Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees(danrodricks.com) |
Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees(danrodricks.com) |
Rewilding unnecessary farmland is also a good idea. As usual in these conversations, there's no reason we can't do both.
Tearing up a parking lot and later building a new one is not only expensive but it does significant environmental damage.
Most of the efforts to improve driveability make it impossible to walk anywhere.
I think it's good to have a diversity of types of development. Just as people who don't want to drive shouldn't expect access to car-dependent environments to be easy, people in cars shouldn't expect the very few pockets of hard-won walkable environments to be optimal for driving into.
That's a good thing. Cheap or free parking is just a subsidy on car usage.
Your complaint is usually implicitly about a lack of free parking. Folks who insist on bringing their cars to town for dinner can foot the storage bill at a lot/garage down the street IMHO.
The free market is telling you something.
You've probably seen that propaganda around here but in case you missed it, here is some documentation : https://www.strongtowns.org/
How so? If we waved a magic wand and all cars became EVs powered by renewable energy, what would be unsustainable?
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.
Charge the people, a dollar and half just to see em.
hoppity heft property is theft
Keep this going at least for 10 years and see how much the people will enjoy it.
* emergency vehicles * other essential government vehicles like post office, garbage, etc. * commercial delivery vehicles (dozens per 1000) * taxi services (dozens per 1000) * personal vehicles for those with disabilities * personal vehicles for those who are willing to pay a lot of money+time for them (hopefully not many dozens per 1000).
You are thinking that the terminal goal is no cars. But the terminal goal is to live on Earth in a sustainable fashion so we don't destroy the only habitable ecosystem for humans. Fewer cars is a secondary goal in service of this very reasonable requirement.
Please note that less than 18% (likely around 10%) of the world's population own cars [1]. 5-10x the number of the current cars in the world, even if they are EVs, will have more than a 5-10x impact on the environment since ecological systems are non-linear in nature.
[1] https://www.motorbiscuit.com/number-car-owners-world-less-th...
Still, if you solved those issues as well (and there is progress afaik?) it'd be fine. Cars are handy, and a necessity if you live somewhere rural. just keep them out of cities as much as possible, except for larger transports and emergency vehicles.
Yes, I currently do. Not being able to do that is a downgrade. We can and should do better than telling people to accept a worse solution.
And define "efficient"? People's time and effort have value, as well, and saving time and effort is a win. If a proposed solution is "it takes longer to get from place to place, and additionally requires walking or biking", many people will rightfully consider that proposal worse.
Capacity, cost per passenger, environmental impact, space efficiency.
How does a hailed EV scale to every person in a city that needs to move around without the massive congestion problems we already see in car dominant cities?
Those things certainly have value. (Environmental impact most of all, that one is actually urgent to solve.) People's time and effort also has value. We have different values for the tradeoffs between them. I care about environmental impact; let's have EVs powered by clean power, and let's have them be repairable and upgradeable so that they don't regularly become obsolete waste. I do not care about capacity or space efficiency except insofar as they indirectly cause problems like congestion and sprawl, and both of those may be possible to address in other ways (e.g. eliminating parking, which is why I didn't claim that everyone owning their own EV and most of them sitting unused most of the time is an ideal solution); neither of those is as important as people's time and effort.
There are other possible utopias, and other potential ways to handle transit. But I'm always going to start from a premise of "how can we achieve the same or better on human time and effort", rather than telling people they have to accept transportation that takes longer and doesn't actually get them directly to where they're going.
I think efficiency as it's defined by urban planners and transport experts is, in my opinion, the most useful definition to use in this debate. I also didn't intend to advocate for a single mode of transportation. EVs likely have a place in a public transport network to fill gaps and/or ferry people with mobility issues. But they should exist as complementary strategies to a robust fleet of mass transit systems, bike lanes and footpaths. Again, leaning entirely on cars, even EVs, is going to eventually lead to congestion and sprawl.
> But I'm always going to start from a premise of "how can we achieve the same or better on human time and effort"
Right, but this only works if only some of the population of a city travels this way. If everyone does, we're back to congestion and traffic jams, which make this mode even less efficient again.
> rather than telling people they have to accept transportation that takes longer and doesn't actually get them directly to where they're going.
Have you had negative experiences with public transport? Because this isn't really the typical situation in every city. I also didn't mean to tell anyone they had to accept one form of transport. I think you'll find if you provide it, and design it well, people will use it, though.
To be clear, I don't either. And I don't want "car-centric city planning". I want "people-centric, car-integrated, transit-integrated, pedestrian-integrated city planning". What's the best solution given all of those tools that places a high value on people's time and effort and treats our current system as a bare minimum baseline that we must not do worse than.
We disagree on the proportion of transit that wants to be point-to-point EV trips, but I would advocate for using the right tool for the right job. I love long-distance train travel whenever I have the opportunity, and I've also encountered local rail systems or subway systems that work reasonably well at getting vaguely near the right place. I think public transit could adequately serve far more people than it does, and the current state of it in the US is abysmal and should be improved. I advocate against positions that claim it will work for the vast majority of people, or that people should have to accept some amount of inconvenience and use it when it's less optimal.
> Right, but this only works if only some of the population of a city travels this way. If everyone does, we're back to congestion and traffic jams, which make this mode even less efficient again.
I disagree with this being an essential property, rather than being one that has arisen from many many terrible ways we do both city design and transit design. (And to be clear, that does include bad design that arises from being car-centric and in particular car-ownership-centric, rather than a people-centric design that integrates cars as well as other modes of transportation.)
Among many other bad designs that we could improve on, given the will to do so:
1) Absolutely build mass transit systems, and use them to get all the predictable non-point-to-point transportation off the roads. Make the mass transit systems free (because they literally lose money collecting fares today and would save money and time by not doing so). Make them comfortable, frequent, and un-crowded. Solve the other societal problems (e.g. insufficient housing, see (7)) that currently have the side effect of making mass transit undesirable for many.
