> More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.
9' by 18' (162 sq ft.) is on the large end of parking space sizes. A couple living in a 400 sq ft. tiny house doesn't even make that true, and most houses aren't tiny houses. For more normal 2000 sq ft. houses, you'd need an average of more than 12 people living in each one to make it true.
So when you go to work, they count the parking space there towards the square footage for your car, but not your office there towards the square footage for you? And when you stay at a hotel, they're counting the hotel's parking space towards the square footage for your car but not the hotel room towards the square footage for you? It's unfair and absurd to only count the square footage for you where you live, but to count the square footage for your car everywhere you ever drive it to.
That is the whole POINT. You don't pick up your house and move it every time you need to go to a grocery store(unless you live in your car, which many do), but that is exactly what you do with a vehicle. This means that the infrastructure needed to support the vehicle is actually massively more extensive than just the vehicle, leaving a footprint that is much bigger than just the car, and impacts almost all facets of day to day life.
You just argued against yourself though, because in a theoretical sense that is exactly what you do. If you don't have a parking space available at the location you are going to, a "public driveway" so to speak, you are not able to leave the car there. Now you could make a similar point about short term living situations like hotels, but I would imagine that the number of people who regularly stay in hotels is much lower than the number of people who own and operate a vehicle regularly.
The point is that it's not any different than the living space itself. If you go from home to work, you need an office to be in while you're there in addition to a parking space, and for that time both your home and the parking space at your home are empty.
But they're counting the parking space at the office and not the office space there.
So either you park your car at the train station, and then the train station needs a parking space for you and according to this math it still counts as another one even if it's outside the city. Or you live within walking distance of mass transit, which most people can't because there isn't enough relevant land zoned for that kind of high density development for everyone to live in even if they wanted to.
But I'll do you one better. If you work from home you don't need the parking space or the office space.
I don't know where you work, but I haven't had an office all to myself ever, a desk is pretty much all I have ever been allotted, and it has usually been an open one at that. I have one place to go to work(usually). But I have almost countless places I could go for shopping or experiences...and that is where the parking problem arises.
...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive. My "empty" house still has utility. My family could be using it. It is storing all of my possessions. It is a source of comfort for knowing I have a place to go to rest.
Anyways, the productivity footprint of shared spaces is very different from those that are exclusively mine, and spaces that are exclusively mine are very limited...essentially my home and my car. I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
> I don't know where you work, but I haven't had an office all to myself ever, a desk is pretty much all I have ever been allotted
You don't just need a desk. You need a desk in addition to your share of a series of hallways that go to your desk, an elevator, a staircase, conference rooms, a lunch room etc.
More to the point, even if your desk is small, it's not literally zero, but that's how it's being accounted for.
> and it has usually been an open one at that.
The building's parking lot will generally be sized according to size of the space (i.e. the number of desks), so this also means that you don't have your own parking space.
> ...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive.
If you did have a house, it would commonly be in an area zoned to require each plot to have an acre of land. An acre is more than 40,000 square feet. Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
> I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
The thing preventing this is the zoning de facto requiring each house in the suburbs to have 35,000 square feet of grass.
> You don't just need a desk. You need a desk in addition to your share of a series of hallways that go to your desk, an elevator, a staircase, conference rooms, a lunch room etc.
All of which are shared throughout the workday, unless someone hired me to be the only one in the building, which seems like a poor decision. The parking spot I take is mine for the day though.
> Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for. Tell a person about to have diarrhea in the middle of a mall that the bathroom is out of service, and panic will surely ensue.
> The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
Ah yeah, and dumping 100 million barrels of oil off the coast of California will be totally irrelevant because the ocean is very, very big. The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic. But I love how you calculate the relevancy/irrelevancy of such massive changes in the snap of a finger. I really hope you don't ever estimate anything of actual value.
Which is why you account for your share of them, which isn't zero.
> It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for.
The size of the plot is extremely relevant to how much housing could be built on it in the alternative.
> The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic.
This is completely the opposite of where most parking spaces actually are. Millions of them are attached to suburban homes, which is about as far from a condensed place with a lot of traffic as you can get without actually being in a corn field. Many more are attached to big box stores and strip malls in low density areas. None of these matter to what happens in a city or what city-adjacent land is zoned to allow, except insofar as some of the areas are only low density because that's all they're zoned for. But if they were rezoned then they wouldn't be parking lots anymore.
"This means that the infrastructure needed to support..."
... the offices, schools, stores, etc is much larger than just a house. All the heating cooling, plumbing, etc and it sits empty most of the time (and you have to walk/drive past those regardless of their parking infrastructure). I fully get the point they are making. The thing the grandparent was talking about is that the argument could just as easily apply to the building spaces themselves rather than only the parking. Given this and the host of other categorical differences in parking vs occupied structures does in my view make the comparison "absurd". In general, this article is using a lot of numbers to make arguments that are really emotionally based.
Certainly the notion that parking could just be replaced by housing(or anything else) in the snap of a finger is a stretch. The initial idea of the American dream and the single family home almost has to lead to a reliance on cars, especially in the suburbs(or did the advent of the car lead to the single family home dream?). Anyways, my point is that the buildings are productive, whether it be a school or a store or a home, but a parking space less so. Many communities have been able to use mass transportation alongside infra for bicycles/mopeds/scooters to make living in a city/town very enjoyable(but this isn't really what the article is getting at).
Not only that, the total nationwide is essentially meaningless because of how many parking spaces there are in suburban areas where zoning prohibits the land from being used for much else or rural areas where the land isn't that scarce. Converting parking spaces into bigger lawns doesn't get you any more housing.
It's pretty marginal but there are a couple instances where I'm at that are slowly being addressed, where some really large, poorly located parking lots are making some areas more flood prone and holding up development in their vicinity.
Even if you were to do that, parking has a larger footprint than habitation. Or whatever you want to call existing in a space.
For example, if I go to Chipotle for lunch, I will go and park my car, go inside, get in line, order, blah.
My car, and everyone else's car will take up 9x18 units. If it's busy, you could have a line 10 to 15 people deep. That's 1620 sq ft of parking for people who will be occupying about 360 sq ft on the inside. (Assuming 10 people all taking up a 6x6 block).
I feel that there is a categoric misunderstanding here: there is no "natural" conversion rate between "parking footage" and "abitable footage", the claim from the book is just saying "There are a lot of parking! More than you think! The parking surface is bigger than the abitable surface", it is about conveying a sense of scale not about "the ratio is 1.2 but should be 0.7".
As you have pointed out it could also means "The car in your driveway has 11 theorethical empty parking spots built for it, maybe there is an overallocation of resources"
Not really. An F150 is 8' wide to the mirror, and most people like to open the door. And they are 17.5' long, and nobody likes to touch the wall with their nose. If anything that's an understatement of the space used. Unless you have valets/robots packing the cars into solid blocks, every single parking space needs a full driveway beside to enter/exit, and that driveway needs to be wide enough to accommodate the turning radius during parking. For the F150, that's another 150sqft or so.
Moreover, that's assuming that every car is a Ford F150. But what happens in practice is that the F150 gets parked next to a Toyota Corolla which is less than 6' wide and thereby has room to open the doors by extending them into the adjacent space.
