
American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage - caiobegotti
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/07/12/american-cities-are-drowning-in-car-storage/
======
angarg12
I visited the US (particularly the bay area) for the first time recently, and
I was baffled by the sparsity of buildings. Suburbs and shopping areas are so
far away that you need a car to go anywhere, and in turn you need massive
expanses to held all those vehicles, which means that stores are even more
spread apart, which essentially becomes a snowball.

Being used to high density housing and underground parking spaces all those
open parking lots seem nonsensical to me, even more considering the alleged
housing shortage over there.

~~~
erikpukinskis
This is how we have had such economic growth. We use our own population as a
testbed where we disintermediate all of our own cultural support systems so
that everything must be hired out. Food, transport, entertainment, self
concept, family, all of it has been reformed in the U.S. over the last 100
years to replace community labor with commercial relations.

This means we get first dibs on these new industries (Software As A Service,
Family Mental Health As A Service, Guiltlessness As A Service, etc) as they
catch on globally. Sometimes naturally because we discover some actual value.
More often just by finding a practice which is addicting and then just dumping
product until a population is addicted.

Great recipe for success, much wealth has been stockpiled.

It’s possible we sold out some cultural knowledge in the process, but the U.S.
is a young country so most of our culture was pretty raw in the 19th century.

The bulk of our old growth culture we just slaughtered on arrival.

~~~
narrator
The reason that everything is so not integrated is because of the American
culture of containment. You have very very different kinds of people living in
close physical proximity who often want nothing to do with each other. Think
East Palo Alto and Palo Alto for example, especially in the 90s when East Palo
Alto had the highest murder rate per capita in the U.S.

Nowadays, physical proximity means less and less. Relationships are even
becoming less integrated. Yes you can interact with other people, but only as
coworkers and paid professionals. Don't cross any weird lines. Even asking
someone to engage in friend activities is getting more rare as most people
prefer online friends, since they have more in common with them. The throughly
modern American asks "Why would you need to be in physical proximity to
someone anyway unless it was necessary for work? That's so creepy!". Lately,
Tinder and friends have really stripped the last actual need for non-work
physical proximity with any indivuals who have not been pre-screened via the
algorithm.

~~~
thatfrenchguy
“You have very very different kinds of people living in close physical
proximity who often want nothing to do with each other.”

Knowing that the US is probably one of the most segregated countries, this
makes me smile :-)

~~~
CapitalistCartr
The US is a widely diverse country, including internally. Milwaukee is quite
segregated, Sacramento isn't. There is a wide spread, depending on where you
are. Overall, the US is about average diversity compared to other countries.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Overall, the US is about average diversity compared to other countries.

I don't think that's accurate. Europe is almost entirely European, Asia is
almost entirely Asian, Africa is almost entirely African. Even Wisconsin at
86.5% white is less white than most European countries. And Milwaukee itself
is 40% black and 17.3% Latino.

The countries that come anywhere close to the US on diversity are
predominantly the other countries in the Americas.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
You're musunderstanding segregation and ethnicity. For instance, Milwaukee is
widely regarded as the most segregated city in America. Their overall
population total isn't the issue; its that neighborhoods within the city are
overwhelmingly uniform.

Of course Asia is full of Asians; but they represent an incredible diversity
of ethnicities. In some areas, they are geographically mixed, in others not.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Diversity and segregation are two different things. If you had a city that was
100.0% Vietnamese then there would be no "segregation" within that city but it
also isn't particularly diverse. And adding an equal number of Hawaiians
wouldn't _reduce_ the diversity even if there was 100% segregation between
them.

Moreover, if you can bisect Asians into Japanese and Koreans etc. then you can
bisect whites into Irish and German, Latinos into Colombians and Venezuelans,
blacks into Jamaicans and Haitians etc. And if you're going to play that game
then why aren't the racially segregated areas still internally diverse in the
same way? Certainly they are as much as the countries that consist almost
entirely of that category of people are.

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Yes, you are correct, diversity and segregation _are_ two different things,
which is why I broke them out.

My original comment was to explain how the statement, "Knowing that the US is
probably one of the most segregated countries . . . " is incorrect.

------
jjeaff
This article tries to make the (weak) point that there is plenty of parking
simply because averages show they spots sit empty most of the time.

But that type of analysis ignores the obvious fact that most parking is built
to support peak times. Most mall parking lots sit mostly empty, except on the
weekends when everyone goes to the mall or restaurants or whatever. Corporate
lots sit empty on the weekends.