2) We currently have systems in which cars and pedestrians ever interact, and we shouldn't. An ideal car network would be 95% invisible to people, either elevated or underground (or alternatively and more feasibly in many pre-existing urban areas, with the walkways elevated and with interconnections between buildings), completely silent, no pedestrian crossings needed (because elevated crossings or hidden roadways), and as few stops/intersections as possible. (That's before the further optimizations that would be possible if we have roadways exclusively usable by self-driving vehicles.) That makes roads faster and more efficient, and makes walking areas more pleasant.
3) We currently try to design self-driving vehicles that ever interact with non-self-driving vehicles, rather than seriously looking at what a robust and safe design could look like if it didn't have that constraint. I am skeptical that our current approaches will produce results anytime in the next decade or more; with dedicated spaces that problem becomes one of infrastructure and largely not one of technology.
4) We have parking taking up space near everywhere people want to stop, rather than designing primarily around drop-offs and pick-ups. (This is an improvement before self-driving and a much bigger one after.)
5) We have advertisements and storefronts and similar that expect people to see them from their cars, which is related to (4) and (6). Get out of car, get on escalator/elevator/stairs, be in or adjacent to the building.
6) We have huge numbers of commercial spaces that take little to no advantage of vertical space. There's (almost) no excuse for 1-2 floor stores or office buildings; that's a lot of wasted vertical space. Many people prefer suburbs for living and don't want to share walls with people; not everyone wants to live in an apartment/condo tower, nor should they have to. But that's far less of a problem for most (not all) businesses or offices, and we get much better transportation efficiency if the last leg of many journeys is an elevator.
7) We have far too little telecommuting and far too much commuting, even in recent years. And the commutes we have are too long. Allow building more housing, a lot more housing, no even more than that, until housing in every area is affordable, so that there's no premium or compromise required to live closer to work. Design taller, denser commercial areas, so that the places people work are easier to get to, and make sure there's plenty of housing in those areas as well. And ensure there's good mass-transit to those buildings, because commutes are one largely predictable bit of transportation and congestion for which we should be able to provide fast point-to-point rail. Have businesses that mandate in-person work provide most of the necessary funds, and enjoy the side effect of many businesses suddenly discovering that telecommuting is fine after all. Once commutes are largely addressed, that addresses the single biggest sources of congestion in most places.
8) Stop denigrating cars as exclusively for "people with mobility issues", and accept that they're for people who want to get directly from point A to point E without having to walk from A to B then take transit to C then take transit to D then walk to E. If a point-to-point car trip is faster than the transit network, and you can't make the transit network go that fast or be that convenient, accept that people rationally want to choose the car and you have to be better than that for people to switch. (And no, you don't get to cheat by going "well, if we make the cars slower people will have to take transit", as I've seen many try to do. Start with the premise that people should be able to get from A to E with as little time and effort as possible, and help them do so.)
That's one handful of possibilities, and I think plenty more naturally arise when you have a design that integrates many modes of transportation. Also, to forestall an obvious objection: the above is written based on planning for the future and based on substantial investment in transportation infrastructure, both of which I think are reasonable for any large-scale plan. I've frankly seen plans for mass transit that would require substantially larger investment in transportation than this, and have substantially less possibility for incremental evolution.
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)
We're at a critical juncture here in the Twin Cities. The state DOT needs to re-build the interstate that cuts right through the entire metro area (I-94) for the first time since it was first built 50 years ago. There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street. This would be amazing, the area around I-94 is, as you'd expect, quite unpleasant to be in. It's noisy, dirty, and dangerous. The interstate is infamous for being one of those roads that was planned to run through and destroy working class and Black neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s[1], and removing it would go some way to regaining what had been room for people to live. I think it's a bit of a longshot, but dang, I would love to see the cities recover that space for the people who actually live here, not just those who are driving through it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I'm really hoping we don't blow it by just rebuilding the stupid thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_94_in_Minnesota#His...
Very similar story - the highway divides Syracuse University from the poor Black neighborhoods. It's a scar through the middle of town.
I'm very excited to see how the city heals around it.
Here's a list of many twin cities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_cities
[1] https://www.archdaily.com/800155/6-cities-that-have-transfor...
I'm afraid that this would wind up like Vancouver, which lacks freeways through the city and has pretty bad traffic as a result. Better maybe to tunnel it under if possible? That works well for Seattle, although we still have I5 to contend with that divides the downtown from Capitol Hill (there is talk of lidding the entire freeway through downtown).
I was sitting in a coffee shop in a small town and I overheard a conversation next to me. Two elderly men were talking, and one of them made a comment to the effect of, "I like a rural town, so I try to vote to keep it that way." Two or three decades ago, this town really was a small farming town, but the population is growing and the town is changing. It's not becoming a city, though, not by any means! As the city (somewhat) nearby is becoming more expensive, the suburban sprawl is, well sprawling. The small rural town is transforming into a suburb of the city.
I would agree that this is a negative change for the small town, and I would argue that the solution is to urbanize the nearby city. There should be much more housing, and it should be much more affordable to live in the city. As it stands, many people want to live in that city, but find the housing prices unaffordable. So these people make a compromise between how much they are willing to pay on housing vs how long they are willing to travel (almost always by car) into the city. I count myself in this group.
Urban areas and rural areas complement one another, and there's pros and cons to living in either kind of place. However, post-WWII styled suburbs are, in my opinion, a net negative.
It really is. Some subruban and rual places are starting to get this as well. A common theme among the ones that get it is to provide density bonuses (i.e. if you allocate large blocks of conservation space, you can build more densely). The result is that you get the same overall density in an area but the people are living much closer together and not sprawling out and building over the natural environment.
I personally think most of them are too conservative with their approaches (often setting upper limits on density even with the bonuses) but the general approach of "build dense to limit the impact on rural spaces" is progress.
And because it's a highrise parking spots are expensive. Like $50k+ each. And that goes directly to the price of housing in rents.
Meanwhile, even at the busiest our garage is more than half empty. What a waste.
