There's an interesting interview with a designer of SimCity, where he discusses parking:
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
The excess of cars in cities is bad enough, but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets.
Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many people are dependent on them. You can't ignore that. There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities, but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. We have to ease toward a situation where their negative impact is reduced. Underground parking in new construction seems like an option, especially in cities like NYC where there is no need fear of scaring off developers. And in the case of NYC, there is precedent that goes back to at least the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, where apartment buildings do, in fact, have underground parking for the building's residents. And I suspect the costs were not huge. In many cases, the "underground parking" is merely basement level or even the ground level.
It's a pity that they didn't bake in the option to turn on realistic parking lots and road sizes for the required capacity. It does have traffic jams and more roads can help, especially since the player can control induced demand far more than in reality, but allowing the player to switch between both what's a fun game and what's a realistic simulation could have gone a long way to inform a good chunk of the population on the tradeoffs and impacts of parking and other infrastructure dedicated to automobiles.
> When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. . . . So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground.
All the new HEBs (Texas grocery store) that I've seen are built above their parking garages with a smaller amount of parking at store level.
Sim City's sort of on the correct solution track here.
The REAL solution is going to look way more like Azimov's Caves of Steel style city.
* High speed people mover beltway / sidewalks
* No cost access to this transit
* A Theme Park like utility corridor system
Plus high speed (freeway like) bypass routes around / through the city which can exit into mega parking structures (much cheaper at large scale than wastefully cramming into a normal building's footprint) as external interface buffers between 'car land' / intercity transit, and 'pedestrian land' / intracity movement.
I played a lot of SimCity 3000, and as I recall, a lot of commercially zoned cells will end up being small parking lots. The game assigns whimsical names to properties, and the parking lots were named "They Paved Paradise."
>You could imagine a world in which streets were pedestrianized and where we planted trees and gardens and in what is currently space reserved for parking, and closed streets, outside schools, so kids can have places to play.
I would love to see a LOT more of this in urban centers.
I live in a college town that is about the same size as Iowa City. Iowa City has taken the step of closing off their downtown and making it mostly pedestrian space. It's incredibly nice to explore the area on foot. Our city has considered the same idea but pedestrianizing our downtown has been so controversial when it has been discussed, it hasn't come up for over a decade- mayors are scared to death to touch it.
Part of the reason is poor past civic planning would make it very expensive to correct. The main conduit through the downtown business district is also the major East-West artery of town, making the street one of those dreaded "stroads-" a street in the sense that there is heavy commercial and residential presence, resulting in a LOT of local foot traffic and stops all day long; mixed with traffic that just wants to get through downtown to somewhere else. So half of the traffic is looking for parking and the other half is running red lights to get somewhere else as fast as possible.
There have been, predictably, many incidents involving cars, pedestrians and bicycles. But not one inch moved on what's become the 800lb gorilla. I don't think a solution is even possible.
Ithaca, New York is another similar-sized town (population ~31K) that closed some blocks of its downtown "Main Street" (State Street) to make a very pleasant pedestrian business district. This happened in the 1970s.
The pedestrianized portion of State Street was part of a New York state highway -- highway traffic was re-routed to be on parallel one-way streets, separated by 2 blocks, that bracket the district.
The somewhat scattered wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Commons) has some of the backstory. (I lived there in the 90s and I think it's exaggerating the downturn in those years, but whatever.)
Part of the problem is you can’t just convert an area to a pedestrian area as people still need to be able to get there. You need to construct low cost parking garages around the area so people can still get there.
A college town's context is very different than that of the central business district and inner city of a large metropolitan area. Context doesn't just matter, it's one of, if not the most, important aspects to consider when selecting a development pattern. You can't turn downtown St. Lous into downtown Iowa City or even 'downtown' Seoul, South Korea. Dreamers hate this reality and will contort their assertions every which way they can to avoid admitting any of this.
I live car-free in NYC. A large appeal of NYC to me was not having to park. I don't ~mind~ driving, but I absolutely hated having to deal with finding parking when I lived in other cities. Parking generally makes me feel stressed (competition for free spots), or makes me pay (using something like SpotHero makes it easy to find a spot, but costs me).