Cut any of these lots by 25% and you cause real problems.

You could apply the same analysis to home occupancy and conclude that since
most homes are sitting empty for 8 hrs a day, we could/should reduce the
number of homes by 25% and be none the wiser.

~~~
justincormack
The level that allows all cars to park at peak times is not the economically
efficient level; that hugely increases the overall cost, as you cant use
parking for any other use. Peak cases should have surge pricing to ration the
space there are for efficiency, and the overall level should be less.

~~~
crazygringo
But they already mostly do. In far-out suburbs, huge mall parking lots aren't
competing with anything else, there's plenty of space.

And in downtown cities, parking garages are alreay _expensive_. $30-50/day in
Manhattan, for example. (I would agree that street parking should match garage
rates, and not be effectively subsidized, though.)

~~~
CalRobert
That seems pretty cheap. How much is rent on a similar amount of space?
Remember all the space needed for accessing the spot, administration (if any),
too! Or are there different rules for storing cars than people?

(Incidentally, there very much are different rules, and for the most part US
cities have worked very, very hard to make it easier to add cars than people).

~~~
crazygringo
Well, at $5/sq ft/mo. for average real estate (Manhattan, e.g. a 600 sq ft apt
is $3K/mo), and if a parking space is 180 ft, then that's $900/mo., or
$30/day, plus overhead/access.

So $30-50/day seems right, especially considering parking garages tend to be
underground, no plumbing, etc., so the space is presumably cheaper than
residential/office.

~~~
adrianN
If you build only one story above the parking space...

------
jaysonelliot
Until cities have a better alternative to driving than "use our terrible mass
transit in our poorly-designed cities," this will remain a problem.

American cities are designed for cars, so that bicycles, scooters, or any
other human-scale transportation is not just inconvenient, it's dangerous.
Forcing skateboards, scooters, gyros, bicycles, etc., into the road with 4,000
pound cars is insanely dangerous. If you're riding something that can't be
carried into a building with you, it's inconvenient at best to park it
outside.

Just removing parking from new construction won't solve the problem, it will
compound it. People still won't want to get on slow, crowded, uncomfortable
buses or packed, unreliable, dirty trains. We'll just get more people driving
endlessly around the block looking for parking and polluting the air, more
accidents from drivers hitting people in the road, more sprawl as people shun
the city so they can drive in the suburbs instead.

Roads have to be repurposed to make light personal transportation safe. Take
every two-way two-lane and split it into a one-way, with a physical separation
between a car side and a personal transport side. Remove parking from the
curbs, and put it in the middle so one side can be for cars and the other for
bikes, scooters, skaters, etc.

Public transit needs a major overhaul, major investment, and a new attitude.
It has to be about riders' comfort, convenience, and happiness, not just
jamming people into routes as if they were statistics in a planning meeting.

New development should be aimed at walkable, human-scale neighborhoods,
planned for people first, not cars.

All these things have to happen to solve the problem. It won't be easy, but
unless we do something like that, we'll be living with the car problem for a
very long time to come.

~~~
ebikelaw
Kind of a weird argument that nobody wants to take the bus or the train
because it's too crowded. Very Berra.

~~~
runarberg
Take the Sound Transit 550. It is the main (only direct?) busline between
downtown Seattle and Bellevue. During rush hour it comes at an interval of 10
- 15 min. The bus it self is a double wagon (with an accordion connection), it
fits maybe (beware I'm pulling this figure from thin air) 50 people. It is
always crowded with people standing back to front. During these 10 - 15
minutes one can only imagine how many people cross on the motorway between
these places in their private cars.

So it is accurate (although it sounds like a contradiction) to say that
*"Nobody wants to take the bus because it is too crowded".