D magazine even used a picture of my garage in their article: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2021/12/the-city-of-da...
Wait am I reading this right that a 3-bedroom family home would come with space for six cars? How many families have 6 cars that's insane O.O
Sounds like a regulation someone long ago thought would for sure prevent anyone from building anything. No way they actually wanted that much residential parking ...
Unfortunately, that sounds like the spaces are close to being properly priced in the market?
Getting more utilization would require the price come down, and the price decrease may not increase the overall revenue immediately.
You would need cheaper nearby parking in order to force the price down. If there is no cheaper parking nearby, then the market is at the clearing price.
I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey and Maryland, spent a little time in my 20s in the denser-than-suburbs suburbia of the Bay Area, and then the past 14 years in San Francisco proper. More recently I've been spending 1-1.5 months at a time living out in "rural" parts of Truckee, CA.
I just don't know anymore. In San Francisco I live within a few minutes' walk of two dozen or so useful businesses (corner store, grocery, bakery, butcher, restaurants, bars, etc.), and everything I need to live I can get by walking no more than a half hour. I hate driving and love this.
In Truckee, the closest convenience store is a 40-minute walk, and all the other necessities are at least a 10-minute drive. On the other hand, I'm a light sleeper, and the intense darkness (moonlight, at most, only!) and quiet in Truckee was wonderful for restfulness. In SF we live near a Muni bus depot, where they clean buses well past midnight every night. I can mostly -- but not entirely -- get darkness with blackout blinds, but it's really not the same.
I definitely don't want to go back to the suburbs, but that sort of thing -- with much better city planning than most (all?) US suburbs have -- has potential to give me quiet and darkness, but the ability to walk everywhere I need to go.
Ultimately, though, what drives where I want to live is where my friends are. As I get older, I find it harder and harder to make new, close friends. Moving to a new place where I don't know anyone sounds like torture to me.
There are advantage and disadvantages to living everywhere in the world. You soon learn to enjoy the things that are possible where you are and not get into the things difficult/impossible.
You experienced a bad compromise of having high density of a city and the high car ownership of suburbia. Like a "stroad," a road that is trying to be a street, it doesn't work.
Try to spend a week in a place with walkable density and no cars: Amsterdam, Oslo, or closer to US, Disney Land.
This is backwards, you’ve got no choices in a lot of US cities other than to drive.
So everyone is pigeonholed into something you want
For now, not to long ago the left seemed adamant about forcing everyone into sprawling concrete jungles. I give it a few more years at most before they’re back at it pushing to cancel cars and force people to move to high rises.
I think we can agree that the sane thing to do is charge for it and let the market set the price. If home owners or developers want to build their own on-site parking, they're welcome to. Personally, I'm sick of having four parking spots in my garage tacked to my rent despite being a one car household.
Or did I misunderstand, and you feel on-street free parking should be paid for by tax payers? I have to disagree. I pay for my own parking. And people like me generate more tax revenue for the city because it costs less to service density, so I'm also funding on-street parking. I don't think that's fair. We should not be subsidizing car dependency. If you want to drive, pay for it yourself.
* Increased housing costs
* Decreased housing supply
* Increased air pollution
* Increased traffic
* Increased noise pollution
* Increased water pollution, stormwater usage
* Decrease in community and neighborhood cohesion
If a person feels they need parking, they can pay for it. They don't need society to force parking to be made available to everyone, whether they want it or not.
I can confidently say, I don’t care about this problem at all. Parking further up the street from my house is a small, small, small price to pay for the benefits of being walking distance from interesting things.
Besides, even if you mandate parking, it's an absurdity to mandate free parking.
Near me, the city is talking about removing a big parking lot and strip mall and turning it into a mixed use space, but as far as I’ve read there has been no talk of transportation. The area sits at the intersection of two stroads. It’s technically walkable, but it’s not a pleasant walk. It’s technically can be biked, but not without competing with cars for space on the road. There might be buses, but they are very infrequent and slow. Everyone I know would want to drive, as the alternatives are significantly worse than driving. If people can’t park, they simply won’t go.
I’d love to get rid of my car, but that requires the city, and region, make significant investments in public transit infrastructure. The non-car option can’t just be available for those who are willing to put in a lot of effort to avoid using a car. The non-car options need to be better than the car option. Easier, cheaper, safer, and more pleasant.
Removing parking lots makes driving worse, but doesn’t make the alternatives better.
If mandatory parking requirements did go down, and zoning was increased, then the people who own it would willingly put forth the effort to make the space more useful. It would also help sort out what is considered "unused" - which right now is a nebulous concept.
What does hyper dense mean? And how is that detrimental? Tokyo meets all of your requirements, for example, but you would call that hyper dense for sure, right? The article is "about" Baltimore, MD. Does that city meet your threshold of hyper dense?
As with most things, a lot of this comes down to money. The more dense an area, the more use the things you want are used, and the more money they make, they more likely they are to thrive. The more dense an area, the bigger the tax base, the more money there is for nice things that maybe don't make money on their own.
If they did it like Spain, for example, where you can just walk out of your home, sit on the street at any restaurant, and drink wine with your friends, we'd have exactly what you're describing.
But then they wouldn't be able to rake in DUI profits.
Save the conspiracies for red light cameras or speed traps.
Let's say a developer builds a bigger, taller building than what was there previously and adds residents. If they're not required to include sufficient parking, the new cars will flood the surrounding neighborhood, and existing residents will now have no place to park. This depends on the type of neighborhood, of course, but it happened in mine in Chicago. Not being able to just come home and go inside, but rather have to drive around and around in ever-larger circles (in the winter) to look for a parking spot because some alderman got paid off by a developer to screw his constituents... that's the reality.
We're seeing this in L.A. too, where local politicians will sell out to developers and publicly excuse it by pretending that parking creates cars and cars = bad. L.A. is a giant county masquerading as a city, and it's never going to be Amsterdam (you hear this asinine comparison all the time). Pretending that people aren't going to bring cars to their residence is absurd and damaging.