It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college town in Illinois and parking downtown is a nightmare, and can easily add 10 minutes to your trip time, AND it's paid. Visiting a city I'm not familiar with can add some stress too as you don't know the best parking, unlike cities you are familiar with.
NYC has problems of it's own (trains are generally reliable, but tend to have delays right when you need them), but for $33 a week I can get to most major neighborhoods in 30 minutes, walking straight to my destination. Add in $40 for a couple cabs when I prioritize a quicker trip, and I have amazing access to my city for less than $100/week.
I lived for a few years a 5 minute walk from downtown Palo Alto. I still used my car, but significantly less. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to walk, instead of drive, for a random trip to a restaurant. It was even better when going to the bar.
I think if we also focused on walkability for residential development, we could cut down on car use. Even though I now live in suburbia, I made sure there were a few places I could walk to before I bought my house.
ClimateTown, along with Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, City Nerd, and the like give me hope that the message is getting out.
That being said, the more I watch these videos/listen to their podcasts the more I understand that city planners, specifically those in charge of managing traffic and parking, have been taught _incorrectly_ for decades. These content creators regularly say that if we want change we are going to need to go to city council meetings and speak up, but in reality what credentials do I have to talk about this stuff? It's my word as a software dev who consumes content about this against someone who's studied this stuff for years of their life. I don't personally blame the city planners, but I do think that car-centric planning has been engrained into their education fundamentally to the point where plans are made based on factors solely considering number of cars moving through traffic lights for example, vs. number of people crossing an intersection irrespective of mode of transportation.
Ah, parking... It's a topic that resonates with me deeply. I must admit, I've declined some get-togethers simply because I knew parking would be a challenge. There's nothing more disheartening than realizing the only option is to find street parking in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and the added stress of searching for a spot, especially parallel parking, just adds to the frustration. This stress often reaches a point where the first thing I do when heading to a new place is to conduct a thorough Google Maps search, examining the aerial view and Street View to identify available parking options. Of course, if public transportation is a viable alternative, I try to opt for that, but unfortunately, it's not always efficient and can significantly increase travel time.
It is insane how much actual land is used for ground-floor parking. You could house every homeless person in the USA with like 1/1000th of the available parking space, and park all the moved cars in vertical parking structures. But, geez, that costs money, and political clout, and homeless people don't exactly have a lobbying group.
It would cost less money than all that is already spent on homelessness combined, but violates the principle that real estate must function first as a wildly profitable speculative asset in expensive urban centers, which is why it’s verboten. You can set billions on fire with BS homelessness programs that both don’t compromise the underlying asset prices and provide myriad opportunities for graft, which is why they’re the favorite form of indirect taxation on real estate put in place by politicians. We already have and spend the money, just in the most corrupt and useless ways imaginable.
I think you need to go one level deeper: People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks shapes everything. Cars, and thus car parking, come about because of this need.
Even before cars existed, roads and parking (such as hitching posts and stables) still existed because people needed to move.
And even bicycles (electric or not) need parking too. There are startups dedicated to creating automated bike parking garages to limit theft.
> People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks shapes everything. Cars, and thus car parking, come about because of this need.
This is not true. Every city in the US used to have a robust public transit system. No cars or parking lots needed. You can hitch 2 horses per car space, and 10-20 bikes in the same space.
this topic is a bit of a rabbit hole. Yes, roads have always been there. Massive car infrastructure and parking has not.
Looking back in time, most people would actually walk for most of their daily life. That reflected in how cities and villages were built. This layout has only changed after we started adopting cars as default mean of transportation (mostly 1930s and later, with some exceptions).
> People needing to move non-trivial distances for periodic tasks
Or being required to even if their job can be effectively done from home (and consists entirely of slack message and zoom calls with remote coworkers whether they pollute the planet driving into the office or not).
> parking is perhaps the greatest determinant of whether people decide to make a trip in a car or by some other means
Surely that can't be true in general - I would think the quality/convenience/cost of the alternative would be by far the biggest factor (but yes, you could argue that's rolling multiple factors into one).
