“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”
If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.
One of the funniest things about American car culture is that Americans probably walk the same distance from their parking spot to the store as I walk from my home.
And they’re walking in car infrastructure. Some of the most unpleasant, not made for humans places, not to mention dangerous. Compared to walking in what a city should feel like.
I hate car dependence too but when I see things like this I wonder what your solution is for people like me who can’t really walk much.
What would your solution for a blind peron be in this car dependant world? Having multiple transportation options is the most fair system. Right now in many places the car is the only option.
Having big parking lots for people to walk across has the same problem. If you can’t walk far it’s better to have density so you don’t have to walk as far.
Handicap parking spots already solve that problem though
uhh, mobility scooters and wheelchairs? i’m a bit confused as to how this isn’t really easy to answer
AI slop graphic.
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As a European, this is the first time I ever heard about parking minimums. What a horrible concept.
Is it really a horrible concept per se, or do people in reality have cars and need to park them somewher, even in Europe?
If your “urban fabric” can’t support access to the public, it doesn’t deserve to survive.
Do you see the people walking in the top left picture?
That’s what access to the public looks like.
ah, so access to the public leaves out people with disabilities.
not much different than today’s reality, but at least you’re open about it.
If someone is so disabled that they can’t go out in a wheelchair how are they going out in a car?
People with disabilities can’t use sidewalks?
More people exist who cannot drive than who have to drive due to disability. Car-centric infrastructure is incredibly ableist.
last i checked mobility scooters exist
Car centric infrastructure is less accessible though.
Americans have a hard time getting through the culturally ingrained car propaganda.
For some of us American’s we’re trapped in it and it seems like it’ll never go away no matter how much we hate it.
I’m someone who lives in a very rural area because I can’t afford to live in a city… so I need a car. Somehow, a mortgage and sharing a car with my husband is still more affordable than living in a walkable/bikable city in my state. That’s a problem. I don’t know how to fix it, but that’s a freaking problem. Rent in some areas is double my mortgage on my small house. People who rent are getting royally fucked over by ever increasing prices.
If we want people to have less cars then cities need to be affordable for people to live in. It shouldn’t cost more to not have a car. The US has so many backwards problems it starts to feel insurmountable.
Yeah. It takes some real mental gymnastics to think that getting rid of parking minimums, getting rid of a harmful government regulation, increasing freedom, is a bad thing.
I work in planning. We removed parking requirements in our downtown districts and a bunch of companies came in to buy the old abandoned buildings and expanded them into the old parking areas.
Every single retail business that moved in over the following 3 years failed because there wasn’t anywhere for the customers to park. They just went to businesses that had parking avaialbe.
Probably would be better off with relatively minor adjustments to overarching standards over time, much akin to parking requirements, but probably that would look more like parking-protected bike lanes downtown, mixed-use zoning, making missing middle housing more available by getting rid of lots of zoning requirements on housing, or, like japan, making them much more comprehensive. None of that costs you anything economically. Parking protected bike lanes just require paint, and you can do that when you need to repave and repaint the main high traffic roads downtown. Eventually you may be able to justify an upgrade to a totally separated bike lane, or you might be able to justify shutting down main street to through traffic and routing things around.
Then you don’t really have to shell out for anything in terms of city transit, you’re just changing some regulations around, and people can walk or bike 2 to 3 minutes to the grocery store on their street corner, from their apartment, which is above a pizza place or whatever the fuck. Bike 3 minutes from the edge of downtown in their rowhome into main downtown where they can pick up groceries. Those people can also have jobs and be economically productive with the higher job density that such a development provides, and this all provides a much healthier and more stable tax base for the city since the utilities cost per person and per business is going to be much less. Course, you’re not gonna get heavy industry like that, but I haven’t really cooked up a solid approach to that sort of commute to a factory or industrial district that doesn’t involve a bus or passenger rail line that just heads straight there, like the USSR did.
The more significant problem with this isn’t so much that it’s some sort of like, totally impossible thing, it’s that any city doing that shit will probably be overrun by a shit ton of annoying gentrifiers, which is a harder problem to solve.