But big vacant parking lots growing weeds? Hell yeah, we have those all over the place, around dying malls and boarded-up Macy's. But what did CA politicians do? Pass laws that allow developers to destroy one single-family home and build 10 units there, overriding any local zoning or review and without local ability to prevent it.
So now we're going to pave over even MORE ground and cut down MORE trees, while said malls are still sitting there. As if the place isn't hot, barren, drought-stricken, and depressing enough.
Anyway, that's what I think of when I hear "get rid of parking requirements:" corrupt sellouts.
"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.”
Even in residential areas, the rise of AirBNB is causing an accordion effect in parking availability, at least in my neighborhood. I live downtown in a place that doesn't have much in the way of garage space or driveways so the streets are heavily used for parking and there is enough space generally speaking for everyone who lives here, but come weekends and event times now that so many condos have become temporary party houses people rent so they can trash, this floods the streets with cars from out of the area and suddenly the people who actually live here have nowhere to park.
What's the original source for that statistic?
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.
"I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps."
You typed both of these sentences in the same post. One of them needs to be removed, because they don't make sense together.
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.
The fact that your home garage and work parking lot are also empty most of the time is also a huge problem. It makes cities much larger than they need to be, and serving public transit across them impossible.
I don't think it's a huge problem. My garage is part of the overall footprint of my home. My garage is under my office. It wouldn't help to have them full all of the time. Should I also have someone living in my house while I work? Or ensuring that all offices have shift work? Sure, there is a possible efficiency there, but we make certain concessions for convenience. A ratio of 4 spots per car doesn't seem obviously bad.
I do think there are some places with too much parking, but there are also plenty of places where there is not enough.
More green spaces are good for cities.
Cities are best when they are allowed to gradually adapt, rather than trying to plan everything out 'just so' from the outset and being rigid about changes.
But parks are tougher to put in once the land has been used up.
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.
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?
So those rolling green links might not be the cheapest places to establish new housing when you include the remediation.
Feels kind of appropriate if you could grow forest on a site for 50 to 100 years or more. Then harvest the wood with all the nasty stuff in it. Then bury all that contaminated wood somewhere deep. Then build houses on the newly clean earth.
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...
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.
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.
Parking lots are parking lots because they require low CapEx, almost no OpEx. You buy some abandoned land, raze it, asphalt it, charge $30 a day per space (at let's say 75 spaces), tow the rest (at the driver's expense). You're pulling in a little under $67k/month. Wait for a commercial developer to come buy and take it off your hands for 3x its value.
You know how much it costs to dig up the ground, install power lines, a box, then bury footings, bolt in legs, install panels, etc, 9+ feet high? For a whole parking lot? $300k-500k, minimum (that's how much it costs just to install a small fleet of EV chargers btw, that's not doing major construction over an area the size of half a football field).
How much you gonna make off these panels? A 200kW panel array generates about 480MWh/yr, which at 1MW/$40 comes out to about $19,200/year in SREC credits. PA energy price is $0.18/KWh, so 480MW is $24/hr. But you're making 80% efficiency and it's not sunny all day all year, so at even 50% usage, that's $24,960/year. Almost a third of what the parking lot makes a month. Before we talk paying back installation costs, assuming your net metering deal is perfect.
It would be cheaper to build a multi-story garage, where you'd make WAY more money.
Were I replacing parking lots, I'd prioritize any abandoned / under utilized lots. Just start mulching and planting.
Plant willows and maples to break up the surface. Or maybe mechanically break things up, if the best-available-science supports doing so, if you're impatient.
Bonus Points: Convert planters, meridians, etc into P-Patch style community gardens. People love to garden. In my city, the wait list to join a P-Patch is years long.
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!
Selecting native species needs to be done, but that's not that complicated (either by asking organizations, or by reading the recomended list by the state/country/whatever).
Maintenance is low. Sure, don't plant trees that need water every day, but that's it. Irrigate them every week the first year. Pruning ? But they're not fruit trees ?
It might not be trivial, but it absolutely can be done.
I think you are correct, though, that we want to avoid planting trees for the sake of it, and ending up with areas with inappropriate species devoid of much life.
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.
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.
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...
I used to live in an English town that set up maximum number of parking spaces for new homes. On paper looks good, as they were trying to incentivize public transport as you mention.
However the outcome was that single family homes were virtual unaffected, as they usually have a double garage plus driveway, while people on apartment blocks had severe parking limitations. In other words, if you were well off enough to buy a house you were gold, and the less well off people had to bear most of the burden.
Also, at least over here, most shopping centers have underground parking.
The "historic city center" and all that crap... that I understand... noone goes there for weekly shopping, but instead people go there to hang out, drink coffee, eat, etc.... public transport works great for that. Malls, shopping centers or even larger stores? Nope.
Reality in a lot of european cities is fundamentally different to most of the US.
When there's a lot of housing there, people sure do do their weekly shopping downtown - but it's mostly the people who live in the area. I lived in central Philadelphia for 7 years or so and when I needed groceries, I walked to one of the grocery stores in the neighborhood. I mostly wasn't carrying a ton of stuff on the train, but that's because there were shops close enough to walk to instead anyway.
(Though also, you can fit a lot of stuff in a cargo bike.)
We look at a large section of a land and decide that we will destroy all life on it, pave over it with asphalt (so that even the rain cannot drain into the soil), all so that large vehicles can sit there unused. It really is the lowest opinion one can have on a piece of Earth.
In 99%+ of east coast US environments, grassland will become forest naturally (over time), even with the deer population as it is.
There's far more forest in New England than there was 150 years or so ago.
The selfish human reason to want trees as a natural heat regulator is I think alone worth the benefit in areas with lots of asphalt where people will be near.
I think the most promising solutions to this problem are policies from state-level governments.