~~~
wool_gather
50 is too low for an articulated bus. Including standing room, but not at
sardine levels, you should at least be getting close to 90.

~~~
stephengillie
The bus has 50 seats, and standing room for maybe 20-25. This includes having
1-2 people standing unsafely on the swivel plate in the middle of the bus.

One of the issues in general with increasing Seattle-Bellevue throughput is
having to bridge the lake. I-90 traded a separate bridge of dedicated express
lanes, for HOV lanes combined with other traffic - so the under construction
Link light rail can use that separate bridge. 520 is another option, but
there's a toll since they just replaced the narrow 2-lane pontoon bridge with
4-lane highway that's suspended higher above the water.

------
fencepost
If anyone in city government is smart Chicago is going to have no real choice
but to go against this trend because of its utterly atrocious parking meter
deal 10+ years ago - or they're going to have to take that glut of spaces and
make them free parking to try to get out of the deal.

Basically the city committed to keeping a fixed number of street parking
spaces for 75 years in exchange for a pittance. If spaces are closed for
construction or eliminated completely, the city has to pay the private company
for those spaces as if they were being used. Want bike lanes? Don't forget to
account for the paying for all those eliminated parking spaces. Pedestrian
only areas? See above. Ride sharing cutting into driving? Guess they'll have
plenty of empty space to pick up and drop off in - unless there's a way for
the parking meter company to charge for that couple of minutes in a parking
space.

But it's not all bad - the city only has to put up with it until 2083.

[http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-
meter-...](http://www.urbanophile.com/2018/05/17/chicago-parking-meter-lease-
slow-motion-train-wreck-only-has-65-more-years-to-go/)

~~~
cozzyd
This is a tricky issue. The correct thing to do would have been to increase
parking rates to something sane, which the private company did, but would have
been politically difficult for the city. At the rates the city was charging
before, and assuming there was no political way to raise them, it's possible
it may have been a rational choice. Ideally it would have been a shorter
timescale though...

~~~
fencepost
If it was a rational choice it wouldn't have been rammed through the way it
was. The way it was handled gives an almost undeniable air of utterly filthy
bought and paid for fix is in. The Chicago Reader has a nice timeline of a
bunch of the privatization that was going on at the time:
[https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/features-cover-
april-9-2...](https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/features-cover-
april-9-2009/Content?oid=1098561)

Bids are opened 12/1\. Aldermen get invited on 12/2 to a briefing that day,
where they get limited information and no details. 12/3 a finance committee
meeting is held to get an ordinance to accept the bid into process - what
they'll be voting on is provided only during this meeting. The finance
committee passes it with no significant scrutiny. The full council vote is
scheduled for 12/4, and requests to see the city's numbers and financial
analysis of the deal are rejected.

When you look back at the deal, to me and an awful lot of other people it
looks like one of two things: either most of the people involved on the city
side were utterly incompetent, or someone(s) were nicely taken care of in some
way.

Edit; autocorrect

------
mattlondon
I always thought it was weird how there is so much parking in the centre of US
cities.

When I talk to colleagues in various US cities and they say they drive to work
it just _Does. Not. Compute_. In central London, driving to work is
essentially unheard of unless you are the Prime Minister.

There is parking available in London, but the prices are fairly high - I just
had a quick look on parkopedia [1] and it looks like 08:30-17:00 would set you
back anywhere from £25 to £50 a day (about the same as half to a full tank of
petrol or diesel). Then add in congestion charging @ £11.50 a day [2] and
you're looking at £35-£60 a day in fees before you add in your hassle factor
of the traffic and paying for fuel

Understandably, as a result a lot of people use public transport. Sure its
fairly decent in London, but thats only because people use it and pay for it
so there are funds to reinvest into making it run effectively.

If suddenly the average US driver was looking at paying $100/day to drive to
work (or $2000 a month), I am sure that they could handle sitting on a bus for
$10/day and pocket the $90 change, while the public transit gets better and
better as a result.

This is a solvable problem.

1 -
[https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_...](https://en.parkopedia.com/parking/locations/tottenham_court_road_tube_station_oxford_st_london_england_w1d_2dh_united_kingdom_gcpvj40xp75/?arriving=201807160830&leaving=201807161700)

2 - [https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-
charge](https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/congestion-charge)

