American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities-are-drowning-in-car-storage/

by caiobegotti • 8 years ago

219 285 8 years ago

usa.streetsblog.org

angarg12• 8 years ago

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball.

Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged housing shortage over there.

smallnamespace• 8 years ago

This is just an example of 'path dependency', i.e. 'history matters'. It's not baffling if you consider that sparse, car-driven infrastructure makes a lot of sense in a country with low population density, and population density has tripled in the US since 1930 [1]. At that time, Germany's population density was about 6x the US's.

However, changing transportation infrastructure is a chicken and egg problem.

People get upset if you take away their parking spaces and build densely when efficient public transport doesn't exist yet and they still need to own a car.

Yet building efficient public transport is at least a decade-long endeavor and requires either buying out or leveraging eminent domain to carve out space for the necessary infrastructure.

Local and state officials aren't going to stick their heads out to support this unless voters will politically reward them for starting a project, but probably not being around to see it finished.

If you want a regime that can efficiently bulldoze its way to the public transit and cheaply, then one way is to copy China, give power to governments to 'strongly encourage' the sale of any rights of way needed, don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183475/united-states-pop...

zkms• 8 years ago

don't open it up to public review and leave it completely in the hands of more-or-less capable technocrats. Is that a price you're willing to pay?

Given that in US, "public review" for any kind of infrastructure (regardless if it's an apartment building, a cell base station, a railway, a power plant) means soliciting input from the most meddlesome moralistic NIMBY normies who have as little respect for other people's property rights as they have appreciation for the societal benefits of public infrastructure works -- and then giving them the authority to use their concern trolling to obstruct/delay/kill whatever project is considered.

It actually turns out you don't need to go full-on PRC to build cities with apartments and dense single-family houses with modern, high-capacity railways (all of which help reduce both the need and impact of parking spaces) if you're willing to tell these people to pound sand, and remove the land-use laws that they use to enforce their capriciousness.

ProfessorLayton• 8 years ago

Exactly. Furthermore, the US is a comparatively young country. A lot of cities with great public transport either already existed before cars were around, or had the necessary population density to support mass transit.

I recently came back from a visit to London, and did not once need a car (I did take an Uber because I wanted to see what it was like to drive from the left side!). It was fantastic being able to take the Underground anywhere I needed to be, but it was very clear that it was only possible because the city was already there and densely populated before the arrival of cars.

TheCoelacanth4• 8 years ago

Talking about modes of transportation that work well based on countrywide population density is silly. The US's population density is massively skewed by Alaska and everything from Kansas to California being almost completely empty.

Most east coast cities have actually decreased their population density considerably since 1930.

randlet• 8 years ago

It's infuriating to me living in North America (I'm in Canada but it's as bad or worse in the US) watching cities develop this way. Mention this to almost anyone here and you will be met with blank stares. There are countless places that contain many stores that share parking lots that we so huge you still have to drive between them.

jvagner• 8 years ago

Reno is an awesome example of this, and this is true even of the latest developments. It's like developers in Reno have never seen pictures of other cities, even here in America. This problem has been solved time and again... and Reno builds large and small shopping malls and then they're empty and under-utilized, so they build another new one and the results are the same.

Having lived overseas a few times in my life, I really am looking forward to leaving NorCal/NV and heading somewhere more sanely organized.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100 years to replace community labor with commercial relations.

This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service, Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value. More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping product until a population is addicted.

Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled.

It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S. is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century.

The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.

halbritt• 8 years ago

Too real.

narrator• 8 years ago

The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S.

Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately, Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the algorithm.

christiangenco• 8 years ago

This is the first time I've heard the phrase "Guiltlessness As A Service" - from a google search I think it may be your own term?

Regardless, I like it. I think you're using it to describe businesses that do things like sell carbon credits or do humanitarian work?

J-dawg• 8 years ago

This is a fascinating idea which seems worth expanding into a longer piece of writing. Could you give some specific examples of what you mean by “community labor” and what they’ve been replaced with?

Also, what do you mean by “Guiltlessness as a service”?

extradego5• 8 years ago

Right on the money.

Before WW2, America was a culture desert. Europeans fleeing the war are the only reason NYC became an international culture hub.

Hip-hop is undoubtedly the most progressive Western art form. (Side note: hip-hop's genius appropriations of commercial symbolisms and it's will to collective empowerment directly underwrite and provide the language of the public engagement of today's millenials. It's influence is as deep as an ocean.) But while hip-hop is the only non-native wholly American cultural movement, it's American origins are a far cry from enlightment; more bound in shame. To say America created hip-hop would be an offense. Saying America stole it would be more accurate.

guelo2• 8 years ago

Wow I love this comment. Especially because I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process

We've lost most of our knowledge about how to create civic spaces of value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ

The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.

A lot of it was transformed.

yuhong2• 8 years ago

The entire current debt-based economy is fundamentally designed to extract as much money as possible from "consumers".

blitmap2• 8 years ago

I had not considered that planning cities like this was meant to be community-hostile, but I can easily see how this is meant to breed a dependence on corporate solutions.

This has the taste of conspiracy, but I do believe you're right. There's a lot of money to be made this way.

Fnoord• 8 years ago

"Car As A Service" is essentially rented cars: taxis, and Uber & friends. Problem in USA is bicycles and cargo bikes are not widespread. Hence the roads aren't build for bicyclists and people don't expect them while bicyclists wear helmets (in The Netherlands the latter is rare but roads are build with bicyclists taken into account).

cmurf2• 8 years ago

A family member describes to me the love affair of the automobile ~65 years ago did this. It became so ingrained in the culture, intentionally designing cities around the car so that you could drive more. Americans loved showing off cars, they loved driving them. Teenage boys' psyche used it as a way to get out of the house, away from their parents (this is city life in middle America during and post-WWII) in particular as men came home from the war, and women weren't doing as much factory work. Kids wanted out of the house all day long. Cars were many things to people but it was the hyped technology of that era and making everything bigger, including all the available infrastructure was a "good thing". You'd see gas stations on every corner.

Another family member of that same era to this day says "rip out the trees, rip out the bike lanes, put in more lanes to deal with this god awful traffic!" Driving is a right. It is not a privilege. Again, it's that ingrained in the culture, and the belief system.

One of those family members gets that cars are on the way out and other things need to replace it for the sake of the planet and human sanity. As much as it was induced sanity in the beginning, it's now a source of individual and public planning stress. The other family member has zero interest in accommodating anything but more cars.

