The excess of cars in cities is bad enough, but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets.
Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many people are dependent on them. You can't ignore that. There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities, but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. We have to ease toward a situation where their negative impact is reduced. Underground parking in new construction seems like an option, especially in cities like NYC where there is no need fear of scaring off developers. And in the case of NYC, there is precedent that goes back to at least the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, where apartment buildings do, in fact, have underground parking for the building's residents. And I suspect the costs were not huge. In many cases, the "underground parking" is merely basement level or even the ground level.
Can't speak to this everywhere but in Seattle and Portland there is already extensive underground and 1st 2nd floor parking for many of the "4 over 1" style of modern apartments.
Part of the problem with this is that it's so expensive that it cuts into the developers budget leading to less housing being built in medium density areas and larger/taller buildings so to keep the margins up.
Even if you imagine a magic shrinking situation where a car could be shrunk down and put in your pocket like a pokéball there's still the issue that roads in cities don't have the throughput to be able to move all those cars effectively.
If only we had a means of transportation that could efficiently move large quantities of people into dense areas of living.
It would be like a really big car that could fit lots of people. You could then put it on tracks so it had its own right-of-way or even underground.
Oh well, one day we'll figure it out. I'm sure instead what we should be doing is expanding our highways and building more parking lots. It'll fix the problem one day I'm sure of it!
except that one big car is not controlled by you, and you have to schedule your trip around it, rather than have the convenience of any-time availability. Not to mention you can't really carry much onboard.
Your objection is specifically a cultural objection rather than one based on any physical real world issue.
Japan, many european cities, etc are all comfortable with the provision and use of widespread public transport.
Where it's a problem is those locations where people such as the Koch brothers [1] invested 50 years (1970 - present) and tens of millions of dollars to bend both public opinion and state and city representatives against public transport.
It didn't take much to have the land of the free muttering in lock step about freedumb's, liberty, and their right to roll coal.
From a distance it was like watching lemmings march over a cliff [2].
> a cultural objection rather than one based on any physical real world issue.
and this is what i dislike about discourse about public transport.
It is woefully inadequate in the majority of the US. Until the day it is fixed, car will always be a superior mode of transport, but then if car is so often used, there's no public incentive to build out more PT.
And by now, the suburban sprawl has made it such that building out the necessary PT with sufficient quantity and quality to replace cars is prohibitively expensive.
The best solution, imho, is a fleet of auto-driving cars that do not need to be parked, but is available at one's beck and call. Think uber, but is available 24/7 on demand.
I don't understand what it is you dislike about the discourse. But to address your point, the United existed before cars. Post WWII, we took very intentional steps to dismantle all the trams and passenger rail we had (we had so so many trains), and to design suburbs that require cars. And by "we," I mean government officals and all levels of governments, along with the wealthy capitalists (car manufacturers could sell more cars if there are more places that require cars, and railroad tycoons made more money in freight than passengers).
Infrastructure is built upon intentional decisions with agendas, not following laws of nature or something.
Do people not have to schedule around 15-30 minute drives? How is that any different from “I can be there in 15 if I make the S3 train otherwise about 25 since I’ll catch the 86 bus that runs shortly after”? There really is no defense at all for being car dependent. Literally every other country in the world proves you don’t need them.
> Literally every other country in the world proves you don’t need them.
Please, tell us one country in the world that doesn't need cars.
Many, may be less dependent on cars than the U.S. . But no country is independent of cars. Using such hyperbole doesn't help the conversions. It just deepens the trenches.
> Do people not have to schedule around 15-30 minute drives?
That's not the same kind of scheduling. You can miss a bus, and be forced to wait for the next one (which will at 15 minutes minimum), but your car departs exactly when you're ready to leave whenever that is. After that, then you add the 15-30 minutes drive time (or more for a bus, if it's not an express bus and makes intermediate stops or if it takes an indirect route for your itinerary). This is so obvious I'm surprised I have to point it out.
Where I live, the subway comes every 3-5 minutes, like clockwork. Is that really so inconvenient?
On the rare occasions you have more stuff than you can carry, you can just pay for delivery. It's far cheaper than the ongoing total-cost-of-ownership of a car.
> Where I live, the subway comes every 3-5 minutes, like clockwork.
aka, you've just qualified your use of public transport with the condition that you would not ever need to wait more than 3-5mins. What if you had to wait 30mins or an hour?
In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.
I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.