Everyone should have a park close to where they live. A place where kids can play and families can picnic is important to a good family life. A park is a good place for art, but it only needs to be accessible by transit as most people won't make regular visits. Many people enjoy playing volleyball, softball, or other sports, but they tend to want to play different teams so while a city should have this it should be accessible by transit but not close to everyone. There are a few variations on the above theme that I didn't mention. Once those uses are covered a city should not build more parks, instead the city needs more of the other things that make a city: places to live, work, shop, and be entertained.
e.g. >In addition, using data from a nationwide inventory, we reach a figure of 105 million metered spaces.
It never mentions what the source of this 'nationwide inventory' is, who made it, when, etc...
You're dismissing the possibility of free EV charging attracting shoppers. Step 1 is getting people to visit your store, step 2 is getting them to buy something, and step 3 is getting them to come again. Step 1 & 3 would immediately get noticed by the corporate bean counters. The real problem I think is the up-front costs of the installation.
For instance, this ordinance in NC says you need one parking space for every 300 sq feet of a store. So the average 30,000 sq foot grocery store would need 100 spots, at least.
Without getting rid of requirements like these the stores will not be able to remove spaces if they wanted. I very much like land value tax (which sounds similar in effect to what you are proposing) but you need the zoning flexibility first.
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/swansboro/latest/swans...
[1] https://talk.dot.state.mn.us/rethinking-i94 The official term for the proposal to remove the freeway is "at-grade alternatives".
Asphalt both absorbs and radiates heat like mad.
I live in Parisian suburbs and stores are all less than 10km away, I have never had trouble getting anything.
If I need something larger / heavier (say, cinder blocks and cement) I just rent a truck for two hours and get all the heavy shopping done in the time frame.
From an "I live here and want my community to be enjoyable and beautiful" standpoint it makes less sense.
I've long thought of the issues with public transit in the majority of US cities as being trapped at a local maximum where we're forced to implement inferior solutions because we're so far into the car infrastructure getting people to abandon their suburban homes to move to a more dense less car dependent urban structure until the underlying shape of cities would adjust to denser clusters again if they ever did.
your decisions are affecting me, isn’t that the norm now?
Also, people with disabilities tend to drive less than those without them.
In fact, that ADA requirements came from laws from the federal government rather than from urban planning is pretty good evidence that the market (ie democratic legislation) is better at this than centralized planners of urban areas.
This is false. I've seen many downtowns that are not thriving and lack parking. They do okay for the midday luck crowd, but they are empty by 6pm as everyone has gone to the suburbs.
Lack of parking is a feature of thriving locations as well, but it isn't an indicator.
That's just one area in Halifax, but the idea is that higher population densities require less infrastructure per person. Less road, power line, water/sewer pipe, etc. However, low density houses usually pay less in property taxes per unit area than high density, meaning that increased infrastructure cost is coupled with a considerable tax break.
Not really sure if trees uptake heavy metals.
1. A big micromobility boom. This describes a number of phenomena: the e-bikes are perhaps the most visible since they add a lot of power to a bike commute and make it easier to justify doing big distances by bike. But equally, the docked bikeshares have found a foothold in many places big and small, and those help extend transit range quite a bit while creating an institutional platform for bike-friendly streets: the bikeshare services will always lobby for whatever makes them the best option.
2. The "unbundled car". This is something Tony Seba uses in his discussions on disruption: the car bundled a large number of services into one solution: "get in the car and drive." Many of those solutions have transitioned to online, delivery, etc. So the car's raison d'etre is diminished today and diminishing further as we develop more alternatives.
3. The future rebundling of transport as a service. The first step in this was the reshuffling of taxi/delivery drivers to gig economy labor. This was probably too early and too reliant on zero interest rates, but one of the things that always courted investment in these businesses was that robotics could take over and perform self-driving. And while it's still not an evenly distributed phenomenon, Waymo exists. I have it on my phone. Waymo itself may not be the last word in how self-driving tech is deployed, but the tech will increasingly realign "cars" with "transit" by lowering the cost of professional vehicle operation. In the current US market, there's been a shortage of bus drivers, and scheduling them is a large pain point for deploying transit. You can't drop driver quality because of the liability involved in operating huge vehicles. Private autos have gotten away with a legal hack that normalizes poor driving by making the individual an owner-operator and blaming them for their inevitable failures. So the economics will work out that cars and fixed-route mass transit are still competitive, but you will get more mobility per dollar invested by adding self-drive to your transit system, because then high-quality driving and scheduling scales and you can flood the streets with both big and small transit vehicles. Therefore, in the future, city buses will run more frequently on more routes and at later hours.
Of course, it won't be free -- it will cost what it should cost, market rate.
(I am disappointed about this oft thrown around comparison, since my city reduced one lane on several major roads and created bike paths. Sadly, we now have major traffic jams and hardly any utilization of the bike path. Turns out someone on the city council wanted to turn it into Denmark)
15km is on the outer edge of normal (my bike commute was 11km). But yeah, we can build more densely because we don't require massive amounts of car storage everywhere in the city. The best time to start densifying was 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now.
> my city reduced one lane on several major roads and created bike paths. Sadly, we now have major traffic jams and hardly any utilization of the bike path.
Try counting how many humans use the traffic lane and the bike path per hour. You might be surprised.
I am in Amsterdam, and lots of people bike 15km each way, including many students at the high schools my children attend.
Local climate is a problem, too. It’s not fun to bike to work some days when it’s very hot and humid, and then in the other half of the year, deal with freezing rain.
I think winter makes a huge difference in how bikeable a city can really be. Western Europe tends to be mild on that front.
The vast, vast majority of Americans have never even been outside the US (except maybe to Canada, and possibly Mexican tourist spots), let alone lived outside the US in a first-world country, and this includes the OP and most people on HN. It's why reading comments on urbanism on forums like this is both entertaining (because it's so wrong and US-centric) and depressing.
I'm reading these threads from my walkable town in western Europe for the same reason ;D
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/about-us/reports-...
That sounds made up on the spot, and borderline xenophobic. Data please.
The rules for them are a joke and just made up at random with little justification for them other than trust us bro.
