“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.
AI slop graphic.
Actually you’re right. Didn’t see that at first.
It still conveys the point pretty effectively regardless
It’s not just oppression against “other forms of transport;” it’s literally classist and (to the extent that race corresponds to class, which is a lot and on purpose) racist. A lot of these zoning laws about minimum parking requirements and minimum lot sizes date back to a time when United States government policy was explicitly designed to perpetuate segregation, and forcing every new parcel and development to be large and expensive enough to be unaffordable to most black people (because they were, and still are, poorer on average because of other institutional racism) was a part of that.
lets not forget its also oppression against people with disabilities since they are significantly more likely to use public transport and pedestrian infrastructure.
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.
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
Not everyone who can’t really walk much qualify for handicapped status. The majority don’t. The elderly as just one example.
Additionally, on-street parking gets you even closer to where you want to go. In fact, if more people who can walk did walk, it would make it even easier for people who can’t who won’t have as much competition for good parking spots.
I don’t see any comment asking to remove all cars from the roads. Only that viable alternatives to driving be made possible by sensible zoning instead of building everything solely to cater to cars.
Would accessibility be a solution here? I am speaking about public transport that has dedicated spaces for wheelchairs, has ramps to get on and off etc., as well as sidewalks that are accesibil by wheelchairs, with a smith surface and ramps to get on and off to. Maybe combine that with lifts to access pedestrian subways and overbrides.
Possibly it could also mean the ability to rent, best case for free and at a place reachable by public transport with very little or no walking, a wheelchair or a simiiular solution that let’s one drive rather then walk.
I’m just thinking loud, but maybe such solutions should be considered in every walkable city.
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.
Would it work for you to drive to a larger parking garage (or even better, use public transport to a larger subway or bus station) and then use some form of battery operated micro-transport type vehicle fit for your type of limitation to move around the sidewalks/bike lanes in what can then be a more compact city center?
In this thread: A lot of misconceptions and more than a few poorly thought out comments.
Also in this thread: Identifying the need to restructure the current standard before car usage can be realistically reduced by large amounts.
Also in this thread: Identifying the need to restructure the current standard before car usage can be realistically reduced by large amounts.
The best way to reduce car use is to create an environment where driving isn’t the default (or only) way to get around. Induced demand works in reverse too.
Those lots are horribly inefficient, aisle-less parking would make more sense for businesses of that size
They may be horribly ineffecient but that seems to be the standard design. Plus compared to pretty much any other land use, even the most optimized surface level parking lot is an ineffecient use of land.
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So move out of the city 🤷
Public transport is famously existent in the countryside.
Move to the country if you want to drive everywhere then. Leave cities for people who actually value the density they’re supposed to provide.
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.
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.
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 “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.
People with disabilities can’t use sidewalks?
last i checked people with disabilities are significantly more likely to walk and use public transport, partly because there are few disabilities that make it so u need a car and many that make it so that u cant drive a car either safely (like random seizures) or at all (like blindness) but also people with disabilities tend to be much poorer and driving is actually expensive as fuck. Public transport and pedestrian infrastructure alongside making streets safer for people by slowing down cars and reducing the overall number of unnecessary cars is actually really good for people with disabilities and even for those few who are forced to drive due to their disabilities surely their lives would be easier if everyone who didnt have to drive were off the roads too.
So if u actually give a shit and that was not just a cheap rhetorical trick then come over to our side and lets destroy car dependency for everyone happiness for the environment and for disabled people.
spoiler
and also for utility vehicle and deliver drivers who are made miserable by being unnecessarily stuck in traffic.
If your “urban fabric” doesn’t have public transit that’s faster and cheaper than driving, it’s just an overbuilt suburb. America has one city, NYC.
There’s tiny bits of real city around the US. It’s usually leftover fragments that managed to survive through the carpocalypse of the 30’ to today.
There are very few real city places larger than a 1/4 sq mile here.
I wish we could have cities like Chongqing, awesome infrastructure.
Car centric infrastructure is less accessible though.
Americans have a hard time getting through the culturally ingrained car propaganda.
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.
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.
And I love how cute it is that you think GM, Ford, Tesla, etc aren’t lobbying for parking minimums.
Also, auto companies have never tried to manipulate a country’s government, no they would never.
excuse me corporations have no financial incentive ever to behave the slightest fart unethically so they never ever ever will.
Actually curious, is this an ongoing thing in America also, or are you just saying it’d be silly to think it’s not? I’d not considered your perspective before and am unsure if this is a documented issue contributing to American city planning, or if your just saying people should be open to the idea of it
And I love how cute it is that you think there are “car lobbyists”.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summary?cycle=2021&id=M02
There’s a lobby for a lot of shit and you didn’t take 2 seconds to think about your claim that a major American industry (one that relies on fossil fuel at that) wouldn’t have lobbyists? Like not downvoting you or anything, I’m too embarrassed for you. Hope you’re not someone who takes downvotes etc to heart.
If they only lobbied, lol
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