I feel like it’s pretty obvious that the main problem here is with the local NIMBY voters which might not like such a thing, and a significant lack of federal funding. There isn’t really a solid argument against any of the fundamental and somewhat universal planning principles which increase density, walkability, public accessibility, economic efficiency and productivity.
Dude, that’s not gonna happen. As you said, it’s the voters who are the “problem.” Our City Council straight-up banned rezoning any districts to multifamily or 2-family. We have a mixed-use district in the code because we’re required to, but it must be on a plot of land of at least 50 acres along a state highway. The largest single tract of land in the city is 15 acres, and it’s not on a state highway.
We also have a minimum lot size of 1 acre and minimum street frontage for a single-family lot of 150 feet for all newly-platted lots. The citizens super duper don’t want the poor moving in.
But you also have to look at it from a different perspective. Many of these suburban towns are made up of people who actively chose to live a less-urban lifestyle, and as the sprawl approaches them they get very, very hostile. They don’t want new people or more affordable housing. They bought their houses 15 years ago when they cost 80 grand. Now people are buying those same houses for a million dollars and tearing them down to build a 7-million dollar house.
If your city is only designed for drivers, it’s no surprise that people will want to drive places. When you remove parking minimums, you also need to prioritize transit and micromobility accessibility, so people are actually incentivized to switch modes. Cities can and are making this shift successfully: here’s one example.
Yes. Let’s spend multiple times our annual city budget to force people to walk in 100-degree heat 4 months out of the year to visit a local restaurant or wait 20 minutes for a shuttle.
They definitely won’t choose to go to the next town over where they can park 50 feet from the door of their destination, and our entire staff definitely won’t be let go in the blowback.
Depending less on car infrastructure will save more tax money long term. Eliminating parking minimums and building denser developments often increases city tax revenue, turns out parking lots don’t generate a lot of taxable revenue, meanwhile more business space does.
Not empty businesses.
And local governments can only develop with the money they have on hand without a bond, and good luck passing a bond that removes parking, increases taxes, and, in the eye of the voters, invites “undesirables.”
Turns out our money is currently being used for things like keeping water flowing, toilets flushing, libraries open, and other civil projects.
We can make a developer build parking through Zoning codes. We can’t make them build public infrastructure that isn’t directly required for their project.
If we can make a devloper build parking, we can make them build transit stops. The car is not the only thing we can force developers to accomadate.
You can’t just decide what’s legal and what isn’t.
A public transit stop serves more than just the property in question, making it a public project and not a private development. We can’t make private developers pay for public projects. It’s illegal.
Whereas a private parking lot is specifically for that exact development, so it can be mandated.
Planning isn’t a videogame where the perfect solution is achievable. We have to work within the confines of the existing legislative and legal environment.
The city could at least communicate with the development plans and purchase the required land for public stops. The city could mandate certain developments require this kind of transit inclusion to the planning process. The city can also mandate for denser zoning around major transit corridors.
The college I went to maintained a roundabout for buses. The college had to fully cover the costs of pavement maintaince and snow removal. It seemed worth it since tons of their students were arriving by bus, because it delivered them to the center of campus.
Well you failed your job then, after removing minimum parking requirements you need to add in public transport, make streets walkable and cyclable, you need to induce the kind of traffic that helps build foot traffic, that way the businesses grow naturally around foot traffic.
You got a spare billion dollars for a city with an annual budget of 50 million?
Edit: And my job is to implement the vision of elected leaders as defined in the Comprehensive Plan. We handle the details, but direction is provided by Council.
Seriously, its like you’ve never played Sim City or Cities Skylines. If you are going to rezone or redesign districts and remove parking then you need to, like everyone else is saying, maximize public transit and walkability. Without doing that you are just creating an urban desert.
The actual day to day job of a planner is closer to Papers Please. 80% of my time is spent reviewing meeting with, reviewing plans of, or writing stag reports about private developments.
In fact, we’re so busy dealing with fights over fence height, pool lighting, and screening of HVAC equipment that most cities outsource their Comp Plan development to third party companies that specialize in it.
You gonna pay for it? Our city’s entire annual budget wouldn’t even begin to pay for that.