Climatetown has a good, if long, video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUNXFHpUhu8
For better or worse, the USA has basically made a contract with its people that "you have the right to a car, and because of that, we will provide really sucky public transit." That contract has to change before we start aggressively taking cars out of the system.
That's somewhat optimistic. In the absence of rules, developers will maximize their profit above all else. Apartment units are far more profitable than parking, so they'll just build the maximum units with no parking.
I lived in such a neighborhood once. Result is 50 unit buildings with 4 parking spots. And the result of that? People driving around the blocks for hours looking for parking, fights breaking out over parking, cars constantly vandalized for taking over "their" spot. It was not fun.
That doesn't provide any guidance to the builder though, so what should they build?
Factories that produce widgets can pretty quickly adjust the specs to changing demand. Houses don't work on that schedule.
If enough people want to buy a house but they need parking but those units don't exist, there is no way for developers to just change what's there to satisfy demand. That'll be a multi-decade effort.
Or you can hand out guest passes to residents.
I think after we have fixed the car parking, we really should start looking into those bikes and ban them from street parking.
This is indeed one of the biggest problems with such parking permit scheme.
What happens is the resident needs to move their car to the street (possibly driving around for a long while to find a spot) so the guest can park on their driveway. It's a pain for everyone involved. And you better never have a party where more than a couple people visit at once.
> vast, vast majority have never left the US
how does 1/2 of the population having a passport equate to the “vast, vast majority” having never traveled? How does this logic connect?
I am not sure about which european city you are in. Here in Germany, there are more cars than people. Infact, there is so much parking shortage that, people walk 10 minutes away to park their cars, because the streets are already full.
Also, I don't know anyone going to store daily, most people shop en-mass over the weekend, mostly Saturday afternoon. Only people I see regularly on the malls near me are just retired oma/opa but they also shop like every 4-5 days.
That being said, while at least in the city I am in, has the most connected and excellent public transport, somehow I have to take a reverse de-tour by bus on my way to work, because bus routes are not often straight forward and there are only specific limited routes I can take, unless I can find a place near some U/S-bahn station(immensely difficult these days due to housing crisis).
If I had a car, I could reduce my daily commute to work by 2.5h, but then again, I don't have strict on-site requirements, so it doesn't matter.
I'm all for designing for walkability, but this is a case study in failing to understand audiences. If you make this not just a possibility but a requirement of walkable cities, many people won't want to live in your "walkable" cities at all.
There are much better arguments possible here. For instance, you could promote CSAs for regularly delivered farm-fresh produce, or establish efficient grocery delivery services that use one vehicle to deliver to many many customers, or other potential options that don't involve regular car trips for grocery shopping and don't involve spending an appreciable fraction of your day shopping.
Nope, weekly trip to the store minimizes all of the issues.
Milk is not supposed to last for a month.
(For clarity in case there is a nomenclature difference here, UHT milk is shelf-stable liquid milk that's entirely equivalent to any milk but lasts much longer before expiring. That's separate from things like evaporated milk or powdered milk, which are also substitutes for milk but not directly equivalent.)
People forget that one of the reasons why the malls became so popular and helped collapse the old downtowns was, you guessed it, lack of free parking.
With malls, you could come into a boundary and spend a significant amount of time in a walkable arena with lots of different stores. You knew there would always be parking except possibly at Christmas.
Downtown? Not so much. And you probably had to pay for parking. And carry quarters for the meter. And risk getting parking tickets. etc.
Malls were what all the anti-car people supposedly promise will happen when you remove cars. And yet, I know of no malls that ever gained residence areas within walking distance. Which seemingly, would have prevented the malls from collapsing.
The anti-car brigade has yet to demonstrate why that should be different today.
Also, for what it's worth, you're citing "carry quarters" as some kind of dystopic microaggression to an elder millennial who was absolutely fucking thrilled to share a roll of quarters with his dad when we went to the local game store and crushed Sengoku on the nearest Neo Geo cabinet.
Uh, yeah, it actually WAS. Quarters were a non-trivial amount of currency (a little under a gallon of gas) back when downtowns still existed and parking meters took them.
There is a reason why "meter maids" were hated so much.
Yes, I witnessed this first-hand in the neighborhood where I went to school.
Very vibrant walkable downtown full of shops and restaurants but also tons of street parking. Then one year government wanted more money so they put up parking meters and pushed up the rates to a point most people couldn't afford it (it was a low income area).
Now ~20 years later? The whole downtown is boarded up abandoned shops, just a couple liquor stores remain open. Very sad. All the shops that could move, moved to the malls.
One of the malls near me, about 5 years ago they tore up a good chunk (like a third) of its massive parking lot and turned it into an apartment complex. It now butts up almost directly against the mall.
So at least there's one.
How is that even possible?
Here in the Greater Toronto Area, practically every large mall has at least a few high rises. Some malls are even constructing residential units directly on top of the mall. Even a larger strip mall will generally have some medium sized apartment buildings nearby.
Downtown Mississauga has dozens of high rises up now right next to its biggest mall. Those buildings have completely changed the city's skyline.
I don't think nearby residence areas would have prevented malls from collapsing.
Online shopping made them largely obsolete as a place to actually shop, with many going bankrupt and others hanging on by a thread. Then a global pandemic cut some of the remaining threads.
Eh, after some lost packages, dealing with USPS for claims, wanting to touch the product before purchasing, and easier returns, I find myself returning to brick and mortar lately.
Letting the developer maximize profits also lets residents choose residences without parking spots, to save money.
I can't imagine Americans submitting to a law like this.
All of these can very easily be changed by future buyers if they prefer something different.
But if the developers builds a 50 unit apartment building with just 4 parking spots, that building is now there for many generations and there is no practical way to change that decision.
Here's the Not Just Bikes video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
https://www.medievalists.net/2016/02/the-noisy-middle-ages/
https://daily.jstor.org/a-history-of-noise/
https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2013/09/30/a-19th-cen...
