
A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot - wallflower
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/brief-cultural-history-of-the-parking-lot/
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throw0101a
A good book on how the automobile came to (the American) city streets:

> _Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and
> included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets
> were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where
> pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter
> Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required
> not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be
> reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially
> reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution,
> he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes
> how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He
> examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to
> the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled
> motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or
> "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians,
> police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown
> businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the
> solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents
> campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice."_ […]

* [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic)

See also the book:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking)

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sarora27
This reminds me of a cool video i saw the other day of San Francisco's Market
Street in 1906:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8&ab_channel=Denis...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8&ab_channel=DenisShiryaev)

It's so interesting to see how people, street cars, horse & carts, and cars
all seemed to share the road in what seemed like a controlled chaos manner

~~~
wolfgang42
Note that this video was apparently partly staged, with cars circling around
to come by the camera again, so it’s probably not entirely representative of
actual traffic patterns at the time:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_Down_Market_Street](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_Down_Market_Street)

(The Wikipedia article also has an original scan of the video, without the AI
confabulation and added sound effects, or a higher quality version with added
sound here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2u4J7Dbouo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2u4J7Dbouo))

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sarora27
Oh my! thank you for enlightening me!

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wolfgang42
Of course! It’s still a cool view into the past and I’d not seen it before, so
thank _you_ for posting it.

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prawn
Something I find interesting is whether the better layout for a large store
complex is an island of shops surrounded by car parking, or a donut of shops
(with street frontage and displays) with interior parking.

Former provides a quick view of accessible parking and minimises in-mall
walking whereas the latter means stores can promote their wares to passing
cars more easily.

A couple of recent big box store builds in Australia I've noticed (Bunnings in
SA) are one-brand warehouses built on top of a single storey of car parking.
Once in the store and even in the outdoor garden centre, it feels identical to
older ground level stores. More compact footprint, car parking is protected
from the elements, and the store has a branded facade on the street.

~~~
jbay808
The 'donut' is also _much_ more welcoming and safe for pedestrian traffic, who
don't have to cross the parking lot twice to get to the post
office/Starbucks/etc.

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ohples
Parking lots don't have culture, they take from it.

~~~
clwk

      Don't it always seem to go
      That you don't know what you got
      Til its gone

~~~
shardinator
Exactly

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sushicalculus
Whenever I think of suburbia, I think of larger homes, malls, and highways. It
makes sense that suburbia got parking lots while downtowns got parking garages
... but I had never really given the parking lot much thought until this
article

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throw0101a
> _while downtowns got parking garages_

Let me introduce you to pre-condo boom downtown Toronto, Canada:

* [https://www.blogto.com/city/2011/10/that_time_when_toronto_w...](https://www.blogto.com/city/2011/10/that_time_when_toronto_was_a_city_of_parking_lots/)

The rise of lots occurred after the construction of the downtown Gardner
highway:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner_Expressway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardiner_Expressway)

Nowadays land is too valuable to be flat, and so most/all parking lots have
been turned into towers (condo(minium) and commercial):

* [http://www.mapto.ca/maps/parkinglots](http://www.mapto.ca/maps/parkinglots)

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poma88
The most horrendous spaces of the US, showing the car lobby successes on PR,
ond how they influenced the average mindset