~~~
Derived
It's that expensive because of the population density and government meddling.
There's no need for that in the US...are you saying we should artificially
charge the pants off of everyone driving to work just to force them to use
public transport? Why? I like my car. I like driving my car. I don't want to
ride a train, or a bus. If I can work to the office, I will. I'll drive
everywhere else.

~~~
stale2002
It is because of government meddling that the US doesn't have high density
living.

Yes, please please please let's get the government OUT of the housing market,
and let's get rid of those building height limits that disallow anything above
6 stories, even though rent is in the thousands of dollars for a studio.

You should be allowed to drive your car and live in whatever low density place
you want. Can you offer the same thing for me, by allowing the market to
produce high density living as well?

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Don't forget getting rid of parking minimums that add so much to the cost of
construction that it adds hundreds of dollars to the monthly rent of an
apartment in a typical urban area.

------
kosei
> In Philadelphia, there are 3.7 times more parking spaces than households

Honestly, this number seems reasonable to me, when you consider that people
could be parking at a) their home, b) their work, and c) at any number of
other places (restaurant, grocery store, mall, etc). Not to mention, each
household may have more than one car. It's probably too high in aggregate, but
we don't park by average, we park for specific means, and if the lot at the
grocery store is full, or at our work, or at home, we consider that to be an
inconvenience and want more spots.

The only way to change this is to move away from the 1-2 car-per-family model
we live in right now.

------
lisper
If you think about it, it has to be this way. The whole point of parking is
that it has to be available _on demand_ , which means you need to build enough
capacity to satisfy _peak_ usage _at the destination_. If you had full parking
utilization, people have to queue to park, and that would defeat the purpose
of getting to your destination quickly.

You either need excess parking, or none at all, and shift to all non-private
vehicles (which includes things like taxis and Uber). But having fully
utilized parking is the worst of all possible worlds.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
It's partly an information availability problem. Parking usage patterns tend
to be based around factors other than availability, which leads to more
extreme peaks and valleys than are necessary. If people could see what the
mall parking lot was like at any given time and decide when to go based on
whether parking was likely to be available, you could probably make the lot
half the size. You already see this in many places around traffic; people in
LA seem to plan their lives around when the freeways are known to be backed
up.

------
burfog
It is highly misleading to point out that "In Des Moines, for example, there
are 18 times as many parking spaces per acre as households". Well sure,
commercial areas don't have households but they still need parking.

Not even questioning the numbers, which might be carefully picked, I come to
the opposite conclusion. To me, "In Seattle, the parking occupancy rate
downtown is 64 percent." means that there is very little room for surges.
Business is impacted when the availability of parking isn't 100% reliable.

~~~
ebikelaw
Not really. Building your parking lot for peak demand has a very, very high
opportunity cost. You could instead surround your business with other uses
(like housing) resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business
traffic that more than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that
peak day.

It is also true that small businesses almost universally overestimate the
fraction of their customers arriving by car. In Oakland they surveyed the
merchants on a street, who estimated 90% of their customers came by car, which
is quite impossible given the streetscape. Careful observation revealed it was
the inverse: only 10% arrived by car. Also the people who arrived on foot
spent the most and the people in the cars spent the least.

Streetsblog has covered the topic of wastefully overprovisioning your parking
capacity for peaks, as well as the topic of merchant perception of
transportation mode.

[https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-
waste...](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/12/01/the-spectacular-waste-of-
half-empty-black-friday-parking-lots/)

~~~
microcolonel
> _You could instead surround your business with other uses (like housing)
> resulting in a greater increase in steady-state business traffic that more
> than offsets whatever you forego from congestion on that peak day._

Only if your customer demographic is very generic (customer locality), or your
employees are young/desperate (employee locality); and sure, lots of
businesses are like this, but how many?

I personally think the opposite approach: undoing zoning restrictions on small
and medium commercial operations mixed directly into residential areas, and
vice versa; I think this lines up with the effect you note in your Oakland
anecdote.

------
oneplane
Maybe it's just me, but in larger cities, cars seem like an incredibly
inefficient and impractical idea to transport people inside those cities.
Maybe just dump the cars outside when you want to get in? Or just don't own
cars and share them as a stopgap until a better solution is put in place?

~~~
wool_gather
You're absolutely right, and this is the problem. In aggregate, they are
horribly inefficient. At the level of the individual, they're generally much
much faster and convenient than other options (i.e., public transit), even
accounting for traffic. So -- in game theory terms -- many people defect.

One of the reasons is frequency. Depending on time of day, a subway or bus may
not come for 10 minutes. A car is basically infinite frequency: when you want
to go, you go right away.

The other is more direct routing. To get to my favorite bookstore, about 5
miles due north, on transit takes an hour because I either have to take the
rail into the city center first and transfer (or take one of the most
infrequent and slow bus routes in the system). It's maybe 35 minutes by bike
or car, as long as it's not rush hour. I don't own a car, but I can't say I
wouldn't be tempted some days, if I did.