This still manifests in how Americans get driver's licenses: states issue them, and the testing is pretty much a disqualification test not a qualification test; by that I mean it's not so much up to you to prove you're a safe driver but for the test to prove you're not. And boom you get a license. Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive. It might be 2018 but it's the wild west and cowboys still exist here!

dsnuh9• 8 years ago

I'm not familiar with licensing requirements in other countries, are they more rigorous?

ghaff13• 8 years ago

Literally no experience required, no driver's education required. Your uncle can teach you how to drive.

Driver's ed at least used to be pretty common,in part because it gave a discount for the (expensive) insurance covering younger drivers. I don't see anything special about the typical driver's ed instructor anyway. It's not like the typical driver's ed is some expensive defensive driving course taught by an ex race car driver.

Furthermore, the typical system is that someone gets a learners permit first which lets them drive only under a limited set of conditions so they gain experience that way.

And, honestly, you gain experience by doing things not taking classes.

kartan• 8 years ago

Yes. I had the same experience. Visiting Mountain View, I was surprised at how walk hostile is. It took me 10 minutes to just pass one of the buildings surrounded by a huge parking lot and move to the next. To go from Intel offices to the Computer History Museum takes a really long walk cross kilometres of parking space.

The Computer History Museum is situated in the middle of "no-where". But it has a highway 2 minutes away. To go from the close houses walking you need to walk close to the highway, with no trees or shadows. https://goo.gl/maps/P6d977i44SA2

Some friends had a story about this. They were in LA and asked directions to a comic shop. "It is 10 minutes from here in that direction". After 20 minutes walking they asked again. It was "10 minutes" by car, the guy that give them directions did not think that they will go walking.

I always have lived in places where is better to take public transportation or to walk than to use your private car. And one of the reasons is that the parking space is expensive. Buildings with parking space, that is also mandatory for new buildings, will place the space underground. This keeps residential buildings, shopping centres and offices close together.

dominotw• 8 years ago

You can use an electric unicycle to get around easily.

Derived2• 8 years ago

America has plenty of cities that are just like cities everywhere else...we're a big country, we hardly have need to pack everyone in like sardines. I live in a major city, downtown. And I'm starting to hate it. No personal space, no yard, shared (or no) garage, and I'm a car enthusiast by the way, which I'm sure is practically a dirty word around most city-dwellers now. I'm seriously considering moving out to the suburbs even if it means a longer commute to the office. I like driving, and I have no problem driving places to get things done...after all, I can only carry so much shopping with me anyway.

wild_preference• 8 years ago

I don’t think so. American cities just aren’t dense enough to please compact-city lovers looking for a walkable experience like Prague. Even where I live in Guadalajara is better than every city I’ve lived in the States because of all the tiny shops near me. In the States I may have a 7/11 near me which doesn’t even carry coffee grounds or fruit/veg. It’s kind if a sad place to live.

stale20022• 8 years ago

If ONLY your "distopian nightmare" of high density cities were true.

In reality it is the opposite. The vast vast majority of space in the US is reserved for the low density living.

Even the supposedly "high density" cities in the US are nothing compared to what they could be. Even places like New York have difficulty building enough housing to house everyone who wants to live there.

I just want a single city, in the entire world, where everyone said "hey, let's just allow building to be as high as anyone wants, and not put a single building restriction on anything".

The people who want low density living having an entire world to choose from. And yet that's apparently not enough for them.

ryanwaggoner6• 8 years ago

America definitely doesn't have plenty of cities that are like cities in Europe and Asia in particular (where I've lived and traveled most outside of the US).

As to your situation, it sounds like it's just not a good fit for your lifestyle. No one is saying that there's not pros / cons or that dense urban living is for everyone. If you want to grow all your own food and raise horses, NYC probably isn't going to be a great fit for you. Ditto if you want a garage full of cars that you work on and take out for leisurely drives all the time.

The issue in America isn't that everyone needs to be forced to live in high-density urban areas. It's that we've spent decades enacting bad policies that heavily discourage urban density while encouraging and subsidizing suburban sprawl. And it turns out that suburban sprawl is bad for the majority of people, and carries huge externalities that we're discovering we can't really afford, but it'll take many decades to reverse the damage we've done.

What makes it more difficult is that there's a lot of cultural value in America (some of it natural, some of it driven by anti-density propaganda) around being positive towards cars, driving, having lots of huge personal space, etc. And negative perceptions of density, public transit, etc.

Not an expert, that's just my read on the situation :)

agoodthrowaway• 8 years ago

Yeah I used to love the city and all the action too. But I tired of the filth, noise, hassle. I just wanted peace and quiet so I moved to the country. Couldn’t believe how much I loved the quiet. Also I love how dark it is at night and being able to see stars. When I get home, the air is noticeably fresher too. I can more or less do what I want to do on my property without anyone telling me what to do. I would have never thought I’d have loved it as much as I do.

ebullientocelot• 8 years ago

Leaving the urban area of my city for the 'burbs was awesome, I highly recommend it.

adrianN3• 8 years ago

"America is big enough for cities to spread out" is a terrible meme. It's not like cities in other countries are right next to each other and if you lowered the density by a factor of two or three there would be war between the cities over who gets to own that new parking lot.

Tiktaalik3• 8 years ago

I've heard this referred to as the "cycle of autodependency". This graphic describes it well.

https://imgur.com/Kuu4j8m

Once you've created an auto dependent city it's really difficult to undo it.

Surrey, the biggest suburb of Vancouver, is trying to shift from being a car centric suburb to building its own compact downtown. It will take decades to change development patterns. They're trying to jump start it by creating their own LRT system, but of course due to auto dependency there is push back because LRT will "get in the way of the cars..."

jhabdas• 8 years ago

The Bay is the garbage dumb of modern America. I'm sorry that it left av memory. Next time head to Chitown or NYC and absorb some culture.

lazyjones4• 8 years ago

But wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that? In Europe's old cities, people often go shopping every day even if they're single. It's annoying to me, as the infrastructure is mostly built for lugging around as much as you can carry home on your feet and even all the packaged foods come in very small sizes (2 servings). US stores, like malls, seem much more convenient for families.

What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots. But I guess that's more family-friendly as well, especially with 2 or more kids.

wool_gather8• 8 years ago

What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built [...] far away from residential areas

This is probably zoning; in many non-urban places mixed zoning is considered to lower the quality of residential living. So you end up with subdivision mazes without so much as a convenience store in walking range.

wasn't this because first people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip

My impression is that it's the other way around: because trips take so long, you maximize the amount you fetch on each.

UncleEntity6• 8 years ago

What I don't understand is the number of restaurants built in a similar way, i.e. far away from residential areas and with huge parking lots.