Not really if you include the driveway too. A parking spot without access in/out is useless. When an aisle has parking both sides, this space is shared, so only 50% allocated to each space. But if you ever see an aisle with parking on only one side, you might be surprised how much more room cars need to get in/out. Even with shared aisles, it is ~100sqft. 300sqft for a parking spot really is a bare minimum. And that's before you start adding up common spaces like ramps, etc.
Just checked a city lot I use. The spots are small, and trucks don't really fit. But even these tiny spots use 510sqft for each pair of parking spots on an aisle, so ~250sqft each (without accounting for ramps, and other shared spaces).
US has 2 billion parking spots. A car also needs room to maneuver into the spot, this makes the space 2 - 3x than just the area required to park a car.
Most of the road is only there because people use cars instead of public transport. Keep 2 lanes as necessary,the remaining lanes should be divided among the cars as wasted space caused by them.
There are considerably more people today than there were before cars, so it's hard to say how wide the roads would need to be if we could make bicycles, public transit, and walking a functional equivalent for cars.
You cannot directly translate between countries with such difference in population density obviously, but if anything - the more people USA has - the bigger gains are there to be realized by switching to more efficient mode of transport.
Mind you there's some cars in the videos, but they aren't any bigger than the horse-drawn carriages that roads had been accommodating well before that.
Train tracks don't have parking off to the side. Buses don't need that either. Neither do they need parking spots at every destination to be useful. They are both much more space efficient than cars especially when you consider most cars have one passenger a lot of the time.
Parking lots and on street parking is a tremendous waste of space (and they're ugly to boot) and forces EVERYTHING to be more spread out.
If you're counting the road as parking because it's used to maneuver into the parking spot, then you need to count people's 10 acre yards as living space as well.
One at home, one at work, one at the grocery store, one at the cafe. Some of those are shared, but it is entirely believable that we have more paved parking than we have housing
If you're only counting the square footage of people's homes rather than of everywhere they go, then you should also only count the square footage of their driveways rather than of everywhere they park their cars.
Interestingly, one practical tactic for increasing walkability in cities is to focus on increasing the re-usability of parking. People who live in an apartment and drive to work don't need their parking space during the day, so sometimes you can have an apartment and an office share parking spaces, in the middle of a city. Obviously there's nowhere near 100% overlap, but if you can get to a situation where you only need 150% as much parking instead of of 200%, that's great.
Many building/land-use codes require one parking space per expected adult occupant. So we can multiply by two.
Further, we are counting just parking at the residence, let alone the combined shared parking elsewhere. Plenty of roads has as much parking on either side as there is actual roadway
You're missing big box stores like Walmart which each have tens of thousands of square feet of parking around them for every car which could potentially show up. Many times, these giant parking lots are mandated by law, so each grocery store has a parking lot, and each school has a parking lot. When you total it up, there are hundreds of places you could theoretically park your car, mostly mandated by law to exist. It makes all infrastructure bigger: you house is further from the store because you have to drive past a bunch of parking lots.
If you go to a place that isn't driving dependent and you'll see that the main factor for "better walkability" is namely "places are a few miles closer because you don't have to walk through 20 parking lots to get there". It's pretty eye opening.
"If you go to a place that isn't driving dependent and you'll see that the main factor for "better walkability" is namely "places are a few miles closer because you don't have to walk through 20 parking lots to get there"."
That's not really the main factor. I would say the main factor is medium to high density, mixed use areas that have business friendly regulations and/or wealthy residents/tourists. There aren't tons of large parking lots in west Philly, but I wouldn't give it a high walkability score given all the vacancies (where are you going to walk to?) and safety concerns (both in infrastructure and crime terms).
Still, not really. Even going with that picture, this is still a better description "medium to high density, mixed use areas that have business friendly regulations and/or wealthy residents/tourists.", as one could get rid of the parking lots, but that wouldn't make it necessarily better unless it's also mixed zoning (eg if those are all office buildings, you still have to drive to get to a restaurant, grocery, etc).
I have two parking spots that are essentially dedicated to my car. At work* and at home. I don't have to worry about parking at either of those spots. Ever.
Everywhere I go out has parking. I need to pick something up at the hardware store and grocery store today. I'm not worried about the parking at either. Usually, there's plenty of empty spots at most locations I'll drive to.
The few times I can't find a parking spot is around meal times at places with already limited parking.
And I just remembered, I have a parking pass for a local stadium for games during that sport's season. That's another dedicated spot for my car. I believe right now, both stadiums have empty parking lots. I drive by a minor league baseball field every morning that has an empty lot.
It's not just about the parking at one place, it's about all the places created so you can park your car. Parking has a lot of slack built into it. Most places have more square footage dedicated to parking than to the structure itself.
*I don't have an assigned parking spot or anything like that, it's just that we have a private lot only for use of employees. So there's always going to be a spot somewhere for me.
I can see it being true given all the places that have large lots.
Although I'm not sure what the author's point is by using that comparison, aside from being an emotional hook. The resources, needs/wants, etc for these are quite different. Same thing for the statement about 3-car garages vs 1 bedroom apartments - it mostly comes down to preferences and how those manifest in the market, politics, and other aspects of life.
Just in case anyone's interested, in the UK a parking space is usually 2.4 x 4.8 metres, with 6 metres between the double rows of cars for manoeuvring. (It's not a law, as far as I know, but those dimensions are mentioned in lots of quasi-official recommendations.) That works out, in the limit, for a very large car park, as an area per parking space of 18.72 square metres, which is just over 201.5 square feet.
The opposing viewpoint is that all the downsides that predominantly harm city living people are perfectly fine for the half of the country that does not live in a city to still occasionally go enjoy city stuff and have that parking be available.
They don't seem to understand that reducing cars in cities and dense areas doesn't stop you from driving your lifted 19 foot long bro truck in the suburbs.
And the alternate universe version of this clickbait: "America has paid a steep price in time for devoting too little space to storing cars," or "Our transportation choices have boxed Americans into living in sardine cans. We need new personal transportation infrastructure."
Americans don't seem to live in sardine cans compared to the world. They mostly seem to transport themselves and work in sardine cans, though. Not very different from the remainder of the developed world, where people do live in sardine cans primarily.
> Americans don't seem to live in sardine cans compared to the world. They mostly seem to transport themselves and work in sardine cans, though. Not very different from the remainder of the developed world, where people do live in sardine cans primarily.
You misunderstand. It's an alternate universe headline.
I'm not sure this claim makes sense. Yes, _if you're committed to driving everywhere_, then fewer parking spaces when you arrive at your destination may make you spend time looking for parking.
But in the alternate world where we didn't design for cars first, you'd be more used to other forms of transit, and a lot of things would be closer together. In our universe, where most businesses are surrounded by large parking lots, whole cities get sprawled out and everyone's travel times are inflated (regardless of mode of travel).
"But in the alternate world where we didn't design for cars first, you'd be more used to other forms of transit, and a lot of things would be closer together."
You don't need an alternate world as you can just look at history. Then we would have to consider why the people chose to adopt and promote cars to bring us into this age.