>In the majority of cities in the US, esp. slightly more rural areas or smaller towns, this is clockwork public transit is highly unlikely to be the norm.
Right, because the US is broken and doesn't know how to do this stuff properly. It's like complaining how Eritrea isn't able to provide efficient public transit.
> I wouldn't live in such a shitty, broken, mismanaged shithole. Properly managed places are able to provide good public transit.
So you don't want to live somewhere near forests or lakes. Somewhere, where is still some for of nature present. You only want to live downtown in a major city. Let me guess, you don't have children. Because many people change their opinion about that when they become parents.
> ...but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help. It can be more expensive, especially for taller buildings, but it would eliminate the eyesore and recoup the valuable urban real estate and potentially free up the streets.
Not just more expensive, but enormously more expensive.
The aesthetic priorities of a video game probably don't map well to real life.
A quick web search puts local underground parking garages including necessary street alterations at about 1.7x the cost of surface parking, per parking square.
Not sure if that falls within the purview of enormously more expensive.
And the real cost of building parking in a residential building isn't the cost of the concrete and painted lines -- but in the opportunity cost of not being able to build / sell more units in the space occupied by cars.
> And the real cost of building parking in a residential building isn't the cost of the concrete and painted lines -- but in the opportunity cost of not being able to build / sell more units in the space occupied by cars.
It's obviously not that simple, because the US isn't a place where no one wants a car but everyone is somehow forced into getting one. I wouldn't live in a residential building with no space a car, and I'm not alone. I'd imagine that most buildings like that just create an externality, where the residents use parking elsewhere.
Maybe for construction, if the building is designed around the need for parking. Parking garage operations are expensive. Self park doesn’t generate enough yield in a dense urban environment. You need to stack cars in there, maybe offer valet contracts to hotels, etc.
Even in cheap city, urban monthly covered parking is around $150.
Just don't have any mandatory minimums, and allow developers to choose to add the underground parking if it makes sense for the building's use case.
> There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities
There's a lot wrong with cars in cities. They choke up the streets with traffic congestion and the sheer geometry problem of them means that it's impossible for even a small fraction of people to get around via cars in a large dense city like NYC.
To do a reality check of a big large scale and expensive solution to a particular problem it often helps to observe existing solutions, and how they fair in city (or state) policy.
For parking this solution is public transit, and in many cities in USA and Europe it fairs rather badly. Bus systems are often underfunded and cities quite often settle for a minimal viable system, a system so dismal that it only marginally reduces parking proliferation.
A policy of underground parking—being infinitely more expensive—will realistically yield an even worse outcome than the public transit policies of most cities today.
Increasing the amount of parking spaces seems to me like it would further exacerbate the problem of car centrism. Houston will often preach “just one more highway lane. That’ll reduce congestion” but it does the opposite. If we want to reduce the amount of parking, we need to make the alternatives to driving more attractive. That is - investing in public transit, bike paths, and cities that allow anyone to walk no more than 20 minutes to a grocery store.
> but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation.
This is exactly what happened in the Netherlands, but the US is a wildly corrupt country with very little in the way of actual representative democracy, which is the primary reason why this (locally) correct. In many other places, it is in fact possible to achieve these outcomes through state power.
It also took 40+ years. After WW2, NL was on a course to model American cities. There are some places that still harken back to that time. Dutch people also really like to drive, which nobody seems to talk about!
But now the trains have been privatized, the ticket prices jacked up, and gas taxes are absolutely bonkers right now. If we’re lucky, maybe the trains can be brought back into more direct government control in the next decade but I doubt it.
Good public transportation and city design is only enforceable through laws on the books. Dutch city planning in some ways is non-negotiable, but very fungible in others. We must stay vigilant if we want to see our small corner of the world continue to flourish and be a beacon of hope to North American and other western societies.
Ask every Dutchman to look at British rail and ask themselves “do we want that?”. If the answer is no, they’d better fight to reverse rail privatization
>the US is a wildly corrupt country with very little in the way of actual representative democracy, which is the primary reason why this (locally) correct
While your assertion about a lack of actual representative democracy may have truth to it, in my view, most Americans hate public transit and really like cars, despite all the clear negatives that come with them (and which those people deny). There are great cities in the world that are walkable and have excellent public transit: I live in one of them myself. But in my observation, most Americans simply don't want this kind of lifestyle, and in fact don't believe it exists. So as far as car-centric planning goes, I think that Americans really are getting what they vote for.