That’s where parking requirements come from.
If you already have existing transit it likely wouldn’t cost an exreme amount to add a couple stops. If your city doesn’t have any transit then someone should plan some.
Once again, who is gonna pay?
The city can’t afford it without a bond, and voters will never approve an increase in taxes to remove parking and install transit that will increase local (e.g. Voter) commute times and invite the “undesirable elements” from the city they fled to the suburbs to avoid.
We can’t legally force developers to build public infrastructure that isn’t directly required due to their individual business (e.g. traffic signal or wastewater line extension).
Know what we can do? Force developers to build parking for their business through zoning ordinances with minimum parking requirements based on use. So a restaurant needs more parking spaces per square foot than an office building, which needs more than a warehouse.
Most cities cannot afford their extisting road infrastructure maintaince. Once built transit systems and walkability are far cheaper to maintain.
Great.
Your still haven’t offered a solution for how to pay for it.
Our roads are 30 years behind on maintenance, but we can patch them here and there and do one out two major projects a year. And when a street collapses it’s relatively easy to get a bond to fix it because the citizens want their roads back.
We can’t patchwork a public transit system, and the citizens are overwhelmingly against it anyway. We tried buying a single bus to shuttle people around and we had a new city manager following that backlash.
Planners aren’t kings. We’re public servants subject to the will of Council, which is made up of people who represent voters, who overwhelmingly don’t want more density, new people, etc. We have pretty much zero input on the direction of the city.
Shit… we spend way more time reviewing swimming pools for code compliance than actually developing plans. When it does come time to do a new comp plan or transportation study, almost every city outsources that to a third party company.
We pay for it by redeveloping massive multi lane roads into multi transit corridors when their major repair/resurfacing work is due. A few places have used this strategy to redevelop car centric areas into areas with better transit and pedestrian accesses.
The horrible AI slop looks so bad if you look at it for longer than a second. Do better yall.
Thing is: you don’t need to look at it longer than a second to understand what is meant to be conveyed. So no, goal achieved, good use of resources instead of overspending on one useless metric (=making it realistic)
I doubt the AI is getting the proportions right. And none of these look like actual places even for one second
I adore how they use mopeds and scooters in Asia
Yeah I love the smell and sound of a million mopeds. Taiwan is known for its urban serenity.
mopeds aren’t the problem, the problem is that they don’t have enough public transport to handle the sheer absurd amount of people wanting to get places.
imagine how these countries would look if everyone drove a car instead of a moped, society would literally fail because no one would be able to get anywhere
No point in that big store if I never go to it because I don’t have anywhere to park.
And I love how cute it is that you think there are “car lobbyists”.
And why do you think you should need to drive?
There’s a shitload of big stores like that in my city that I can get to in less than 20 minutes without a car.
Your city is frankly built shit if that’s not also the case.
Big box stores, not just big stores. From the from door to one to the front door to the next is just barely reasonable walking distance - and that is assuming you take unsafe shortcuts, go around the parking lot on the sidewalks and it isn’t a reasonable walk (if there is snow they pile that between the two doors). If you want to go to some third store instead of the second you can’t get there in a reasonable walk.
there are many different ways to do a big store. Big box stores are not necessarily any bigger than the others, but the layout of the doors is such that anything other than driving is discouraged by the design and if you do anyway you realize it isn’t safe. There are other big stores where walking is reasonable.
What distance would you call a reasonable walk?
from their front door to their car ofcourse.
So move out of the city 🤷
Public transport is famously existent in the countryside.
Is this sarcasm, or satire, or a stroke?
It’s someone who doesn’t know what sub they’re in; this sub is for those living in NYC, LA, SF, and Chicago only. I’m guessing they live in the tiny sliver of the United States that isn’t one of those four cities, hence their confusion.
I was reading about a study that showed how much the climate temperature would rise if every house had solar panels on their roof. I then immediately thought, hey now, what if we had less asphalt everywhere, would that not affect overall temperatures as well?
What was the conclusion? Asphalt shingles and slate shingles are already dark, so I’d imagine it would impact covered lighter roofing more.