Ironically, where I live (one of the oldest neighborhoods in Phoenix), they're taking the exact opposite approach -- building restaurants with absolutely zero consideration for parking and it's having a negative impact. They had to put up "resident only parking with permit" signs on my street because it got so bad. The apartments across the street went so far as to designate parking spots on the street -- totally illegal but it seems to work. The ones next door to them leave their trashcans out 24/7 for the same effect.

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

people decided they wanted to purchase larger amounts of goods per trip, so they needed a car to transport that

The distance is related to the shopping habit. It’s neat watching people move to New York. At first, they continue their big, irregular shopping trips. Slowly, though, they switch to quick daily or every-other-day trips (+ delivery), and walkig to a store around the corner.

isoskeles• 8 years ago

Have you been to many other regions in the US? I live in the Bay Area and one of the few things I love about it is that it's way more "walkable" than other places I've lived in the states, especially the suburbs.

Or, maybe a better question: what part of the Bay Area?

walshemj• 8 years ago

America has a lot of land and in the developed world you wont get planning permission for residential property with out of street parking

stcredzero2• 8 years ago

I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so far away that you need a car to go anywhere

When I lived in Cincinnati just north of the University in the cool little Gaslight neighborhood, I would come home from my job in an office park in the suburbs, then walk to the grocery, cool shops, the cafe, the library, the bank, friends houses. That wasn't typical, but it still existed.

csomar• 8 years ago

That's because it is cheaper to acquire land than build underground parking. I live in a city that has gone through that transformation. Big parking were converted into malls/supermarkets with multi-floor parking.

Parking areas were also built with underground parking buildings. But that's only because land become scare and so it was expensive to have a non-underground parking.

badrabbit• 8 years ago

This is why we have more flooding too. More parking space means less ground to absorb rain water.

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

Here in the US, some city developers are building apartment buildings - with dozens of units - which provide NO parking for the tenants ... let alone any potential guests. To me this is equally puzzling.

Reasoning leadership is a necessary part of city ecology. Rewarding complainers (hello Pavlov) is not a reasoned solution.

smileysteve• 8 years ago

The lack of parking may be an effort to solve a chicken and the egg problem. While some zoning restrictions call for parking per unit, some high traffic areas are calling for less parking per unit.

If everybody is expected to have a car then pedestrians never develop, local businesses don't thrive, class mobility is it's highest.

By limiting parking, or at least making it ala carte, residents and businesses consider their location proximity to eachother.

burfog2• 8 years ago

It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure, commercial areas don't have households but they still need parking.

Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very little room for surges. Business is impacted when the availability of parking isn't 100% reliable.

ebikelaw3• 8 years ago

Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day.

It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least.

Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of transportation mode.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste...

microcolonel4• 8 years ago

You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day.

Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of businesses are like this, but how many?

I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland anecdote.

burfog2• 8 years ago

You underestimate the loss.

It isn't just that businesses lose customers when the parking is full. People don't want to drive there and then have to turn back, so many won't take the risk. The lots may only be 70% full, but the chance that they might be 100% full is enough to make people go elsewhere. Customers expect dependable service.

It's the same with operating hours. If you make your hours completely random, with a decent chance of being closed when customers show up, nobody will bother to make the trip.

extralego• 8 years ago

Talk about gridlock! Literally and figuratively...

I don’t think anyone is missing your point, but it sounds terribly short-sighted.

For one, what’s good for business is commonly catastrophic to other systems. An effort to prioritize here is critical.

For some reason, baby-boomers have an odd propensity for ignoring more systematic, hollistic concerns brought by the shift to dependency on automobiles. I think I can speak for most of my millenial peers when I say it seems maniacal.

And I am getting sick of feeling guilty for blaming “baby-boomers”. You people just don’t know when enough is enough.

Of course, you’re also responsible for gutting the safety nets and other civil structures that the victims of failed businesses rely on. Again, gridlock. Drop it already. At least you ahve a business.

microcolonel4• 8 years ago

Also, the idea of comparing "parking spaces per acre" and "households per acre" is kinda silly in the first place. Des Moines households are generally larger than parking spaces. A typical parking space, plus its corresponding lane space in a lot, is about 15m². The average Des Moines apartment is about 67m², and the average household population in Iowa is ~2.4. So even ignoring non-rental housing, you can see how this comparison is kinda bogus, since (like-for-like) apartments are naturally at least five times larger than parking spaces (and non-rental housing is usually even larger), and somewhere between one and two parking spaces per household is easy to justify even if you're only looking at residential space: when it comes to commercial areas, parking charges and volumes are clearly set to ensure availability, so in order for fees to remain reasonable, considerably more parking than "makes sense" must be provisioned.

st262• 8 years ago

A business is also impacted when it doesn't have its very own stoplight to help people turn into the lot. Thus some cities wind up putting in stoplights every few hundred feet, in some areas.

Congratulations, you've just created an unsolvable traffic light network, and magicked all-day gridlock out of thin air.

This is a multivariate optimization problem. We need to consider the repercussions of heavily over-provisioning parking.

RickJWagner• 8 years ago

This is good-- it's where those fantastic barn-finds come from.

paulsutter• 8 years ago

“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk

daviator88• 8 years ago

It's no wonder Seattle's garages often sit empty, a parking space goes for minimum of $4 per hour

jasonmp85• 8 years ago

Wow that’s incredibly cheap.

eatbitseveryday• 8 years ago

Hm. Downtown Portland is $2/hr. I would not say $4/hr is 'incredibly cheap'.

nickthemagicman• 8 years ago

You either pay for parking or get a ticket. It must make incredible amounts of money for all involved.

jaysonelliot• 8 years ago

Until cities have a better alternative to driving than "use our terrible mass transit in our poorly-designed cities," this will remain a problem.

American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it's dangerous. Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000 pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you're riding something that can't be carried into a building with you, it's inconvenient at best to park it outside.

Just removing parking from new construction won't solve the problem, it will compound it. People still won't want to get on slow, crowded, uncomfortable buses or packed, unreliable, dirty trains. We'll just get more people driving endlessly around the block looking for parking and polluting the air, more accidents from drivers hitting people in the road, more sprawl as people shun the city so they can drive in the suburbs instead.

Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc.

Public transit needs a major overhaul, major investment, and a new attitude. It has to be about riders' comfort, convenience, and happiness, not just jamming people into routes as if they were statistics in a planning meeting.

New development should be aimed at walkable, human-scale neighborhoods, planned for people first, not cars.

All these things have to happen to solve the problem. It won't be easy, but unless we do something like that, we'll be living with the car problem for a very long time to come.

ebikelaw3• 8 years ago

Kind of a weird argument that nobody wants to take the bus or the train because it's too crowded. Very Berra.

lozenge• 8 years ago

It just means there aren't enough bus routes or busses on the route.

runarberg2• 8 years ago

Take the Sound Transit 550. It is the main (only direct?) busline between downtown Seattle and Bellevue. During rush hour it comes at an interval of 10 - 15 min. The bus it self is a double wagon (with an accordion connection), it fits maybe (beware I'm pulling this figure from thin air) 50 people. It is always crowded with people standing back to front. During these 10 - 15 minutes one can only imagine how many people cross on the motorway between these places in their private cars.