But as an example, plenty of offices I've worked at over the years have offered free or cheap parking to all staff, with sufficient space for virtually everyone, yet less than half of the staff chose to drive simply because getting there by car was slower/more expensive than the alternatives (typically train or tram, and a few, like myself, that much prefer our pushbikes!). Actually at my current job in a CBD/downtown building, nobody drives despite the high availability of parking, but it is quite expensive to use (~$18 a day I believe).
> I would think the quality/convenience/cost of the alternative would be by far the biggest factor
The alternatives almost never beat a car in quality, convenience, and cost (minus parking costs, which is the point). The exceptions are very specific cases, like inter-Manhattan travel at certain times of the day, for example, where $2.75 can get you most places faster than your own car and cheaper than a cab.
A few of my memories from working in the parking biz:
1. We were bidding smart parking meters to a city in California who insisted that, per the ADA, they should be accessible to the blind. We suggested to them that blind folks tend to not park or drive cars very often.
2. Seeing damage photos from a customer's parking meter where somebody had inserted dynamite up the coin/ticket return tray. The explosion buckled the body of the machine, but incredibly the reinforcement and the lock held. The [paper] money inside got destroyed, though.
3. The angry customer reaction when a co-worker's "Get bent, loser" dummy/debug message accidentally found its way into production.
4. Having to certify the accuracy of a parking meter's onboard clock because it printed a boat launch ticket that was used as evidence in the case of a guy who killed his pregnant wife and dumped her in the SF Bay.
A drive in cinema I loved going to shut down last week because a land value tax made it impossible to conduct their business there. They were being charged over one thousand dollars per day of tax because in that area, tax is calculated ignoring what's actually on the land. If it was shut down and turned into apartments (which is what's happening now), the tax is spread out across all owners and manageable. But concentrated on one business, it made it impossible to run. Land value tax is anti-business.
We have an abundance of parking and a shortage of housing, it's too bad we don't have a way to quickly setup housing (even temporary) in parking areas. Most parking is already located near other utilities so they would already be close by. To start with, we could require every parking lot over a certain size provide basic amenities like public restrooms with showers and water fountains.
> it's too bad we don't have a way to quickly setup housing (even temporary) in parking areas.
RVs.
Don't quote me, but I suspect some temporary shelters during disasters are RVs (and go to the exact parking lots you describe.)
> We have an abundance of parking and a shortage of housing
But I'm not sure that putting RVs in underutilized parking lots will solve the homeless crisis. (Assuming that's what you're referring to.) I generally see a lot of homeless people in very dense cities where parking is at a premium.
Maybe "RVs in parking lots as temporary housing" would work for low-wage employees, who sometimes are at risk of becoming homeless due to their low wages?
American cities seem to hover around 20-30% land area dedicated to parking in the city cores, according to ParkingReform. Canadian urban planning is largely indistinguishable from American here too. Mexico City is probably similar, with around 40% according to one source [1]. Rio is around 42% of new construction. In all of the cities I checked, it was largest land use category once broken out.
Melbourne seems to be better at ~12%, but it's still the third largest land use category despite long-standing efforts to deprioritize cars.
If anything, "shapes everything around us" might be understating the reality.
I visited metro Detroit for the first time on Saturday and the parking situation was abysmal but this is perhaps understandable in a large city. I thought my small city in Canada was bad!
We couldn’t even park downtown since it appears you need to book it in advance and the trip was somewhat spontaneous. I just ended up pulling over (by a no stopping sign ha) on a quiet side street and setting the GPS back to Windsor.
Detroit, as the capital of the auto industry, has far more parking than just about any other city I've ever been to. There are huge, multi-story garages right on the main thoroughfare downtown.
> Detroit was, or is, Motor City. Its center can pull off another automotive-related nickname: Parking Central. Fully one-third of downtown Detroit is dedicated to letting cars do what they’re not designed for: standing still.
I recently took a roadtrip about 1500 miles to visit some family. On the way to/back we wanted to stop and check out some cities the kids wanted to visit and it's amazing the anxiety I had every time we drove into a large urban area, all about traffic and parking. Most of the time, like you said, there was no place to park so I drove around and around with hundreds of other people while the kids complained about not being able to get out. It's like you said, if you knew where you were going you may be able to map it out, which also gives me anxiety (ok kids, we need to leave now to get to the next parking spot). I don't know, each time I was glad to leave.