Because marketing works, companies like selling stuff (shared laundromat in the basement? Are you communist?) and because government likes selling dreams even if those turn to nightmare.
> Because marketing works, companies like selling stuff (shared laundromat in the basement? Are you communist?) and because government likes selling dreams even if those turn to nightmare.
Come on, dude. A suburban home with a yard isn't a "nightmare," they're actually very desirable to a lot of people. They market themselves. Of course, there's a set of wannabe central planners that dislike that preference because it conflicts with their "vision" for how the plebs should live, so they try to deny that truth.
I think the house and the yard aren't the nightmare, but the miles of cookie cutter housing developments attached to arterials studded with strip malls are.
And those are the communities which were invented and built by central planning, by people saying: "these businesses all need to meet a large parking minimum, and these areas are _only_ allowed to be single family homes, and this other area can _only_ be commercial, and these arterials will then need to have 45 mph speed limits so drivers can get from their homes to the store in a reasonable period, and since they're going fast the lanes should be wide so I guess we won't have room for a bike lane, and only one side of the street can have a sidewalk, and hey what do you know, that really fits with our intention to not put crosswalks except at those intersections every 1/2 mile ...".
Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like. The design of the suburb _coerces_ people to drive by threatening the lives of cyclists and pedestrians, and invariably having poor or slow public transit.
> I think the house and the yard aren't the nightmare, but the miles of cookie cutter housing developments attached to arterials studded with strip malls is.
Those aren't nightmares either. Or rather, they're only nightmares if your idea of a nightmare is "alternatives to urban living exist."
Also the selective use of "cookie cutter" as a pejorative is interesting. Everything is cookie cutter, especially dense urban development (e.g. all the rail-adjacent apartment complexes I've seen built in the last decade or two). But of course it's only a problem when we're talking about the trendy-to-hate suburbs.
Almost all those other requirements you complain about follow directly from a desire to live in a quiet neighborhood, and the rest are almost certainly a function of traditional American excessive cost-cutting (e.g. the sidewalks on one side, which are not universal). If people didn't actually want to live in quiet neighborhoods, they'd have stayed in the cities.
> Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like.
You missed my point: suburbs are desirable, but your urban advocate central planners lie and claim they aren't (e.g. "they're nightmares," people only moved there because of "marketing", etc. that have been repeated in this thread).
This whole conversation stems from an article about the excessive cost of putting parking _everywhere_, and acknowledging that while the desire to have a car and to want a place to park it is reasonable, that policy decisions fixating on that create costs for _everyone_. The article specifically mentions how in LA after the 1960s it was infeasible to develop medium-sized housing projects because of the parking minimum requirements. And planning specifically means that a lot of property owners were blocked from building higher density on their property. I.e. the car-centric and suburbanite central planners won, have been in control for decades, and their policies actively exacerbate the housing shortage even in urban markets.
In that context, it's absurd for you to act like suburbanites are the brow-beaten victims of city-dwellers telling you how to live. People living in the city who don't own cars are paying higher housing costs because of planing policies that demand that developers build more parking, or disallow multi-unit projects. It's the car-folk who are telling everyone else how to live, and have been for decades. The city-residents are also subsidizing the road construction and maintenance and the less efficient emergency services for suburbs in our counties, and the whole planet has to deal with the higher carbon footprint.
For you to frame this as all about individuals just happening to prefer driving and living in suburbs is disingenuous when the policy problems are _all about_ car-centric policies _forcing_ unnecessary constraints onto people. The LA guy in the article that wanted to open a deli but spent 6 figures and multiple years blocked over showing that he was meeting the parking requirements, and then giving up -- why is his desire to open a business less important than your desire to drive and have ample parking wherever you go? Suburban drivers are not the victims here; they are the problem.
The reason why suburbia historically dictate how the city center is built in the US is pretty clear too. I hate this, but this was a race issue. Now that rich (white guys) reinvested the city center, i guess we'll see policy changes and less parking.
> But in the alternate world where we didn't design for cars first, you'd be more used to other forms of transit, and a lot of things would be closer together.
That was the second alternate universe scenario. You can make different tradeoffs, and that's one of them. I for one, would not prefer either of the alternate-universe tradeoffs I mentioned, and I know I'm not alone or even unusual in that preference.
This was basically the argument of overbearing planners in the 50s and 60s who carved up walk-able American cities with urban highways. The results were pretty disastrous and don't really need to be expanded upon here.
Thats a bold claim to make so axiomatically. Disastrous in what regard? Why do you feel like you don't need to expand? What is this seemingly obviously utopian vision you have that the greatest civil engineering minds of the 20th century failed to comprehend? How precisely would you have handle the competing needs of the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors of arguably the largest developed country (by sq miles of developed land) in the world?
It doesn't feel like such a bold claim to me. Dividing neighborhoods (i.e. redlining) lead to ghettos, inner city violence, white flight, etc., Today there is barely any remnant of the middle class in major urban areas and more traffic than ever. City planners (and policy makers) are not civil engineers.
> Disastrous in what regard? Why do you feel like you don't need to expand? What is this seemingly obviously utopian vision you have that the greatest civil engineering minds of the 20th century failed to comprehend
It's a bit surprising this is news/debatable to some, but here it goes:
* Traffic is very heavy on those urban highways, making them highly inefficient in transporting people, their main objective; they result in massive amounts of time wasted
* The neighborhoods bulldozed for those urban highways, or near them, suffered immensely. Of course this being the US we're talking about, it was disproportionately poorer and "non-white" communities that suffered, as well as historic/picturesque parts (e.g. some US cities have highways on waterfronts which are super nice places to have as parks).
Ugly, noisy, polluting highways that wall off the undesirables while also being shit at their main task? Yes, urban highways were generally a failure.
I'll grant everything up until your last sentence. The point I was trying to make was "what better idea do you have"? "urban highways were generally a failure" compared to what? The US has the unique problem of being both big and developed. The only country that could claim the same is China, and only for the last couple of decades. Europe, even as an entire region does not compare. Too much of the US is car dependent to then suddenly change things once you enter a city. That would just cause even more issues. So you either need a way to scale up to the US, or, as frustrating and unsexy as it might be, deal with the fact that cars are the best way to scale down to the Urban Environment.
The US is car dependent specifically because of the choice the government made to move people out of cities. Aggressively subsidizing suburban development and infrastructure was an intentional top down choice. No market would have ever supported the bond backed creep of development out further and further into the suburbs.
Precisely what you see now are wealthy cities (outside of the sunbelt) tearing down old and crumbling urban highways like the Embarcadero in SF and poor cities like Baltimore being stuck with 83 which it can neither afford to maintain or tear down. In the case of 83 it cut right through a thriving working class neighborhood called Old Town which is now abandoned and little more than a skid row. Whereas the neighborhoods around the water that were slated for razing for highway construction but spared are the most thriving neighborhoods in the city. Urban highways were always a giveaway to people who fled to the suburbs at the expense of people who did not. They involved monstrous acts of government takings through imminent domain and eradicated the wealth of generations of people who had their property stolen with only token compensation. And now in the case of Baltimore, no only were multiple neighborhoods destroyed, but the schools that remained near the highway have worse performance which has been repeatedly linked to air pollution from the highway.