So it is accurate (although it sounds like a contradiction) to say that *"Nobody wants to take the bus because it is too crowded".

greglindahl• 8 years ago

Yeah, people make exactly this argument every time it's proposed to build denser stuff with less parking in the middle of downtown Palo Alto, which has relatively good walking/train/bus/bike lanes... we can't possibly do it yet because we aren't ready. Even though surveys show that people who live or go to downtown use cars less than the rest of the city.

And so parking spaces are built which are never used.

closeparen• 8 years ago

Downtown Palo Alto and Berkeley both have a nice model with affordable public garages just off the main strip. So the pedestrian area isn’t (as) inundated with cars and parking, but you can still get there as a motorist.

btrettel3• 8 years ago

Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for bikes, scooters, skaters, etc.

As a cyclist, I'd argue that most separated lanes as implemented are less safe than taking the main travel lane.

These lanes seem to be based around the idea that intersections don't matter for safety, and in practice they tend to greatly increase the number of problems at intersections.

In Austin, TX, where I live, the city had added several fully separated cycle tracks near where I live. The only reason I ever use any of them is if I'm stopping at a location on them. If I'm continuing further down the same road, I instead take the regular travel lane. I do this because so many drivers turn directly into the cycle track without checking for oncoming cyclists. This is despite the signs placed prominently on every one of these to look before turning. (In my view, signs like that are strong evidence that a particular location is dangerous for cyclists. They don't noticeably change driver behavior in my view, and seem to exist more for the city to cover their asses than anything else.)

I'm not the only cyclist who has a problem with these cycle tracks either. A friend of mine has additionally pointed out that the city tends to put the cycle track on the downhill side of the road, but not the uphill side, which is exactly the opposite of what they should do because cyclists go much faster downhill than uphill.

If I had to guess, I'd say the problem comes from politicians and bureaucrats who are not cyclists being the driving forces behind the construction of these lanes. You don't need to talk to too many cyclists before you'll hear my views about cycle tracks.

I'm okay with separated facilities when done well, but the vast majority I've seen are poorly designed and amplify problems.

jschwartzi3• 8 years ago

A friend of mine has additionally pointed out that the city tends to put the cycle track on the downhill side of the road (but not the uphill), which is exactly the opposite of what they should do because cyclists go much faster downhill than uphill.

I saw a really good example of an unsafe bike lane when I lived in Kent, wa. As you say the planner had put it on the downhill side of a 45 mph main thouroughfare dropping 500 feet in 1000 feet. It had a lot of great twists and turns for drivers to cut using the bike lane. And there was nothing on the uphill side.

Meanwhile I could bike a mile south and drop the same elevation by rolling through quiet neighborhoods with school zones and no traffic. It boggled my mind how none of the planners thought to redirect bicycle down this route instead of the most dangerous downhill they could find.

stretchwithme11• 8 years ago

Once automated vehicles take over (eventually), most people will switch to taxis. Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle. So the need to park will be greatly reduced.

Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs. Parking will be built underground for off peak storage of vehicles, allowing the repurposing of surface parking spots. Maybe agricultural robots will make use of them.

Cities will get quieter.

cozzyd8• 8 years ago

Yeah taxis don't have sufficient capacity. You'd just double the cars on the roads. Autonomous buses on the other hand could make a dent (since the primary cost of buses in rich countries is labor).

55873445216111• 8 years ago

I'm curious about this. How do you arrive at the conclusion that autonomous taxi adoption results in a doubling of the number of cars? Do you have a link?

seanmcdirmid• 8 years ago

I mean, both can exist. The middle class in Beijing use taxis/didi fairly ubiquitously, poorer people use the subway and buses more.

Autonomous taxis could also easily caravan reducing their capacity disadvantage over autonomous buses.

chimeracoder2• 8 years ago

Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed for AVs.

No matter how autonomous the vehicle, a tunnel of cars will never have the the same throughput capacity as a subway. For supporting the kind of dense cities that we need to in order to have a somewhat sustainable society in the long-term, that's crucial.

Unless you're talking about fully autonomous subway systems, in which case those already exist - like in NYC.

blt• 8 years ago

The NYC subway system is not autonomous. Every train has a driver. Autonomous subways do exist though.

dsnuh9• 8 years ago

Every time I hear this notion that autonomous vehicles will replace private car ownership in the U.S., it strikes me as a futurist pipe dream. I think truly autonomous vehicles are a long way away, if ever. The capital and construction required to totally rearrange the average American city to get to the scenarios you describe would be incredible. I also think we are underestimating the cultural aspect of car ownership in America, as another commenter above pointed out.

stretchwithme11• 8 years ago

I think it will tke longer than most of the optimists project.

But it will happen.

And there will continue to be people who choose to drive. I don't see a problem with that.

If anything, they will be much more capable than today's average driver, as those barely capable give up and take cabs.

They will certainly receive more scrutiny, as the number of cameras on the road will explode.

Tiktaalik3• 8 years ago

lmao

The cost and availability of parking is one of the primary deterrants to car ownership and driving. If that is removed, then due to induced demand, the price commuting by car will substantially decrease. Following induced demand again this means the amount of traffic on the road will substantially increase, which will be a nightmare for cities.

Autonomous cars will not solve anything and will in all likelihoods make the situation much worse.

The only thing that will take cars off the road is simply to reduce the amount of road available to them.

TheCoelacanth4• 8 years ago

One thing that will take cars off the road is to provide better alternatives modes of transportation.

ghaff13• 8 years ago

Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle.

People say this but it's very unclear it will be the case. Especially outside of places where the environment (salted roads for example) take a toll, most of the cost of owning a car is ultimately distance, not time.

A lot of factors could make pay-per-use fleet cars a bit cheaper or more expensive than owner but it's not clear that the economic difference will really be all that great.

I also see people expecting drastically cheaper prices than Uber but the overall costs (including those associated with getting the car to you) are still going to be 50 cents a mile or so.

stretchwithme11• 8 years ago

The distance traveled will be a bigger part of the cost of robotic travel. That's what happens when you are sharing the capital cost with many other users.

And that is a big part of why AVs will be cheaper. Paying 1/10 of $500 a month is better than paying $500.

The cost will also depend on how big a vehicle you need. For many people going to work, they only need room for one person and a little space for cargo. Paying for 1/4 of a vehicle is cheaper than paying for a whole vehicle.