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.64.5....
We've driven out nature, we don't have livestock or any animals other than rats and a few birds, we don't transport cargo on carts with wood & metal wheels, we don't live in industrial areas that produce noise pollution, we have laws governing loud music and such.
Above all, we have high quality windows now which block out almost everything but the loudest noises, usually those produced by cars.
If you allow the outside to be unpleasant, then people are increasingly going to stay inside which has negative societal ramifications.
The enforcement are handled by the same people that do normal parking enforcement. They scan the plates, see if there's a valid permit/ticket and write a ticket otherwise.
And it is true the weather in many US cities tends to be less mild than in Amsterdam, but that can be worked around with proper clothing.
Boston is about the only city in the US that I feel mildly safe walking around the downtown at night.
You mention crime in regards to safety within a city, but there is a study floating around Twitter that factors in traffic fatalities in suburban and rural areas, and the dangers of cars make suburbs and rural areas MORE dangerous that urban areas! Take a look at this article detailing urban vs rural deaths: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-in-rural-a...
The money they make is {rent} × {units rented}. The reason they don't set rent to $1billion is that they will rent zero of them. I think this shows that they do have a reason to lower prices, at least at some range.
Honestly who is downvoting this anyway? Do you work for big contractors or just like unaffordable housing as long as it's condensed? Evil much?
If anything, a monopolistic landlord would like to expand and build more apartments, to extract a higher volume of above-market rent.
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-and-w...
I once was at a farmers place - when they were done milking the cows in the morning they brought milk in from the tank for breakfast - ever since then I can't drink store bought milk as fresh milk tastes so much better. (the milk was also unpasteurized, I believe fresh was the key to taste but I'm not sure)
But in any case, it's good that multiple options exist.
if you're concerned about how your time is spent, i think you're missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle: how much time you spend driving. you could end up saving an enormous amount of time while still going out to shop more if you cut out driving and reduce the scope of your trips.
it would be great if everybody on HN felt the same, unfortunately this is quite commonplace. read threads on any EV post for instance.
>contemptuous attitude toward people whose preferences differ from your own
I appear to be welcoming the dialogue, and as I read back, you appear to be downvoting to ensure others won't see the dialogue (downvoting prevents people from replying). This is worse than name calling. It's literally contemptuous. And worse, you're accusing me of your crime.
>and the way your ire over the scandal
I hope you can cite where I did that, otherwise this also is contemptuous. How would you know if I'm angry? Is it because you hear my words in your head in an angry voice? There's a rule about that on HN.
>blinded you to basic principles of economics
Me and Congress? It sounds like you might be missing something that Congress and I are aware of. Can you admit that or would that require you to have a better attitude toward people with a differing preference from your own?
>Remark added more noise than signal to the discussion
Is that because it doesn't align with your world view? If that's not why I'll be glad to consider your defense to this point. I hope it will include some honest reason for not wanting to hear other people's opinion, so much so that you would downvote them for sharing it.
Overall, the irony in just this one comment is largely incriminating in regard to HN rules, and in regard to your own aspirations of yourself, I would assume, given the strict expectations you've set out for me.
The outside needs to be nice, but making inside unpleasant doesn't accomplish that.
ignoring the problem outside exacerbates the issue and eventually leads to an undesirable outside. don’t live with broken windows.
The noises that bothered me were the live music from downstairs blasting into my room after midnight, people making a ruckus in the halls outside my room, people yelling on the street, loud emergency services vehicles.
Just like in an airplane it isn’t the sound of the aircraft that is annoying to me but the guy two rows in front talking to his bros.
The nice thing is I live in the suburbs and don’t hear any of the above and I also don’t hear traffic noise. The worst I hear is an occasional landscaping crew or circular saw but those don’t happen at 1 am.
cars are not the problem. anybody with any experience in life knows the more stuff and people you cram in a small area, the more noise (an heat for all you climate changers)
I live in a relatively small city with a pedestrian zone "historic center", and all of the larger...ish shopping centers are outside the city center, and larger stores are on the 'edge' of the city. Both the stores and restaurants in the city center are tourist-based and so are many residential properties that are now just airbnbs causing the housing crisis to be even worse. On a rainy january afternoon (so, last week for us), the city center is dead. No toursts, noone goes there to shop, since you can go futher out with a car, noone goes there to walk around, since it's raining, so it's just a few people that work there during the day and not even them in the afternoon. I mean.. why would you go to shop there, if you can drive to the edge of the city, where you can park without issues, buy stuff and drive it home?
Cars on a freeway are either headed to your city as a destination, in which case the speed at which you deliver them into the city doesn’t make much difference, they’re always going to cause traffic when they leave the freeway. Or the cars are headed through the city, in which I would assume most of them would be just as happy to go around the city as go through it.
So if you get to pick between through and around, why would any sane city choose to put the freeway through your city? You’re just bringing noise and pollution into your city, putting a huge great impassable scar through your city, and forcing the people who live to drive everywhere because the freeway slice up the city into segments that you move between in a car.
As forward-looking as much of the area is, we weren't getting away with "less car", and I don't think most places will today either.
The I5 meanwhile turns into the 99 on the Canadian side of the border, and goes right through the city. It’s a nightmare since it is officially a highway, but in reality just a surface street in the city.
Lidding it would be great, but removing it would be better. There are loads of people who live in the suburbs north and south of Seattle and expect to be able to drive 20-30 miles each way day-in-day-out to commute. If the city continues to grow, this simply isn't tenable in the long run, because you can't grow highway capacity forever; they would no longer be able to do this, which would be good. Just rip the band-aid off.
We saw what happened when the Palestine supporters blocked off I5 a few weeks ago...on a weekend without a rush hour, people were stuck in traffic for hours.
Drive around the lake if you need to get past the city.
For capacity they aren't expanding I-5 directly, but expanding i-405 and sr167 instead for people trying to go past Seattle.