My better idea was for the government not to steal peoples' homes and businesses to build highways for people it also subsidized to live elsewhere. This create a double drag on the economies of American cities by depriving them of tax revenue and destroying economic activity.
> The US is car dependent specifically because of the choice the government made to move people out of cities.
My grandpa told me about this. Government troops driving him and his family out of their tenement apartment at bayonet point. Marching them, weeping, to a tract home in a suburb with a car in the garage. No one wanted to go, and they all wept for weeks. My grandma was home-bound for years because she refused to step into one of those infernal automobiles, and government forces had bombed all the trolleys. The 1950s was a a very traumatic time for America.
You know eminent domain for highways and “slum” clearing were real things that happened? There were literally bulldozers crushing peoples’ homes in some cases. And as for the slim clearing in NYC, people weren’t driven anywhere the government just told them to fuck off.
But the policies I’m referring to are around federal home lending programs that only lent money for suburban developments, the construction of interstate highways, paying for “slum clearing” in the 1950, and so on.
Are there consistent major differences in time spent in transit for public transit / walkable cities VS cars? My understanding is that transit time is often similar, it's only the method that changes. E.g., most people probably aim to live within an hour of work regardless of commute method.
> Are there consistent major differences in time spent in transit for public transit / walkable cities VS cars? My understanding is that transit time is often similar, it's only the method that changes. E.g., most people probably aim to live within an hour of work regardless of commute method.
You're too fixated on one variable. You can decrease transit times by increasing density, but then you're cramming people into sardine cans.
I wonder if you calculated area for sidewalks, corridors in offices and public spaces, maybe public parks. How much wasted space is there dedicated to people to walk or stand in?
> I wonder if you calculated area for sidewalks, corridors in offices and public spaces, maybe public parks. How much wasted space is there dedicated to people to walk or stand in?
How much space have we wasted on transportation infrastructure, period? How many one-bedroom apartments could we build in cities, if there was no way to get in or out of them?
I think that's an important question that The Atlantic magazine needs to commission a long article about. Preferably one written in a self-righteous, judgemental tone.
Much less. You can verify it by checking population density in American vs European cities. That's despite the fact European cities usually don't build as high as American ones.
It's interesting to read that discussion from a couple months ago. There are comments that are literally being cut & paste from each discussion to the next, that's how often this exact same car-hating discussion plays out on HN.
At this point we could just turn ChatGPT loose and it could probably generate the entire discussion.
Starting the article with the false equivalence of housing space to parking space is ridiculous.
Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing/sewer, telecom etc.
Parking requires either gravel or gravel with asphalt on top.
Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?
Starting the article with the false equivalence of housing space to parking space is ridiculous.
Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing/sewer, telecom etc.
So do houses built further away. Do we want houses to be more close or not? What about corner shops?
Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?
No, I do not want to live any closer to anyone else. I want a house with a yard to plant the seeds I want to grow and do the things I want to do. The quality of the fruit at even upscale places like Central Market is absolute dogshit compared to what I can grow in my backyard. Nobody who has only ever had figs from a market or grocery store has ever eaten a good fig.
I do not want to live in a sad concrete box in a city somewhere, and my quality of life matters more to me than someone else's communal pipe dreams. I had a rural upbringing. Cities are nice to visit but they give me anxiety.
> People who like living in cities don't like cars
Some people who like living in some cities don't like cars. Try that schtick in Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, or New Orleans and see how far that gets you.
That's a tautology, and doesn't really address the point. Europeans also own a lot of cars, despite having cities much older than the modern automobile. Maybe cars have a use case that isn't easily addressed with public transit.
This seems to be like looking at a CPU die and commenting how inefficient it is to have so many on die transistors devoted to cache.
The truth is you need a place to put people (and data in the CPU world) while they are going about their lives and moving from place to place.
To move from place to place, it seems the average American prefers their car, since it generally runs on their timetable, and they do not have to share personal space with strangers.
And it is not just an American thing. If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.
Go where you want (99.99% of places where there is a building there is road), when you want and carry with you 0 to 80,000lbs of stuff at a mile a minute. People who are into doing stuff and going places like that. Freedom, as they say.
Total freedom 100% of the time, except when anyone needs to get to roughly the same place within a 2 hour window of anyone else going in approximately the same direction.
The fact is that until somewhat recently cars were very inexpensive compared to the income of most Americans.
Cars in Europe are a bit more expensive, and a lot more expensive in the third world. But in everywhere we always saw the same thing, as soon as people could buy a car, they would buy one.
And once someone has a car, they would also tend to move further to bigger places. Most people outside HN bubble like cars and their convenience.
> Most people outside... like cars and their convenience
Everyone loves [the first order effects of] cars. Climate control, directly to where you need to go, whenever suits you, for a high upfront, but low ongoing cost.
Everyone fucking hates the second order effects (see: literally anybodys take on traffic). Climate change, more danger to everyone around them (from pedestrians to motorcyclists to other drivers), noise pollution, and air pollution from tires and exhaust. Everyone likes them, typically right up to when they aren't the driver [0]
[0] Some gearheads break this rule, but I think nearly all of them would agree that requiring the average person to maintain and drive their car isn't great, considering the average driver's skillset.
Which ironically just generates more car use, because car drivers male 1-1 associations between people and cars and congestion, and then use their cars to get away from people.
Somehow, not owning a car, I rarely feel like there's too many people around, perhaps unless it's peak tourist season; I just associate the miserable parts with cars alone rather than people in-general. In fact, it's almost always a positive contribution to my day-to-day life. But when I seldom borrow a car, I remember why they feel this way.
In dense urban cores, I think people (to the extent that they are able) can and will self select for what they prefer. IMO urban cores should be fairly hostile to cars, in order to maintain space efficiency and work well for the largest quantity of people. If you optimize an urban core for cars, nobody has a good time. If you optimize it for throughput, at least people walking, biking, and taking trains/subways can have a good time. It's just a utility argument, but that's where policy needs to step in to nudge us away from a local minimum of every individual city dweller wanting their own SUV.
There is endless suburban sprawl in the US that does accommodate cars, and people that feel the need to drive a massive vehicle are welcome there.
And this is coming from someone owning 7 cars living out in the sticks. But when I did live in Seattle the train and bike infrastructure made the city so much more livable when working downtown.
> If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.
Urban planning in these places will naturally cap car ownership, i.e. in PRC cities have 0.5 - 1 parking spaces per car vs 3-6 in US. Ownership is not going to explode to the point of replicating comparable problems of car centric urban design. It comes with it's own downsides of course.
> To move from place to place, it seems the average American prefers their car
I’m sorry but I really hate this argument. In most places in the US it’s impossible to use anything but a car to get around. It’s not that most of these articles want to ban cars, most are just trying get public transit/biking/walking as a second option.
You can’t have only one option then walk around saying “well I guess Americans really prefer this option, we shouldn’t give them any other options”.
> And it is not just an American thing. If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.