So even the variable cost of your transportation will go down.

nlawalker• 8 years ago

> Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception persists that there’s “not enough parking.”

I imagine most people will perceive that there's not enough parking unless there's an open spot right out front of where they're going when they get there.

Services that facilitate parking further away from your destination might help.

21• 8 years ago

Parking is also extremely expensive to construct and maintain.

Say what? It's a fucking concrete slab.

Maybe they mean expensive in land cost.

black6• 8 years ago

Extremely expensive compared to an undeveloped lot...

gruez2• 8 years ago

when your benchmark is $0, everything's expensive by comparison.

robbrown451• 8 years ago

If it is nothing but a concrete slab, the cost is the land.

Parking structures reduce the amount of land per car, but then you have to pay for the structure.

Semirhage• 8 years ago

I’m from Italy, and until I lived in America for a while I’d never understood just how massive the US really is. I lived on two coasts, in two states that were both much larger than my entire country! People like to point to Berlin or Paris as model cities, but they’re population centers in countries that could fit inside Texas without making a splash. I’m not saying that US car culture is entirely healthy, or that it couldn’t benefit from more and better public transport in major cities. I’m always annoyed though, to see these conversations on HN ignore the sheer size of the country in question. Of course it’s spread out, it’s enormous!

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-reme...

microcolonel4• 8 years ago

For some, the grass is always greener on the other side. It is stylish today to criticize every tradeoff the U.S. has made in order to credibly claim that every habitable square foot of every state is "inhabited", but a lot of it makes perfect sense.

There is one piece of public transit which makes a lot of sense in the U.S.: the bus (both local and coach buses), but it is unstylish and so gets no attention.

Imagine how much better it would be getting from city to city if the money that went into subsidizing AmTrak (which approximately nobody uses, least of which the lower classes) was available as a grant or credit for every passenger mile on the already-thriving network of American bus carriers (Greyhound, Megabus, and 24 others in the long-distance category alone).

ghaff13• 8 years ago

Amtrak is very popular on certain routes, predominantly in the Northeast Corridor. And, in fact, those routes are being upgraded. But poor people certainly don't use it. They take something like Megabus. And the money Amtrak makes in the northeast covers, though not entirely, a lot of long haul routes that aren't competitive with air.

amelius• 8 years ago

Self-driving cars will solve the whole parking problem.

captainmuon• 8 years ago

Yeah some idiots would just let their car drive around all the time without them. I remember reading an article that they wanted to make a law specifically against this before it happens, but I can't find the link. Now if people can share the autonomous cars, that's a different story.

amptorn• 8 years ago

How? Being self-driving doesn't make a car take up less space.

lazyjones4• 8 years ago

A self-driving car will ideally drop you off in front of your commute target and go find a parking space at a convenient location that might even be outside town.

ilaksh• 8 years ago

https://grist.org/article/no-parking-self-driving-cars-could...

wool_gather8• 8 years ago

Multi-car parking areas (garages, e.g.) could be compressed somewhat if humans no longer need to be in the space. (When the car drops you off and then goes and parks itself.) There's space used for fault tolerance, and just opening doors, that would no longer be necessary given a "perfect" driver. I bet you could get another 20% usage spacewise. And there might even be other efficiencies to take advantage of. Even now there are parking garages where cars are stored on top of each other using some kind of mechanical lift.

mattlondon4• 8 years ago

I always thought it was weird how there is so much parking in the centre of US cities.

When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister.

There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks like 08:30-17:00 would set you back anywhere from £25 to £50 a day (about the same as half to a full tank of petrol or diesel). Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor of the traffic and paying for fuel

Understandably, as a result a lot of people use public transport. Sure its fairly decent in London, but thats only because people use it and pay for it so there are funds to reinvest into making it run effectively.

If suddenly the average US driver was looking at paying $100/day to drive to work (or $2000 a month), I am sure that they could handle sitting on a bus for $10/day and pocket the $90 change, while the public transit gets better and better as a result.

This is a solvable problem.

1 - https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_...

2 - https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge

ryanSrich• 8 years ago

A few points:

1.) A lot of employers offer some percentage of parking reimbursement.

2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations.

3.) Often times the bus is extremely dirty and dangerous. Risking injury or confrontation isn't worth saving a few dollars a day on driving.

mattlondon4• 8 years ago

Here in the UK, employers offer things like interest free loans for season tickets or buying a folding commuter bike etc.

1+ hour away is fairly common in London, even on public transport. Not only is London itself pretty large, but it has a big catchment area for people coming in for work from elsewhere.

Buses can be made safer and cleaner and more comfortable with investment. Would I prefer to drive in my own car in my own space? You bet I would. But the difference in price is not a few dollars, it in the order of £60 a day which is £1,200 a month. Not worth it. That £1.2K would be better spent paying down a mortgage

pythonistic• 8 years ago

Most of the US cities I've lived in have poorly laid out bus systems; Seattle is a notable exception with plenty of cross-town and downtown routes, and riders are never more than a couple blocks from the nearest stop.

Most cities are laid out in a hub and spoke system, pulling from suburbs into downtown, but most employers are in office parks in a ring outside the downtown area. A public transit commute may mean nearly an hour into downtown, than another hour to the suburbs, followed by a long walk. In other cities, public transit is only available at certain hours: my parents, for instance, can only catch a bus to work before 7 AM and then won't have a bus back home until after 5 or 6 PM.

nmoaenm342nt2• 8 years ago

2.) A lot of employees live 1+ hour away. The bus doesn't work in these situations.

I live in large dense city in the US (Los Angeles). I live a 15-20 minute car ride from work. The city is going to be doing some construction on my route and have asked the businesses to encourage their employees to take public transit, walk, bike, etc. during the construction. I looked into taking the bus, which for the first time in my life, is a reasonable walk from my home. It would increase my commute time (one way) from 20 minutes to 50 minutes! Sorry, but I don't have an extra hour I can take out of my day for that. It would be better to just work from home, but my employer won't let me do that for the duration of the construction which is supposed to last a year or two.

EDIT: For about a month, my office was at the Santa Monica end of the train. (Like literally right next to the train stop.) Sadly it no longer is. Even then, a coworker decided to take the train once from his place in Pasadena. His normally 45-60 minute commute increased to an hour and 50 minutes taking public transport. Sorry, but he'll just drive instead.