My whole life I've struggled with the need for cars in the places I've lived. Very few US cities have the right infrastructure to go car-free, and the places I personally have lived feature such unrelentingly hot summers that going anywhere without AC is pretty much a nonstarter.
But it exists as a low-grade "well this sucks, but I can't do much about it" fact of existence, like hangnails or tax audits. Then, last year, I bought a motorcycle in lieu of us getting a second car, and I found that EVEN WITH the hassles of weather and limited cargo, and EVEN WITH factoring in the need to wear protective gear, the dead solid CERTAINTY that I can park in seconds without being far from my destination makes the bike my preference 80% of the time.
Only 100F or driving rain will make me PICK the car if the logistics of the trip don't demand it for other reasons. The agility, ease of parking, and absurd fuel economy are all huge wins, plus it's always more fun that driving.
> catastrophically mismanaged the way we provide parking in this country
> it’s not properly priced
It is was interesting how complex the parking situation can be. So many factors come into play when planning a trip to raise my anxiety levels. Factors include: likelihood of availability given your timing, safely of vehicle, price (anywhere from free to $60 a day), time limits, proximity to desired location.
I think I would like some sort of reservation system, but I am sure that would come with other unforeseen issues, like rick people reserving everything at all times.
You could mandate underground parking lots for every new structure. Then liberate access to that parking via an app so that not only the above the parking lot folks take advantage of it.
[+] [-] UtopiaPunk|2 years ago|reply
Geoff Manaugh: While you were making those measurements of different real-world cities, did you discover any surprising patterns or spatial relationships
Librande: Yes, definitely. I think the biggest one was the parking lots. When I started measuring out our local grocery store, which I don’t think of as being that big, I was blown away by how much more space was parking lot rather than actual store. That was kind of a problem, because we were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
Manaugh: You would be making SimParkingLot, rather than SimCity.
Librande: [laughs] Exactly. So what we do in the game is that we just imagine they are underground. We do have parking lots in the game, and we do try to scale them—so, if you have a little grocery store, we’ll put six or seven parking spots on the side, and, if you have a big convention center or a big pro stadium, they’ll have what seem like really big lots—but they’re nowhere near what a real grocery store or pro stadium would have. We had to do the best we could do and still make the game look attractive.
Source: https://bldgblog.com/2013/05/sim-city-an-interview-with-ston...
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|2 years ago|reply
Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many people are dependent on them. You can't ignore that. There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities, but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. We have to ease toward a situation where their negative impact is reduced. Underground parking in new construction seems like an option, especially in cities like NYC where there is no need fear of scaring off developers. And in the case of NYC, there is precedent that goes back to at least the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, where apartment buildings do, in fact, have underground parking for the building's residents. And I suspect the costs were not huge. In many cases, the "underground parking" is merely basement level or even the ground level.
[+] [-] catgary|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeoPanthera|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adolph|2 years ago|reply
All the new HEBs (Texas grocery store) that I've seen are built above their parking garages with a smaller amount of parking at store level.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-E-B
[+] [-] mjevans|2 years ago|reply
The REAL solution is going to look way more like Azimov's Caves of Steel style city.
Plus high speed (freeway like) bypass routes around / through the city which can exit into mega parking structures (much cheaper at large scale than wastefully cramming into a normal building's footprint) as external interface buffers between 'car land' / intercity transit, and 'pedestrian land' / intracity movement.[+] [-] Tommah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nharada|2 years ago|reply
SimCity: https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/simcity/e/...
Real Stadium: https://i.imgur.com/KwT1T53.png
[+] [-] damnesian|2 years ago|reply
I would love to see a LOT more of this in urban centers.
I live in a college town that is about the same size as Iowa City. Iowa City has taken the step of closing off their downtown and making it mostly pedestrian space. It's incredibly nice to explore the area on foot. Our city has considered the same idea but pedestrianizing our downtown has been so controversial when it has been discussed, it hasn't come up for over a decade- mayors are scared to death to touch it.