This is, as usual a thing in degrees. The number of US cars owned sits at 96-100% of the drive-able population. China is at ~30%. India is ~10%. A commenter mentions Europe as having “a lot of cars” but a quick eyeball shows that most European countries have roughly 1/3 fewer cars than America. These aren’t trivial differences that you can just handwave away.
It's actually loathsome how bad urban planning infrastructure is in most of the U.S and Canada. It's deliberately so bad that in many cases, even in small towns, it makes more sense to get in your car (truck) than to walk to the next store over.
I always wondered if it was possible for a company to just buy up a bunch of land and develop it however they wanted. If I recall, Google wanted to purchase land north of the 101 in Mountain View and put a giant bubble over the entire thing [1].
Not that I particularly trust Google to do a great job, but interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
Planned communities are definitely a thing, and have been tried many times. As I recall, they mostly end up as failures. It's difficult to design a utopia and have many other people than yourself agree.
Yeah kind of, but you have the most freedom when you do it in the middle of nowhere; Disney had a wide berth in Florida for example. It's pretty hard to do such things in already built-up areas.
Here's the model from coal "company towns" in the late 1800s/early 1900s: build town close to mine claim, far from any other town. Build company store in town. Fill it with necessities with huge markups. Offer credit for store items to employees. On payday (monthly), all credit owed to company store is taken from wages before you are given a paycheck. BTW, employees don't get paid an hourly rate. They get paid by how much coal they mine, and the company used fake weights when measuring how much coal you loaded each day to make it look like you loaded less than you did.
That's the whole scenario behind the song "Sixteen Tons". "Load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go. I owe my life to the company store."
Parking spaces seem to be tiny these days. In the 1970s Grandmother drive a Ford Torino it was 17 feet long and over 6 feet wide. The doors were also quite big. It was actually a typical car not unusually big for the time. A Toyota Camry is about 16' x 6 feet but it seems to be so much smaller like 3 feet rather than 1 foot. I think it felt different in the 1970s because the parking spaces were bigger.
Me, I would love to see cars disappear tomorrow, but we have issues that is feeding each other, keeping transportation in the US static.
Public transportation in the US is pretty much non-existent, except maybe in and around New York City. In the area where I use to live, public transportation now is rather dangerous to the people using it.
I rode a bicycle to work for and lite errands for more than 30 years, and am probably still alive because of that. But I have been hit by cars more times then I can count (no serious injuries). And I was in rather bicycle friendly area. I spent some time in the Detroit area 15 years ago, the area I was in, bicycling there is a form of suicide. As I said before, Montreal, to me, is a bicycle commuter paradise.
So what can people do in the US ?
I believe right now, the only way out of this automobile mess is to raise gas prices to $10 per Gallon. Then people and the Government may start changing, otherwise we are driving straight into a worldwide catastrophe.
Please for the love of god stop with the "public transportation is dangerous" narrative. The numbers dont bare it out at all. The same goes for an increase in violent crime in most cities (unless your base case is COVID).
I said were I use to live, not everywhere. It is not crime but people being killed by accident on the trains due to upkeep being ignored over the past 40 years.
One thing people that are against changes to the urban environments miss is that the desire is not for cars to be banned, just deprioritized. The aim is to reduce the need for personal vehicles, not eliminate them entirely. There are 289MM cars in the US (.87 cars per person), in The Netherlands there are 8.7MM cars (0.5 cars per person). Even with such a "small" numeric difference, the effects are drastic to livability.
Now compare the area of the two countries and the population densities. Now compare the variance in climate across Netherlands vs. the United States. Now compare the variation in altitude within Netherlands vs the variation in altitude in the United States. Now compare when the cities in Netherlands were founded and formed vs the age of cities in America. Are you being intentionally absurd for some reason I'm not seeing?
The size of a country is irrelevant to this discussion: it is about urban centers. The density of cities in both countries is relevant, and of course they are different: that's precisely what the conversation is about.
I remain unconvinced about the argument around climate: when it is too cold to walk less than 15 minutes, roads are also unsafe to drive.
What does altitude have to do with anything? San Francisco has plenty of hills, yet people still manage to move around by bike.
When a city was founded has little to do with what to do with them going forward. Many american cities were very walkable, and then urban freeways where built in them, displacing people and disconnecting neighborhoods. Amsterdam itself was very car-centric in the 70's, yet they are now considered the biking capital of the world. Cities are living organisms, that can and should change over time.
If you don't see how being able to walk when you need milk helps with having a good quality of life then I don't know what to tell you.
Edit: the comparison is relevant because it gives us a good idea of what the lower bound of what it realistically means to downsize the usage of cars in urban environments. It's a very clear example of a place where half the population (which includes children!) has a car, but cities are entirely navigable by foot, public transport or bikes.
Climate variance works both ways, and I'm not sure which side is more important.
For example harsh winters and big temperature differences make maintenance of motorways significantly more expansive compared to railways and walking paths. Hence you have trans-siberian rail but no trans-siberian motorway network.
Also Netherlands did car-centric design in 50s. Then they stopped and reverted it because they realized it sucked.
Why would you seek to change the US vs. relocating your person to The Netherlands though? They're both impactful and costly, but the former is almost impossible while the latter well within the abilities of a motivated actor.
When you understand how quickly the Netherlands changed (it used to be just as car-centric at the US), you might change your view about what's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnFYOvcOn_E
I believe the GP is arguing against change because they like the status quo. It is not "go there to get what you want", it's "go there so you don't bother me".
People always suggest this ("if you like it better in Europe, why don't you move there!"), and it's such a facetious argument.
1. All my friends/family/professional networks are based in the US. Do I need to convince all of them to move with me to the Netherlands?
2. I would need to uproot my children from their schooling and friends and move them to a foreign country.
3. I would have to get a job in NL--perhaps doable for me, but what if you don't have in-demand tech skills and don't already speak Dutch?
4. I would have to work in NL for five continuous years before being eligible for permanent residency.
These hurdles are indeed not totally insurmountable for some people, but to pretend like it's a viable option for anyone who wants to live in more functional cities is silly. Why can't we just try to make our cities better? Look around at which cities in the world are working better, and learn from them!
$10/gal gasoline is not the answer, because it's a regressive tax that just prices the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder out of the transportation they need to get to work. It also adversely affects businesses that can't use public transit, like technical service people with tools and materials, and delivery drivers. The actual answer is to build a comprehensive mass transit system that makes driving unnecessary for most people. Trying to force people to use an inadequate public transit system by making the alternative unaffordable is just a shitty thing to do to people.
High gas prices are explicitly why I take transit and avoid driving. I have a car, but it works out to $10 CAD every day to drive to work - so I make the effort to get up a little earlier and take the train when I can.
"It's regressive and has an undue effect on the poor" and "It's moderately effective" are not mutually exclusive. That was a major reason public transit bounced back so fast in the Lower Mainland of BC, Canada - because driving is decidedly not cheap. Moreover, high gas prices are something I endorse, loudly and often, because it subsidises transit, and how much more expensive it makes the biggest (most dangerous to pedestrians) vehicles.
Still need to drive, and don't want to pay an arm and a leg? Skip the Silverado, get a hatchback or moderately-sized SUV or van. Need to haul your boat (or 40-foot camper instead of a tent)? Sounds like an expensive hobby - and anyone who's owned a boat can attest to that.
