31/24, 9:31 AM
it's funny how older countries are sometimes ahead of some trends. Here in France we can ignore some local height limits to install solar pannels, it's now forbidden (in the genreal case) to toss your rainwater to the street, you have to get in back in the ground on the area it was collected, etc. But it's true that being an old country they did not really trash everything for the car, so we are not too much left with the very wide scar of a highway cutting through a downtown.
by lifeformed on 1/31/24, 11:10 AM
Here in Taipei, most of the parking lots are built underground, and above them are green park spaces. It's great, a two-for-one deal.
by lgleason on 1/30/24, 7:51 PM
I like cars and spend a decent amount of time keeping my cars looking pristine. I personally prefer having more than enough parking rather than just enough. Most of the efforts to improve walkability makes it impossible to find parking when you are driving in and forces you to park in dense areas where you either have to pay a fortune to park or park in dense areas where your car is likely to get dinged by some jerk who opens their door into your car.
by dukeofdoom on 1/30/24, 11:43 PM
Money could be spent to aquire larger amounts of land on outskirts of cities ti create a larger park or forrested area.
by kusuriya on 1/30/24, 10:48 PM
heck even if we just did more trees and shade cover of parking lots it would be better for the environment all the way around, and make drivers happier so they don't have to crawl into a complete oven of a car.
by HenryBemis on 1/31/24, 7:35 AM
> remove the unnecessary asphalt and plant some trees. Or do something constructive with this unused, paved space — new housing, a solar energy field
It's always about the money. Who will sell the land, who will buy the land, who will build the houses, who will buy the houses (for how much), and so on.
If I am a developer I don't care to make a $100k house. I prefer that there is 'some' scarcity in the market so I can be selling $300k houses instead. This 'motivational' speech is socialist-like (I like socialism but the Scandinavian one - aka capitalism with enhanced social care).
If there is money to be made, then money will be made. I am sure that these places will go down in prices enough to become 'attractive', and not a day before.
by aetherspawn on 1/31/24, 7:18 AM
Wow, you guys have unused parking lots? We chronically don’t have enough, anywhere.
by andrewstuart on 1/30/24, 10:17 PM
Take all the trees, put em in a tree museum.
Charge the people, a dollar and half just to see em.
by megablast on 1/31/24, 9:56 AM
Tear up all car parks.
by irusensei on 1/30/24, 7:47 PM
If it’s public properties then yes please. If private then hippity hoppity…
by tamimio on 1/30/24, 8:50 PM
Before attacking the parking lots, fix the return to office mandates, the public transportation, downtown concepts, and physically collocated XY (shops or other) and the parking lot issue will solve itself, going after the symptoms without fixing the root cause is just moronic nonsense that will lead to at least “other” parking lots increasing their prices.
by Ekaros on 1/31/24, 6:46 AM
I say we wait until someone demonstrate area working which totally bans all types of vehicles. Only allowing ambulances and firetrucks. Absolutely nothing else, no vans, no taxis(or ridesharing). Maybe provide wheelchairs for those that need.
Keep this going at least for 10 years and see how much the people will enjoy it.
by kova12 on 1/30/24, 7:44 PM
No P&L, no cost/reward analysis, no numbers at all. Just emotional "omg need more green". Have the author ever torn down a single parking lot? Doesn't look like that to me. Why is this article even on HN at all?