Part of the reason is poor past civic planning would make it very expensive to correct. The main conduit through the downtown business district is also the major East-West artery of town, making the street one of those dreaded "stroads-" a street in the sense that there is heavy commercial and residential presence, resulting in a LOT of local foot traffic and stops all day long; mixed with traffic that just wants to get through downtown to somewhere else. So half of the traffic is looking for parking and the other half is running red lights to get somewhere else as fast as possible.
There have been, predictably, many incidents involving cars, pedestrians and bicycles. But not one inch moved on what's become the 800lb gorilla. I don't think a solution is even possible.
[+] [-] mturmon|2 years ago|reply
The pedestrianized portion of State Street was part of a New York state highway -- highway traffic was re-routed to be on parallel one-way streets, separated by 2 blocks, that bracket the district.
The somewhat scattered wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca_Commons) has some of the backstory. (I lived there in the 90s and I think it's exaggerating the downturn in those years, but whatever.)
[+] [-] david2ndaccount|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZitchDog|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paganel|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elijaht|2 years ago|reply
It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college town in Illinois and parking downtown is a nightmare, and can easily add 10 minutes to your trip time, AND it's paid. Visiting a city I'm not familiar with can add some stress too as you don't know the best parking, unlike cities you are familiar with.
NYC has problems of it's own (trains are generally reliable, but tend to have delays right when you need them), but for $33 a week I can get to most major neighborhoods in 30 minutes, walking straight to my destination. Add in $40 for a couple cabs when I prioritize a quicker trip, and I have amazing access to my city for less than $100/week.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|2 years ago|reply
I think if we also focused on walkability for residential development, we could cut down on car use. Even though I now live in suburbia, I made sure there were a few places I could walk to before I bought my house.
[+] [-] lippihom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeeWEE|2 years ago|reply
A car is not really a status symbol here. Its more like a liability.
[+] [-] squidgyhead|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willio58|2 years ago|reply
That being said, the more I watch these videos/listen to their podcasts the more I understand that city planners, specifically those in charge of managing traffic and parking, have been taught _incorrectly_ for decades. These content creators regularly say that if we want change we are going to need to go to city council meetings and speak up, but in reality what credentials do I have to talk about this stuff? It's my word as a software dev who consumes content about this against someone who's studied this stuff for years of their life. I don't personally blame the city planners, but I do think that car-centric planning has been engrained into their education fundamentally to the point where plans are made based on factors solely considering number of cars moving through traffic lights for example, vs. number of people crossing an intersection irrespective of mode of transportation.
[+] [-] cmcconomy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsignedint|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xbadcafebee|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bugglebeetle|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|2 years ago|reply
Even before cars existed, roads and parking (such as hitching posts and stables) still existed because people needed to move.
And even bicycles (electric or not) need parking too. There are startups dedicated to creating automated bike parking garages to limit theft.
[+] [-] SamBorick|2 years ago|reply
This is not true. Every city in the US used to have a robust public transit system. No cars or parking lots needed. You can hitch 2 horses per car space, and 10-20 bikes in the same space.
Those pre-car public transit systems were bankrupted by artificially low fares, and because a small number of cars literally got in the way: https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...
[+] [-] ttymck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MezzoDelCammin|2 years ago|reply
Looking back in time, most people would actually walk for most of their daily life. That reflected in how cities and villages were built. This layout has only changed after we started adopting cars as default mean of transportation (mostly 1930s and later, with some exceptions).
[+] [-] commandlinefan|2 years ago|reply
Or being required to even if their job can be effectively done from home (and consists entirely of slack message and zoom calls with remote coworkers whether they pollute the planet driving into the office or not).
[+] [-] wizofaus|2 years ago|reply
Surely that can't be true in general - I would think the quality/convenience/cost of the alternative would be by far the biggest factor (but yes, you could argue that's rolling multiple factors into one).
But as an example, plenty of offices I've worked at over the years have offered free or cheap parking to all staff, with sufficient space for virtually everyone, yet less than half of the staff chose to drive simply because getting there by car was slower/more expensive than the alternatives (typically train or tram, and a few, like myself, that much prefer our pushbikes!). Actually at my current job in a CBD/downtown building, nobody drives despite the high availability of parking, but it is quite expensive to use (~$18 a day I believe).