Can't you put fuel as expense when you have a small business? Then only individuals would pay that tax, not businesses.
> The actual answer is to build a comprehensive mass transit system that makes driving unnecessary for most people
Car-centric design makes building such a system hard in many ways. You have to tackle both side of the equation at once - encourage public transport and discourage cars. Otherways you build it and nobody uses it.
Your last statement misses the point. I doubt raising the price of gas to $10 per gallon would change care usage all that much (although it would likely greatly increase the pickup speed for electric vehicles) because demand for vehicle transport is very inelastic because the actual problem is zoning and land use making cars the only viable option. Make a bunch of simple changes to zoning and land use laws and sit back and in a couple decades you would be surprised how drastic the change can be because that's 20 years of all construction (including road repair maintenance) pushing the shape of the city in a direction that supports a multitude of transport options and ultimately makes the city a lot more vibrantly human rather than loud, dreary car based annoyances.
One thing I've been encouraged by in the last 5-or-so years is parking lots getting covered by solar panels. All the local school parking lots in my area are covered by solar panels now. Most of the Walmarts. Most of the hospitals. And I recall Disney is/was covering their parking lots with solar panels, too. I realize this isn't necessarily a solution to parking lot sprawl, but I like to think it's taking a bad situation and getting at least something positive from it.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] thread9' by 18' (162 sq ft.) is on the large end of parking space sizes. A couple living in a 400 sq ft. tiny house doesn't even make that true, and most houses aren't tiny houses. For more normal 2000 sq ft. houses, you'd need an average of more than 12 people living in each one to make it true.
For example this would include all the parking spaces at schools, offices, walmarts, etc.
You are to your house as your car is to your driveway. You don't dig up your driveway and bring it with you every time you drive somewhere.
But they're counting the parking space at the office and not the office space there.
But I'll do you one better. If you work from home you don't need the parking space or the office space.
...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive. My "empty" house still has utility. My family could be using it. It is storing all of my possessions. It is a source of comfort for knowing I have a place to go to rest.
Anyways, the productivity footprint of shared spaces is very different from those that are exclusively mine, and spaces that are exclusively mine are very limited...essentially my home and my car. I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
You don't just need a desk. You need a desk in addition to your share of a series of hallways that go to your desk, an elevator, a staircase, conference rooms, a lunch room etc.
More to the point, even if your desk is small, it's not literally zero, but that's how it's being accounted for.
> and it has usually been an open one at that.
The building's parking lot will generally be sized according to size of the space (i.e. the number of desks), so this also means that you don't have your own parking space.
> ...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive.
If you did have a house, it would commonly be in an area zoned to require each plot to have an acre of land. An acre is more than 40,000 square feet. Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
> I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
The thing preventing this is the zoning de facto requiring each house in the suburbs to have 35,000 square feet of grass.
All of which are shared throughout the workday, unless someone hired me to be the only one in the building, which seems like a poor decision. The parking spot I take is mine for the day though.
> Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for. Tell a person about to have diarrhea in the middle of a mall that the bathroom is out of service, and panic will surely ensue.
> The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
Ah yeah, and dumping 100 million barrels of oil off the coast of California will be totally irrelevant because the ocean is very, very big. The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic. But I love how you calculate the relevancy/irrelevancy of such massive changes in the snap of a finger. I really hope you don't ever estimate anything of actual value.
Which is why you account for your share of them, which isn't zero.
> It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for.
The size of the plot is extremely relevant to how much housing could be built on it in the alternative.
> The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic.
This is completely the opposite of where most parking spaces actually are. Millions of them are attached to suburban homes, which is about as far from a condensed place with a lot of traffic as you can get without actually being in a corn field. Many more are attached to big box stores and strip malls in low density areas. None of these matter to what happens in a city or what city-adjacent land is zoned to allow, except insofar as some of the areas are only low density because that's all they're zoned for. But if they were rezoned then they wouldn't be parking lots anymore.
... the offices, schools, stores, etc is much larger than just a house. All the heating cooling, plumbing, etc and it sits empty most of the time (and you have to walk/drive past those regardless of their parking infrastructure). I fully get the point they are making. The thing the grandparent was talking about is that the argument could just as easily apply to the building spaces themselves rather than only the parking. Given this and the host of other categorical differences in parking vs occupied structures does in my view make the comparison "absurd". In general, this article is using a lot of numbers to make arguments that are really emotionally based.
For example, if I go to Chipotle for lunch, I will go and park my car, go inside, get in line, order, blah.
My car, and everyone else's car will take up 9x18 units. If it's busy, you could have a line 10 to 15 people deep. That's 1620 sq ft of parking for people who will be occupying about 360 sq ft on the inside. (Assuming 10 people all taking up a 6x6 block).
As you have pointed out it could also means "The car in your driveway has 11 theorethical empty parking spots built for it, maybe there is an overallocation of resources"
Some relevant resource might be: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... from Not Just Bikes based on research from Strongtowns
Buses need roads too, and train tracks are just as big as roads but less versatile.
And delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles, etc. We certainly had roads before we had cars.
Road that connects 3 biggest cities in Netherlands has 3 lanes in each direction: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1822053,4.5947627,3a,75y,47....
Your average road in Netherlands looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1968565,4.592548,3a,75y,58.8...
You cannot directly translate between countries with such difference in population density obviously, but if anything - the more people USA has - the bigger gains are there to be realized by switching to more efficient mode of transport.
Mind you there's some cars in the videos, but they aren't any bigger than the horse-drawn carriages that roads had been accommodating well before that.
Parking lots and on street parking is a tremendous waste of space (and they're ugly to boot) and forces EVERYTHING to be more spread out.
That's why I said keep 2 lanes (1 in each direction). Anything more is optional and should be counted as effect of car-centric development model.
> train tracks are just as big as roads but less versatile
1 railway track in each direction gives you more throughput than any multi-lane motorway possibly could.
One at home, one at work, one at the grocery store, one at the cafe. Some of those are shared, but it is entirely believable that we have more paved parking than we have housing
"America has eight parking spaces for every car. Here’s how cities are rethinking that land"
Wow.
If you add more cars without adding at least 2 parking spaces per car you almost surely get less usage or cars stuck in traffic.
Car infrastructure is very expensive, see https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
Further, we are counting just parking at the residence, let alone the combined shared parking elsewhere. Plenty of roads has as much parking on either side as there is actual roadway
If you go to a place that isn't driving dependent and you'll see that the main factor for "better walkability" is namely "places are a few miles closer because you don't have to walk through 20 parking lots to get there". It's pretty eye opening.
That's not really the main factor. I would say the main factor is medium to high density, mixed use areas that have business friendly regulations and/or wealthy residents/tourists. There aren't tons of large parking lots in west Philly, but I wouldn't give it a high walkability score given all the vacancies (where are you going to walk to?) and safety concerns (both in infrastructure and crime terms).
Not being 90% empty space is a necessary condition for walkability.
Everywhere I go out has parking. I need to pick something up at the hardware store and grocery store today. I'm not worried about the parking at either. Usually, there's plenty of empty spots at most locations I'll drive to.