Derived2• 8 years ago

It's that expensive because of the population density and government meddling. There's no need for that in the US...are you saying we should artificially charge the pants off of everyone driving to work just to force them to use public transport? Why? I like my car. I like driving my car. I don't want to ride a train, or a bus. If I can work to the office, I will. I'll drive everywhere else.

mattlondon4• 8 years ago

The "Why" is pollution is really high, and the traffic is awful. Everyone loses.

wflann• 8 years ago

Government meddling on government-build roads?

rockinghigh• 8 years ago

Government run cities. Without "government meddling", you would not have public roads or street lights. You should visit London, Tokyo or Amsterdam. Hopefully it will change your views on how denser US cities may look like. I also like my car but the ability to walk places is really under appreciated in the US.

deagle50• 8 years ago

This is why we need higher gas taxes. Driving is much more pleasant than the alternatives to most Americans, until the true cost of their behavior is reflected at the pump we'll keep going in circles.

Right now my outrageous urban rent and taxes are subsidizing your driving privileges. Real estate for garages instead of housing/retail and road lanes for cars over pedestrians/cyclists. Those costs need to be passed on to the suburban drivers and not the car-less city dwellers.

Unfortunately the political will for gas taxes is null and we'll be left with draconian measures like car holidays and congestion tolls which won't alleviate the need to provide car infrastructure for peak demand, which is artificially high due to the distorted market.

stale20022• 8 years ago

It is because of government meddling that the US doesn't have high density living.

Yes, please please please let's get the government OUT of the housing market, and let's get rid of those building height limits that disallow anything above 6 stories, even though rent is in the thousands of dollars for a studio.

You should be allowed to drive your car and live in whatever low density place you want. Can you offer the same thing for me, by allowing the market to produce high density living as well?

btrettel3• 8 years ago

"Government meddling" is the primary reason parking is so cheap in the US. Typically the law requires a minimum amount of parking. People like myself who don't own cars tend to subsidize those who do.

I recall some sort of economic study that suggested rents would drop by hundreds of dollars per month if parking minimums could be eliminated. (No time to find it right now, sorry.) I'd take that, as right now my apartment gives me two parking spots that I can't do anything with. (A previous apartment manager complained when I used the spot for storage. Cars only, I guess. Renting to others would not be practical, either.)

mandeepj• 8 years ago

Part of it is - England is so small compared to US, which means everything is close by. Here in US, we have so much land which makes things scattered away. Hard to cover each route via public transport on such a large area

mattlondon4• 8 years ago

With respect, this argument is BS and gets brought out over and over and over and over again whenever this sort of thing comes up (e.g. Broadband, Healthcare, renewable energy) - "the US is just too large!" everyone cries "there is simply nothing that can be done!". It is an excuse for mediocrity and the US should be better than that.

In reality there are bubbles of population density in any country where large amounts of people congregate to live and work - we call these "cities". It is in these cities where public transport makes sense. If you need to go somewhere in the middle of nowhere, then drive (just the same as we do here in Europe - you dont need to cover every route with public transport)

icebraining• 8 years ago

we have so much land which makes things scattered away

The availability of space doesn't, in itself, make things scattered away.

jschwartzi3• 8 years ago

The US is spread out because we choose policies that make it easier to spread into undeveloped land than to increase density. It's not some unalterable fact such that it has to be this way.

matthewowen• 8 years ago

Outside of London, the majority of people in the UK drive to work.

Likewise, the majority of people commuting to (eg) Manhattan don't drive to work.

When someone in Houston says that they drive to work, the comparison isn't to someone working in Central London. It's to someone who lives who works in the outskirts of Birmingham.

I think the US is too car dependent. But from my experience, outside of London the UK is pretty terrible too.

Brakenshire• 8 years ago

Yes, that’s true. Unfortunately in the UK there’s a lot of cross-subsidy taking revenues away from commuter and intercity train services, which are in demand, and giving it to rural services which people don’t use. Hence the commuter services are not able to grow enough to compete with cars.

chrisseaton• 8 years ago

When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work it just Does. Not. Compute. In central London, driving to work is essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister.

I get this as well. I hear Americans talk about driving into town for work being hard, and they're literally talking about somewhere like San Francisco, and I think why on earth would you even think that was a reasonable thing to try to do? That's obviously a stupid idea.

ghaff13• 8 years ago

Yes, because people are obviously too stupid to do what works best for them.

I'm quite familiar with going into Boston from the exurbs, in part because I commuted semi-regularly for about a year.

I do often take the commuter rail if I'm going in 9-5ish and can always get a seat because I'm near the end of the line but...

1.) It's not cheap, it's about $30/day between the train, parking, and the subway on the other end.

2.) It tends to take longer.

3.) The real kicker is that I have very little flexibility on the other end. There's basically one train mid-afternoon I can catch, a number at evening rush hour (which can be very crowded), and a few later.

4.) So basically if I have an evening event or just need to go in for the morning I drive, even if just to the subway parking though that fills up extremely early so I need to leave by 5:50-6am or so.

lazyjones4• 8 years ago

Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor of the traffic and paying for fuel

Congestion charge applies only to a small part of London and all those car parks have season tickets at something like -70% discount.

If traffic and fuel costs were such a hassle, nobody would drive to work except a few maniacs, generally cars are chosen for convenience / because public transport is slower and annoying in various ways.

ebikelaw3• 8 years ago

Technically the Prime Minister is forbidden from driving to work, or to any other place.

dawhizkid• 8 years ago

Personally very excited Travis (former Uber CEO) is CEO of City Storage Systems now to basically future proof antiquated urban real estate like parking or retail.

brudgers• 8 years ago

I think parking capacity probably reduces to a local scheduling problem [1]. If it does, it reduces to a 3-sat problem and this would mean optimum parking is NP-complete. Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant [2] and when it comes to where a person parks relative to their home the acceptable radius is probably 100m or less...Des Moines is cold in the winter, hot in the summer, and gets storms at the scale of the Great Plains several times a year.

The marginal cost of a parking space is low. The heuristic for structured parking has long been $10,000 per space. Over a 30 year building life cycle that's less than $1/day. Private surface parking is a few cents and on street public parking is nothing...and often so is even that expensive structured parking because the $1/day of capital costs makes parking a potentially lucrative business. This means that the most cost effective way to avoid scheduling bottlenecks is with capacity that far exceeds the average rate or median demand.

To put it another way, all that parking is what a working system looks like. Sure Des Moines might not need 1.6 million parking spaces -- but it's probably not far from what's necessary to provide required for reasonable livability at the density and geography [3] of Des Moines. Recovering all those parking spaces for development doesn't do a lot for Des Moines. It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower.

To put it another way, land use for parking in Des Moines (or other cities) largely reflects an economic equilibrium in the real-estate market. When there's too much, it gets converted to other uses over time...and when regulations are impediments, major local real-estate interests get those regulations relaxed/modified/removed. [4]

[1]: The size of the 'local' may vary, but it's much much smaller than Des Moines and difficult even down to the scale of on-street parking for a single urban block.