I know you prefaced your argument with saying it's your view and all but that's just not based in reality. Americans want alternatives. It's just too bad they can't afford lobbyists to agitate for those policy preferences. https://www.filesforprogress.org/memos/gnd-for-transit-polli...
I suspect maybe part of it is a generational thing. In my circles at least a lot of my peers get actual anxiety while driving. It's certainly the most dangerous thing Americans regularly do.
My view is based in reality, yours isn't. Just because a small minority of 20-something hipsters want bikeable cities doesn't mean most Americans do. They don't. This has nothing to do with "lobbyists" and everything to do with the voting public, just like Trump was not elected by lobbyists, but instead by half the voting public who supported his repulsive views.
Well no, Trump was elected by a majority of the Electoral College. The majority of the public vote went to the other candidate. Which is sort of the point, that the US is not actually democratic in some important ways which influence policy decisions.
>The majority of the public vote went to the other candidate.
No, it didn't. Hillary didn't get a majority, she got about 48%. Trump got about 46%. There was not a significant difference between the two, and roughly half the American public voted for Trump.
It's so weird how every single time I write about how roughly half the American public voted for that turd, people like you come out of the woodwork to try to insinuate that Trump was elected by some vanishingly small minority. Why is that?
Because you're lying about the claim being made. It is correct to say that Trump was elected by a minority of the total votes cast. It would be incorrect to say that he was elected by "some vanishingly small minority", but you're the only one saying that. Being elected by a minority is sufficient to sustain the claim that an institution is antidemocratic, particularly in an otherwise simple-plurality voting system. I'm sorry if there's some reality there you don't like.
If Hillary had won, it would have also been "antidemocratic" according to your definition. So would you have protested that too? No one was going to get greater than 50% of the popular vote in that election.
Apparently there's some reality there you don't like either.
You Americans are seriously lunatic reality-deniers. Close to 50% of the voters vote for Trump, but because it's not mathematically 50%, you dismiss it as a not-significant part of the electorate. You liberals are no better than the people who stormed the Capitol; you're just as unbelieving of reality as they are.
You seem confused. It's pretty common in English, particularly when discussing simple plurality voting, to use "majority" to indicate "plurality" instead of absolute majority. It would also be possible to claim that a vote is antidemocratic absent an arbitrarily chosen supermajority, but that's not being advanced here. I decline further semantic arguments as being non-substantive, as well as puerile. Your inventions about my character are nakedly intended to be offensive; probably you shouldn't post like that here.
indeed, how bizarre that saying "half" (not "roughly half", as you are now saying), a literally factually untrue statement, garners responses pointing out that it is.
are you sure you're on the right forum for you? This community generally values accuracy over flamebait.
"but I do wonder whether underground parking would at least help"
Our local Tesco (Yeovil, Somerset, UK) had a fairly large car park, and a rather strange split level two storey thing at the periphery which seems to have been designed and built for dodgy purposes and is minimally used! Around 20 odd years ago they simply put a second storey on most of it.
You need to provide walkways anyway, so you minimally encroach on those with concrete encased steel pillars (mostly for fire retardant but handy extra section anyway). It's a pretty cheap way to nearly double your parking.
There’s plenty of parking in Manhattan, it just isn’t free. Parking isn’t the force that shapes the world. Free parking is.
Suburbs have zoning standards that usually require more parking than required. The average big box lot has parking stalls that have never used for anything other than piling up snow.
Is motorcycle parking still free (or unenforced) in most of Manhattan? I did this for many years (sometimes with a motorcycle cover as people recommended, but sometimes without) and was never ticketed.
In Boston it was the same policy until recently when they started enforcing motorcycle parking extremely strictly - basically requiring motorcycles to buy a car spot once the very few motorcycle parking spots are filled up.
Realistically, we have to accept that we've spent almost a century creating a situation that has enabled car dominance and that many people are dependent on them. You can't ignore that. There is nothing wrong with cars, even in cities, but the car-centrism that has wrecked the urban environment cannot be undone simply by enacting hostile legislation. We have to ease toward a situation where their negative impact is reduced. Underground parking in new construction seems like an option, especially in cities like NYC where there is no need fear of scaring off developers. And in the case of NYC, there is precedent that goes back to at least the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, where apartment buildings do, in fact, have underground parking for the building's residents. And I suspect the costs were not huge. In many cases, the "underground parking" is merely basement level or even the ground level.