The few times I can't find a parking spot is around meal times at places with already limited parking.
And I just remembered, I have a parking pass for a local stadium for games during that sport's season. That's another dedicated spot for my car. I believe right now, both stadiums have empty parking lots. I drive by a minor league baseball field every morning that has an empty lot.
It's not just about the parking at one place, it's about all the places created so you can park your car. Parking has a lot of slack built into it. Most places have more square footage dedicated to parking than to the structure itself.
*I don't have an assigned parking spot or anything like that, it's just that we have a private lot only for use of employees. So there's always going to be a spot somewhere for me.
Although I'm not sure what the author's point is by using that comparison, aside from being an emotional hook. The resources, needs/wants, etc for these are quite different. Same thing for the statement about 3-car garages vs 1 bedroom apartments - it mostly comes down to preferences and how those manifest in the market, politics, and other aspects of life.
They don't seem to understand that reducing cars in cities and dense areas doesn't stop you from driving your lifted 19 foot long bro truck in the suburbs.
You misunderstand. It's an alternate universe headline.
But in the alternate world where we didn't design for cars first, you'd be more used to other forms of transit, and a lot of things would be closer together. In our universe, where most businesses are surrounded by large parking lots, whole cities get sprawled out and everyone's travel times are inflated (regardless of mode of travel).
You don't need an alternate world as you can just look at history. Then we would have to consider why the people chose to adopt and promote cars to bring us into this age.
Come on, dude. A suburban home with a yard isn't a "nightmare," they're actually very desirable to a lot of people. They market themselves. Of course, there's a set of wannabe central planners that dislike that preference because it conflicts with their "vision" for how the plebs should live, so they try to deny that truth.
And those are the communities which were invented and built by central planning, by people saying: "these businesses all need to meet a large parking minimum, and these areas are _only_ allowed to be single family homes, and this other area can _only_ be commercial, and these arterials will then need to have 45 mph speed limits so drivers can get from their homes to the store in a reasonable period, and since they're going fast the lanes should be wide so I guess we won't have room for a bike lane, and only one side of the street can have a sidewalk, and hey what do you know, that really fits with our intention to not put crosswalks except at those intersections every 1/2 mile ...".
Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like. The design of the suburb _coerces_ people to drive by threatening the lives of cyclists and pedestrians, and invariably having poor or slow public transit.
Those aren't nightmares either. Or rather, they're only nightmares if your idea of a nightmare is "alternatives to urban living exist."
Also the selective use of "cookie cutter" as a pejorative is interesting. Everything is cookie cutter, especially dense urban development (e.g. all the rail-adjacent apartment complexes I've seen built in the last decade or two). But of course it's only a problem when we're talking about the trendy-to-hate suburbs.
Almost all those other requirements you complain about follow directly from a desire to live in a quiet neighborhood, and the rest are almost certainly a function of traditional American excessive cost-cutting (e.g. the sidewalks on one side, which are not universal). If people didn't actually want to live in quiet neighborhoods, they'd have stayed in the cities.
> Suburbs don't happen without planning, and don't pretend it's only city-dwellers that have a vision for what society should look like.
You missed my point: suburbs are desirable, but your urban advocate central planners lie and claim they aren't (e.g. "they're nightmares," people only moved there because of "marketing", etc. that have been repeated in this thread).
In that context, it's absurd for you to act like suburbanites are the brow-beaten victims of city-dwellers telling you how to live. People living in the city who don't own cars are paying higher housing costs because of planing policies that demand that developers build more parking, or disallow multi-unit projects. It's the car-folk who are telling everyone else how to live, and have been for decades. The city-residents are also subsidizing the road construction and maintenance and the less efficient emergency services for suburbs in our counties, and the whole planet has to deal with the higher carbon footprint.
For you to frame this as all about individuals just happening to prefer driving and living in suburbs is disingenuous when the policy problems are _all about_ car-centric policies _forcing_ unnecessary constraints onto people. The LA guy in the article that wanted to open a deli but spent 6 figures and multiple years blocked over showing that he was meeting the parking requirements, and then giving up -- why is his desire to open a business less important than your desire to drive and have ample parking wherever you go? Suburban drivers are not the victims here; they are the problem.
That was the second alternate universe scenario. You can make different tradeoffs, and that's one of them. I for one, would not prefer either of the alternate-universe tradeoffs I mentioned, and I know I'm not alone or even unusual in that preference.
It's a bit surprising this is news/debatable to some, but here it goes:
* Traffic is very heavy on those urban highways, making them highly inefficient in transporting people, their main objective; they result in massive amounts of time wasted
* The neighborhoods bulldozed for those urban highways, or near them, suffered immensely. Of course this being the US we're talking about, it was disproportionately poorer and "non-white" communities that suffered, as well as historic/picturesque parts (e.g. some US cities have highways on waterfronts which are super nice places to have as parks).
Ugly, noisy, polluting highways that wall off the undesirables while also being shit at their main task? Yes, urban highways were generally a failure.
Precisely what you see now are wealthy cities (outside of the sunbelt) tearing down old and crumbling urban highways like the Embarcadero in SF and poor cities like Baltimore being stuck with 83 which it can neither afford to maintain or tear down. In the case of 83 it cut right through a thriving working class neighborhood called Old Town which is now abandoned and little more than a skid row. Whereas the neighborhoods around the water that were slated for razing for highway construction but spared are the most thriving neighborhoods in the city. Urban highways were always a giveaway to people who fled to the suburbs at the expense of people who did not. They involved monstrous acts of government takings through imminent domain and eradicated the wealth of generations of people who had their property stolen with only token compensation. And now in the case of Baltimore, no only were multiple neighborhoods destroyed, but the schools that remained near the highway have worse performance which has been repeatedly linked to air pollution from the highway.
My better idea was for the government not to steal peoples' homes and businesses to build highways for people it also subsidized to live elsewhere. This create a double drag on the economies of American cities by depriving them of tax revenue and destroying economic activity.
My grandpa told me about this. Government troops driving him and his family out of their tenement apartment at bayonet point. Marching them, weeping, to a tract home in a suburb with a car in the garage. No one wanted to go, and they all wept for weeks. My grandma was home-bound for years because she refused to step into one of those infernal automobiles, and government forces had bombed all the trolleys. The 1950s was a a very traumatic time for America.
But the policies I’m referring to are around federal home lending programs that only lent money for suburban developments, the construction of interstate highways, paying for “slum clearing” in the 1950, and so on.
But why bother knowing anything about history…
You're too fixated on one variable. You can decrease transit times by increasing density, but then you're cramming people into sardine cans.
Should I hate driving because sometimes my car is filled full of people or items?
How much space have we wasted on transportation infrastructure, period? How many one-bedroom apartments could we build in cities, if there was no way to get in or out of them?
I think that's an important question that The Atlantic magazine needs to commission a long article about. Preferably one written in a self-righteous, judgemental tone.
HN discussion (333 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35395060
At this point we could just turn ChatGPT loose and it could probably generate the entire discussion.
Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing/sewer, telecom etc.
Parking requires either gravel or gravel with asphalt on top.
Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?
Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing/sewer, telecom etc.
So do houses built further away. Do we want houses to be more close or not? What about corner shops?
Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?
Cars happen when systems are built for them.
I do not want to live in a sad concrete box in a city somewhere, and my quality of life matters more to me than someone else's communal pipe dreams. I had a rural upbringing. Cities are nice to visit but they give me anxiety.
People who like living in cities don't like cars. People living outside like them. It's quite easy to enforce tbh.
Some people who like living in some cities don't like cars. Try that schtick in Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, or New Orleans and see how far that gets you.
That's a tautology, and doesn't really address the point. Europeans also own a lot of cars, despite having cities much older than the modern automobile. Maybe cars have a use case that isn't easily addressed with public transit.
They're not static at all.
The truth is you need a place to put people (and data in the CPU world) while they are going about their lives and moving from place to place.
To move from place to place, it seems the average American prefers their car, since it generally runs on their timetable, and they do not have to share personal space with strangers.
And it is not just an American thing. If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.
Cars in Europe are a bit more expensive, and a lot more expensive in the third world. But in everywhere we always saw the same thing, as soon as people could buy a car, they would buy one.
And once someone has a car, they would also tend to move further to bigger places. Most people outside HN bubble like cars and their convenience.
Everyone loves [the first order effects of] cars. Climate control, directly to where you need to go, whenever suits you, for a high upfront, but low ongoing cost.
Everyone fucking hates the second order effects (see: literally anybodys take on traffic). Climate change, more danger to everyone around them (from pedestrians to motorcyclists to other drivers), noise pollution, and air pollution from tires and exhaust. Everyone likes them, typically right up to when they aren't the driver [0]
[0] Some gearheads break this rule, but I think nearly all of them would agree that requiring the average person to maintain and drive their car isn't great, considering the average driver's skillset.
Somehow, not owning a car, I rarely feel like there's too many people around, perhaps unless it's peak tourist season; I just associate the miserable parts with cars alone rather than people in-general. In fact, it's almost always a positive contribution to my day-to-day life. But when I seldom borrow a car, I remember why they feel this way.
There is endless suburban sprawl in the US that does accommodate cars, and people that feel the need to drive a massive vehicle are welcome there.
And this is coming from someone owning 7 cars living out in the sticks. But when I did live in Seattle the train and bike infrastructure made the city so much more livable when working downtown.
Urban planning in these places will naturally cap car ownership, i.e. in PRC cities have 0.5 - 1 parking spaces per car vs 3-6 in US. Ownership is not going to explode to the point of replicating comparable problems of car centric urban design. It comes with it's own downsides of course.
I’m sorry but I really hate this argument. In most places in the US it’s impossible to use anything but a car to get around. It’s not that most of these articles want to ban cars, most are just trying get public transit/biking/walking as a second option.
You can’t have only one option then walk around saying “well I guess Americans really prefer this option, we shouldn’t give them any other options”.
> And it is not just an American thing. If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.
This is, as usual a thing in degrees. The number of US cars owned sits at 96-100% of the drive-able population. China is at ~30%. India is ~10%. A commenter mentions Europe as having “a lot of cars” but a quick eyeball shows that most European countries have roughly 1/3 fewer cars than America. These aren’t trivial differences that you can just handwave away.
Not that I particularly trust Google to do a great job, but interesting thought experiment nonetheless.
[1] - https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/02/23/google-r...
IE Coal company towns and Fordlandia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia
https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-company-town/
That's the whole scenario behind the song "Sixteen Tons". "Load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go. I owe my life to the company store."
https://www.carsized.com is a fun resource to visualise the size evolution - take a far model and see how it's gotten bigger over the years.
Public transportation in the US is pretty much non-existent, except maybe in and around New York City. In the area where I use to live, public transportation now is rather dangerous to the people using it.
I rode a bicycle to work for and lite errands for more than 30 years, and am probably still alive because of that. But I have been hit by cars more times then I can count (no serious injuries). And I was in rather bicycle friendly area. I spent some time in the Detroit area 15 years ago, the area I was in, bicycling there is a form of suicide. As I said before, Montreal, to me, is a bicycle commuter paradise.
So what can people do in the US ?
I believe right now, the only way out of this automobile mess is to raise gas prices to $10 per Gallon. Then people and the Government may start changing, otherwise we are driving straight into a worldwide catastrophe.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/bart-withholding-s...
I remain unconvinced about the argument around climate: when it is too cold to walk less than 15 minutes, roads are also unsafe to drive.
What does altitude have to do with anything? San Francisco has plenty of hills, yet people still manage to move around by bike.
When a city was founded has little to do with what to do with them going forward. Many american cities were very walkable, and then urban freeways where built in them, displacing people and disconnecting neighborhoods. Amsterdam itself was very car-centric in the 70's, yet they are now considered the biking capital of the world. Cities are living organisms, that can and should change over time.
If you don't see how being able to walk when you need milk helps with having a good quality of life then I don't know what to tell you.
Edit: the comparison is relevant because it gives us a good idea of what the lower bound of what it realistically means to downsize the usage of cars in urban environments. It's a very clear example of a place where half the population (which includes children!) has a car, but cities are entirely navigable by foot, public transport or bikes.
For example harsh winters and big temperature differences make maintenance of motorways significantly more expansive compared to railways and walking paths. Hence you have trans-siberian rail but no trans-siberian motorway network.
Also Netherlands did car-centric design in 50s. Then they stopped and reverted it because they realized it sucked.
When you understand how quickly the Netherlands changed (it used to be just as car-centric at the US), you might change your view about what's possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnFYOvcOn_E
1. All my friends/family/professional networks are based in the US. Do I need to convince all of them to move with me to the Netherlands?
2. I would need to uproot my children from their schooling and friends and move them to a foreign country.
3. I would have to get a job in NL--perhaps doable for me, but what if you don't have in-demand tech skills and don't already speak Dutch?
4. I would have to work in NL for five continuous years before being eligible for permanent residency.
These hurdles are indeed not totally insurmountable for some people, but to pretend like it's a viable option for anyone who wants to live in more functional cities is silly. Why can't we just try to make our cities better? Look around at which cities in the world are working better, and learn from them!
Why can't someone want to make where they already are better? Why should someone be expected to accept the status quo?
"It's regressive and has an undue effect on the poor" and "It's moderately effective" are not mutually exclusive. That was a major reason public transit bounced back so fast in the Lower Mainland of BC, Canada - because driving is decidedly not cheap. Moreover, high gas prices are something I endorse, loudly and often, because it subsidises transit, and how much more expensive it makes the biggest (most dangerous to pedestrians) vehicles.
Still need to drive, and don't want to pay an arm and a leg? Skip the Silverado, get a hatchback or moderately-sized SUV or van. Need to haul your boat (or 40-foot camper instead of a tent)? Sounds like an expensive hobby - and anyone who's owned a boat can attest to that.
> The actual answer is to build a comprehensive mass transit system that makes driving unnecessary for most people
Car-centric design makes building such a system hard in many ways. You have to tackle both side of the equation at once - encourage public transport and discourage cars. Otherways you build it and nobody uses it.