[2]: Based on the heuristic of 1/4 mile reasonable walking radius in urban environments.

[3]: Consider that the Des Moines river runs through the city and a parking space on one side of the river is not generally fungible with a parking space on the other side. The river complicates public transit by bottlenecking surface transit with bridges and subsurface transit with tunnels.

[4]: Institutions with teams of $600/hr real estate lawyers and fifty year investment horizons.

al2o3cr• 8 years ago

It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of conversion is not lower.

is somewhat contradicted by

Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant

This is the space constraint the article focuses on: if there's enough surface parking, it pushes destinations far enough apart that you need to move your car to go from one to the other.

Re: marginal cost, there are plenty of effects that impose additional capital and/or opportunity cost on converting between parking and not-parking uses - everything from long leases for companies that operate parking (10+ years sometimes) to basic constraints like "putting up a building requires a large chunk of up-front spending". Those effects make "economic equilibrium" slow-to-impossible to reach.

MisterTea• 8 years ago

edit tl;dr there is plenty of parking where it's not needed and too little parking where it is needed.

I think the main problem is not the amount of parking but the distribution of parking. I live in NYC and avoid driving around the city as much as possible except off peak and short local runs.

The big problem is commercial centers tend to be high density and clustered together. For example, queens boulevard between Forest Hills and Rego Park has dozens of restaurants and shops where the number of parking spots on the block vs. the number of people concentrated on that block is where the problem begins. A restaurant with one or two parking spots in front might have two dozen people people inside including staff requiring at least six parking spots (assuming couples).

My neighborhood Ozone Park is in south Queens and live is a part that is a block from the A train. Super convenient location as everything is in walking distance of a few blocks including the train. There is also a school around the block. So every morning dozens of commuters pack the neighborhood looking for parking for the train and then add the teachers and other school staff who only get about two dozen reserved spots and half are blocked by construction. Your driveway is frequently partly blocked and finding street parking during weekdays is brutal until about 7-8PM.

So the blocks along the train stations are municipal free-for all parking lots. As you push out into the back areas away from the commercial cacophony there is street parking so long as the neighborhood was built with sanity meaning homes have functional driveways (most don't or can only fit a single car). And there are plenty of those areas spread throughout the city but the parking goes to waste. Then throw in neighborhoods of row houses with no driveways and again, the housing density outweighs the parking.

Face it, no planning was done for the automobile in major cities. Parking allotment is abysmal and to make things worse, maximizing the dwelling square footage is what all developers aim for to maximize the value. So there is zero incentive to build in sane parking. This is an example of a nearby 10 apartment home that was built with parking for about 8-10 vehicles if people park front to back and side-by-side underneath the front half: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75...

Not exactly a pretty example. Down the block from me a single story ranch with a big back yard was bought by a developer, demolished and three two family homes built with the easy ability to add an illegal basement apartment with a little modding (it was so obvious when we toured them during sale). There used to be more parking on weekends before those homes went in. Now even weekend parking can be tough. And this type of development is happening all over NYC. Single family homes are bought up demolished and replaced with 4+ apartments each of which usually bring one car into the neighborhood. They also build little or no parking in. The requirements for parking are easily cheated with a long driveway that is only practical for one or two cars to use as you can't practically park six cars back to back. No one is building single family homes anymore.

Summary: it's a damn mess.

fencepost4• 8 years ago

If anyone in city government is smart Chicago is going to have no real choice but to go against this trend because of its utterly atrocious parking meter deal 10+ years ago - or they're going to have to take that glut of spaces and make them free parking to try to get out of the deal.

Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are closed for construction or eliminated completely, the city has to pay the private company for those spaces as if they were being used. Want bike lanes? Don't forget to account for the paying for all those eliminated parking spaces. Pedestrian only areas? See above. Ride sharing cutting into driving? Guess they'll have plenty of empty space to pick up and drop off in - unless there's a way for the parking meter company to charge for that couple of minutes in a parking space.

But it's not all bad - the city only has to put up with it until 2083.

http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-...

gok4• 8 years ago

The alternative was bankruptcy. And as the market for street parking vaporizes over the next couple decades, this may end up being a great deal.

fiter2• 8 years ago

This will still be a sour deal. What a waste of urban space to just leave empty parking spots due to the fees for repurposing them.

fencepost4• 8 years ago

How will it be a great deal? For 65 more years Chicago will be on the hook for paving and otherwise not using two lanes worth of road on a huge number of roads. If self driving cars become incredible over the next 20 years, the city goes to all robot cabs and no private vehicles, etc. they will still have to keep those parking spaces or pay the parking vendor for them. For this year the city will be paying $20+ million and it's not getting even the ~24 million it would previously have gotten, so roughly a net -45 million for 2018 alone - and even not counting the money paid by the city the leasing company will have made back its entire purchase price by 2020, leaving 60+ years of pure profit.

Chicago got taken so hard that it's now the canonical example of how not to do this kind of thing.

cozzyd8• 8 years ago

This is a tricky issue. The correct thing to do would have been to increase parking rates to something sane, which the private company did, but would have been politically difficult for the city. At the rates the city was charging before, and assuming there was no political way to raise them, it's possible it may have been a rational choice. Ideally it would have been a shorter timescale though...

gok4• 8 years ago

It also had the benefit of moving the meter maids off the city payroll...

fencepost4• 8 years ago

If it was a rational choice it wouldn't have been rammed through the way it was. The way it was handled gives an almost undeniable air of utterly filthy bought and paid for fix is in. The Chicago Reader has a nice timeline of a bunch of the privatization that was going on at the time: https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/features-cover-april-9-2...

Bids are opened 12/1. Aldermen get invited on 12/2 to a briefing that day, where they get limited information and no details. 12/3 a finance committee meeting is held to get an ordinance to accept the bid into process - what they'll be voting on is provided only during this meeting. The finance committee passes it with no significant scrutiny. The full council vote is scheduled for 12/4, and requests to see the city's numbers and financial analysis of the deal are rejected.

When you look back at the deal, to me and an awful lot of other people it looks like one of two things: either most of the people involved on the city side were utterly incompetent, or someone(s) were nicely taken care of in some way.

Edit; autocorrect

kosei• 8 years ago

In Philadelphia, there are 3.7 times more parking spaces than households

Honestly, this number seems reasonable to me, when you consider that people could be parking at a) their home, b) their work, and c) at any number of other places (restaurant, grocery store, mall, etc). Not to mention, each household may have more than one car. It's probably too high in aggregate, but we don't park by average, we park for specific means, and if the lot at the grocery store is full, or at our work, or at home, we consider that to be an inconvenience and want more spots.