For i-5 within Seattle area, there are some 2030s plans to convert the hov lanes to toll lanes and reconfiguring the reversible express lane system. * I-5 Managed Lanes: SR 16 to Pierce/ King County Line * I-5 Managed Lanes: Pierce/ King County Line to I-405 * I-5 Managed Lanes: I-405 to US 2
Invest in transit and make it easier for people to get around without cars; that's the only way to solve traffic. Building more roads (and widening existing roads) just induces more demand.
Any freeway through Vancouver would have to cut through all of east Vancouver and then the downtown core then Stanley park, and they would have to completely rebuild the lionsgate bridge since it is only three lanes total, and then tear out a huge portion of the residential neighborhood on the other side of the bridge.
Why in the world would Vancouver, which is on a much narrower strip of land want to do what Seattle did and divide their city in half so people can get to Whistler 15 minutes faster.
https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2014/03/12/metro-vancouver-str...
https://www.google.se/maps/@-33.8710314,151.1203316,3a,75y,2...
Definitely, the best case for cars is to have fast highways that bypass the city, but there isn't a lot of room with that given Vancouver's geography, so it's a lesser-of-two-evils. Beyond cars, public transit and cycling provide a better solution in my opinion anyway.
Regardless... the biggest traffic pain point in downtown Vancouver is the 3-lane (total) Lions Gate bridge.
Whenever I visit Vancouver, I find the traffic horrible compared to Seattle. It’s like…no I don’t want to drive here (to be fair, I don’t want to drive downtown Seattle either, but there is so much more going on in downtown Vancouver that it’s hard to avoid).
This is probably because train transport capacity is prodigious, and driving is expensive.
Also, driving isn't expensive in Tokyo at all, it's actually free except on the toll highways. What's expensive is parking: with few places to park, and it being expensive to rent a parking space in your apartment, it's not that affordable or practical to drive. People also aren't allowed to own cars unless they have a place to park them, so we don't have the problem of car owners fighting over scarce street parking like many other cities.
If someone suggests deleting I5 through Seattle and replacing it with Vancouver-like Stroads, I'm going to vote against them as fast as possible.
I feel sorry for anyone who has to actually do that commute. It was horrible when I was living in Bothell and attending UW 30 years ago.
https://wsdot.wa.gov/construction-planning/search-projects/i...
The bellevue to lynnwood section was already 'expanded' a decade ago though as one can tell, it still has traffic. They're opting to increase the tolls now.
You only have a few roads to do that east or west of Lake Washington. In most cases, people aren't going to downtown Seattle, downtown Seattle is just in the way.
Then you have things like the air force base or the university. They're important for the economy so you may work at or near them, but for the most part you don't really want to live directly adjacent to them. Fighter jets are very, very loud all day long (my mom lived where you could see the runway right behind her house when I was a teenager), and the military is known to dump very nasty chemicals for their training exercises. University students throw parties, and there's more crime in the area. For a few years, I lived a little over 2 miles from the university, and I had my bike stolen out of my backyard. In the further out part of town where I grew up, that was completely unheard of. Some of the downtown parks are mostly full of homeless adults. The parks where I grew up were mostly full of kids/teenagers.
So there's reasons why you might want to live within a ~30 minute drive of a denser area with services or work, but without having to actually live near a dense area. And your day-to-day services are already spread across most of the city, so you don't need to travel for those. I get the impression that many cities have a similar dynamic.
If I want to buy furniture, I need to go either to the far north or far south of the city to a suburb just outside the city limits (cheaper land).
Culturally, lots of food can only be found in certain areas of the city, which means north/south traveling.
In regards to services overall, obscene land prices means that not much new is being built that isn't owned by large corporations, so we are pretty much stuck with what we have, and what we have is rather quickly disappearing.
> I'm sure there are reasons for people to go north as well, but I have a harder time thinking of them (other than that they went south and now have to come back north).
@sean To reach UW, northgate (well it's demolished just ice skating for now lol), ballard and fremont; granted this is a bit optional, uvillage is nice to visit as well.
Also I find it a bit interesting you have a harder time thinking of interesting stuff in north seattle, I am actually sometimes annoyed having to drive north past downtown seattle to reach north seattle. I didn't really think about it but yeah ikea/southcenter are relatively easy for me to reach. :)
@uoaei Anyways regarding planning itself. Seattle is actually actively planning their next community plan, one of the items called out is whether to allow more 'urban villages' which have shops and other amenities.
For malls, Northgate should have been the north seattle mall but it's currently being redeveloped. There's U village but it's a bit high end. The other alternative of Alderwood mall isn't too bad to get to by driving but during peak traffic can be quite slow.
Parks, lots of parks.
The only decent real "spas" I've found are all up north (Again, Shoreline, just outside of the city)
Ballard and Fremont are both big draws.
UW, kind of a biggie.
Schools are better in the north, which is why we chose Ballard rather than Beacon Hill. The reason I don't think about North Seattle so much is because I live here, I guess (and getting places isn't so hard if I'm not crossing Seattle).
If you only go to the south end for Ikea, Southcenter, and Seatac, how often do you really need to do those things? It's not like it becomes impossible to drive there, it just takes a little longer. Frankly, traffic in Seattle just isn't that bad compared to other major cities. I just checked the traffic from Ballard to Ikea, and it's 45 minutes on 99... I-5 isn't even the ideal route right now.
Of course I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, but you also have to weigh this against just how much additional real estate would come available if I-5 was gone. I don't think people's need for driving convenience actually stacks up that strongly against all the other positive considerations.
Trailheads are fundamentally incompatible with transit. They might be philosophical opposites. A trailhead accessible by rail is a trailhead I don't want to be at.
Not everywhere in the world is exactly the same. Stop trying to force a top-down solution that works in Europe on a geographically massive city like Tucson
I've worked at places where it could take 20 minutes to get out of the parking garage when a bus stop was less than a 5 minute walk, on-boarding/off-boarding was super fast (a pre-pay kiosk meant people didn't stop to pay when they got on), and I could be all the way home in less than 20 minutes.