[+] [-] whateverman23|2 years ago|reply
The alternatives almost never beat a car in quality, convenience, and cost (minus parking costs, which is the point). The exceptions are very specific cases, like inter-Manhattan travel at certain times of the day, for example, where $2.75 can get you most places faster than your own car and cheaper than a cab.
[+] [-] glonq|2 years ago|reply
1. We were bidding smart parking meters to a city in California who insisted that, per the ADA, they should be accessible to the blind. We suggested to them that blind folks tend to not park or drive cars very often.
2. Seeing damage photos from a customer's parking meter where somebody had inserted dynamite up the coin/ticket return tray. The explosion buckled the body of the machine, but incredibly the reinforcement and the lock held. The [paper] money inside got destroyed, though.
3. The angry customer reaction when a co-worker's "Get bent, loser" dummy/debug message accidentally found its way into production.
4. Having to certify the accuracy of a parking meter's onboard clock because it printed a boat launch ticket that was used as evidence in the case of a guy who killed his pregnant wife and dumped her in the SF Bay.
[+] [-] ultra_nick|2 years ago|reply
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/what-is-a-land-value-tax-520...
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|2 years ago|reply
No thanks.
[+] [-] staringback|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supportengineer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwbas1c|2 years ago|reply
RVs.
Don't quote me, but I suspect some temporary shelters during disasters are RVs (and go to the exact parking lots you describe.)
> We have an abundance of parking and a shortage of housing
But I'm not sure that putting RVs in underutilized parking lots will solve the homeless crisis. (Assuming that's what you're referring to.) I generally see a lot of homeless people in very dense cities where parking is at a premium.
Maybe "RVs in parking lots as temporary housing" would work for low-wage employees, who sometimes are at risk of becoming homeless due to their low wages?
[+] [-] supertrope|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlyingSnake|2 years ago|reply
From my experience in living in Asia, USA and Europe, it might only be applicable to USA.
[+] [-] AlotOfReading|2 years ago|reply
Melbourne seems to be better at ~12%, but it's still the third largest land use category despite long-standing efforts to deprioritize cars.
If anything, "shapes everything around us" might be understating the reality.
[1] https://www.itdp.org/2017/07/26/mexico-city-became-leader-pa...
[2] https://www.itdp.org/2019/01/31/rio-joins-parking-reform-lea...
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mikrl|2 years ago|reply
We couldn’t even park downtown since it appears you need to book it in advance and the trip was somewhat spontaneous. I just ended up pulling over (by a no stopping sign ha) on a quiet side street and setting the GPS back to Windsor.
[+] [-] jakemoshenko|2 years ago|reply
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/parking-lots-eat-american-...
> Detroit was, or is, Motor City. Its center can pull off another automotive-related nickname: Parking Central. Fully one-third of downtown Detroit is dedicated to letting cars do what they’re not designed for: standing still.
[+] [-] tfandango|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brewdad|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ubermonkey|2 years ago|reply
But it exists as a low-grade "well this sucks, but I can't do much about it" fact of existence, like hangnails or tax audits. Then, last year, I bought a motorcycle in lieu of us getting a second car, and I found that EVEN WITH the hassles of weather and limited cargo, and EVEN WITH factoring in the need to wear protective gear, the dead solid CERTAINTY that I can park in seconds without being far from my destination makes the bike my preference 80% of the time.
Only 100F or driving rain will make me PICK the car if the logistics of the trip don't demand it for other reasons. The agility, ease of parking, and absurd fuel economy are all huge wins, plus it's always more fun that driving.
[+] [-] mdrzn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] francisofascii|2 years ago|reply
It is was interesting how complex the parking situation can be. So many factors come into play when planning a trip to raise my anxiety levels. Factors include: likelihood of availability given your timing, safely of vehicle, price (anywhere from free to $60 a day), time limits, proximity to desired location.
I think I would like some sort of reservation system, but I am sure that would come with other unforeseen issues, like rick people reserving everything at all times.
[+] [-] anideazzz|2 years ago|reply