The only way to change this is to move away from the 1-2 car-per-family model we live in right now.

oneplane• 8 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but in larger cities, cars seem like an incredibly inefficient and impractical idea to transport people inside those cities. Maybe just dump the cars outside when you want to get in? Or just don't own cars and share them as a stopgap until a better solution is put in place?

wool_gather8• 8 years ago

You're absolutely right, and this is the problem. In aggregate, they are horribly inefficient. At the level of the individual, they're generally much much faster and convenient than other options (i.e., public transit), even accounting for traffic. So -- in game theory terms -- many people defect.

One of the reasons is frequency. Depending on time of day, a subway or bus may not come for 10 minutes. A car is basically infinite frequency: when you want to go, you go right away.

The other is more direct routing. To get to my favorite bookstore, about 5 miles due north, on transit takes an hour because I either have to take the rail into the city center first and transfer (or take one of the most infrequent and slow bus routes in the system). It's maybe 35 minutes by bike or car, as long as it's not rush hour. I don't own a car, but I can't say I wouldn't be tempted some days, if I did.

Felz2• 8 years ago

We can build over all of the parking lots once driverless cars become a thing, can't we?

Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.

antoineMoPa2• 8 years ago

Public transport also reduces the amount of congestion in roads that driverless cars can only worsen.

Felz2• 8 years ago

Probably true, but completely missing my point.

Buses are inflexible solutions, far from ideal transport. You have to find the bus, abide by its schedule, and the bus can only deliver its passengers sort of near its destination. If the bus isn't near full, it's also very wasteful.

A better solution would be on-demand, and could come much closer to the passenger for pickup and dropoff. It would be cheaper to scale as needed.

I think that describes driverless cars, and less perfectly Uber/Lyft. Improving congestion is a matter of improving thoroughput, and our society would be better off focusing on ways to pack more driverless cars into less road, or have more roads, or have more road alternatives (point to point electric scooters), or have better traffic routing, than make a bunch of buses and have people drive them around all day.

And I don't even need to mention the crushing inflexibility of subways and trains.

jjeaff• 8 years ago

This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time.

But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate lots sit empty on the weekends.

Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems.

You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.

DINKDINK2• 8 years ago

...averages show they spots sit empty most of the time. But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built to support peak times.

The word, that not enough technical and non-technical people know, that describes this issue is ergodicty:

an ergodic dynamical system is one that, broadly speaking, has the same behavior averaged over time as averaged over the space of all the system's states in its phase space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity

haste410• 8 years ago

Seems like a useful term to know. Too bad the wikipedia article is too dense to understand.

xapata3• 8 years ago

I'm not sure ergodic is what you're looking for here.

Ergodic is like a gas particle in a box. Over time, it'll have been at every position in the box.

Non-ergodic is like a house of cards. Eventually, it'll collapse and stay down.

PebblesRox• 8 years ago

Even on Black Friday many mall parking lots are far from full. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/27/highlights-fr...

ghaff13• 8 years ago

I'm not sure how much that tells you. There are plenty of moribund malls around. I'll probably be able to find plenty of parking outside JC Penney or Toys R Us at the one near me any day of the year. There are other local malls I'm not going anywhere near after about mid November.

gruez2• 8 years ago

source: a few cherrypicked tweets

justincormack2• 8 years ago

The level that allows all cars to park at peak times is not the economically efficient level; that hugely increases the overall cost, as you cant use parking for any other use. Peak cases should have surge pricing to ration the space there are for efficiency, and the overall level should be less.

crazygringo3• 8 years ago

But they already mostly do. In far-out suburbs, huge mall parking lots aren't competing with anything else, there's plenty of space.

And in downtown cities, parking garages are alreay expensive. $30-50/day in Manhattan, for example. (I would agree that street parking should match garage rates, and not be effectively subsidized, though.)

nmoaenm342nt2• 8 years ago

Where I live (Los Angeles), parts of parking lots are rented out for other things. You often see radio station promotions, paper shredding companies, and things like that renting parts of the parking lots of grocery stores, etc. at off-peak times.

My employer, however, does not rent their parking lot out after hours. They might be able to make some money if they did, though.

Spooky23• 8 years ago

If it wasn’t economically efficient, they wouldn’t exist.

My uncle runs a small parking lot in a central business district. He clears a very healthy living working 5:30-9 five days a week, plus events. When he is ready to retire, he can sell it for a couple of million dollars or pass it on to his kid.

Most older central city parking is like that... modest income to cover taxes and expenses to park the property for future speculation or security for loans. Newer ones are usually part of another development and are tax exempt or taxpayer funded.

The malls were very economically viable in the 80s and 90s. In my areas, malls whose bonds are getting paid off are in-filling the outer areas of the property and some lots with the current hot real estate hustle... hotels and giant gas stations.

crazygringo3• 8 years ago

Exactly. I'm all for mass transit replacing cars and parking... but this article falls flat on its face trying to argue that not-enough-parking is an illusion.

lisper• 8 years ago

If you think about it, it has to be this way. The whole point of parking is that it has to be available on demand, which means you need to build enough capacity to satisfy peak usage at the destination. If you had full parking utilization, people have to queue to park, and that would defeat the purpose of getting to your destination quickly.

You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-private vehicles (which includes things like taxis and Uber). But having fully utilized parking is the worst of all possible worlds.

ryanwaggoner6• 8 years ago

It's partly an information availability problem. Parking usage patterns tend to be based around factors other than availability, which leads to more extreme peaks and valleys than are necessary. If people could see what the mall parking lot was like at any given time and decide when to go based on whether parking was likely to be available, you could probably make the lot half the size. You already see this in many places around traffic; people in LA seem to plan their lives around when the freeways are known to be backed up.

gok4• 8 years ago

I wonder what we’ll do with all this space once AVs take over.

yuhong2• 8 years ago

It would be fun to do the math if every one of the parking spots had EV charging

AtlasBarfed• 8 years ago

Another problem begging for self-driving cars.

Have the car drop you off, then self-drive to an offsite parking, and then return when summoned.

This model would also support mobile "gear boxes" where you have activity-focused mobile storage pods of gear (think toolboxes for trade work, or a surfing/beach pod with your beach gear, or a biking/triathlon pod with all your triathlon gear), which I think will be a huge benefit once self-driving hits reality.

Rather than have storage units where you can't easily get to your stuff because of the side trip and annoyance of loading/unloading, you have modular storage that can be summoned to a spot and purpose needed.

That would reduce storage needs in urban areas as well, so you could further enhance density.

loonyballoonys• 8 years ago

In the USA, from what I have seen, public transportation is a punishment for being poor.

American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage

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