------
brudgers
I think parking capacity probably reduces to a local scheduling problem [1].
If it does, it reduces to a 3-sat problem and this would mean optimum parking
is NP-complete. Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is
irrelevant [2] and when it comes to where a person parks relative to their
home the acceptable radius is probably 100m or less...Des Moines is cold in
the winter, hot in the summer, and gets storms at the scale of the Great
Plains several times a year.

The marginal cost of a parking space is low. The heuristic for structured
parking has long been $10,000 per space. Over a 30 year building life cycle
that's less than $1/day. Private surface parking is a few cents and on street
public parking is nothing...and often so is even that expensive structured
parking because the $1/day of capital costs makes parking a potentially
lucrative business. This means that the most cost effective way to avoid
scheduling bottlenecks is with capacity that far exceeds the average rate or
median demand.

To put it another way, all that parking is what a working system looks like.
Sure Des Moines might not need 1.6 million parking spaces -- but it's probably
not far from what's necessary to provide required for reasonable livability at
the density and geography [3] of Des Moines. Recovering all those parking
spaces for development doesn't do a lot for Des Moines. It's not severely
space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the economic value of
conversion is not lower.

To put it another way, land use for parking in Des Moines (or other cities)
largely reflects an economic equilibrium in the real-estate market. When
there's too much, it gets converted to other uses over time...and when
regulations are impediments, major local real-estate interests get those
regulations relaxed/modified/removed. [4]

[1]: The size of the 'local' may vary, but it's much much smaller than Des
Moines and difficult even down to the scale of on-street parking for a single
urban block.

[2]: Based on the heuristic of 1/4 mile reasonable walking radius in urban
environments.

[3]: Consider that the Des Moines river runs through the city and a parking
space on one side of the river is not generally fungible with a parking space
on the other side. The river complicates public transit by bottlenecking
surface transit with bridges and subsurface transit with tunnels.

[4]: Institutions with teams of $600/hr real estate lawyers and fifty year
investment horizons.

~~~
al2o3cr
> It's not severely space constrained by an ocean like NYC or SF and so the
> economic value of conversion is not lower.

is somewhat contradicted by

> Most of the time a parking space more than 400m away is irrelevant

This is the space constraint the article focuses on: if there's enough surface
parking, it pushes destinations far enough apart that you need to move your
car to go from one to the other.

Re: marginal cost, there are plenty of effects that impose additional capital
and/or opportunity cost on converting between parking and not-parking uses -
everything from long leases for companies that operate parking (10+ years
sometimes) to basic constraints like "putting up a building requires a large
chunk of up-front spending". Those effects make "economic equilibrium" slow-
to-impossible to reach.

------
daviator88
It's no wonder Seattle's garages often sit empty, a parking space goes for
minimum of $4 per hour

~~~
jasonmp85
Wow that’s incredibly cheap.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
Hm. Downtown Portland is $2/hr. I would not say $4/hr is 'incredibly cheap'.

------
AtlasBarfed
Another problem begging for self-driving cars.

Have the car drop you off, then self-drive to an offsite parking, and then
return when summoned.

This model would also support mobile "gear boxes" where you have activity-
focused mobile storage pods of gear (think toolboxes for trade work, or a
surfing/beach pod with your beach gear, or a biking/triathlon pod with all
your triathlon gear), which I think will be a huge benefit once self-driving
hits reality.

Rather than have storage units where you can't easily get to your stuff
because of the side trip and annoyance of loading/unloading, you have modular
storage that can be summoned to a spot and purpose needed.

That would reduce storage needs in urban areas as well, so you could further
enhance density.

------
stretchwithme
Once automated vehicles take over (eventually), most people will switch to
taxis. Taking taxis everywhere will be cheaper than owning your own vehicle.
So the need to park will be greatly reduced.

Eventually, mass transit will fail and underground subways will be repurposed
for AVs. Parking will be built underground for off peak storage of vehicles,
allowing the repurposing of surface parking spots. Maybe agricultural robots
will make use of them.

Cities will get quieter.

~~~
cozzyd
Yeah taxis don't have sufficient capacity. You'd just double the cars on the
roads. Autonomous buses on the other hand could make a dent (since the primary
cost of buses in rich countries is labor).

~~~
55873445216111
I'm curious about this. How do you arrive at the conclusion that autonomous
taxi adoption results in a doubling of the number of cars? Do you have a link?

~~~
cozzyd
Because order half the time they'll be empty driving to their next pickup.

The increase in ride-sharing has already greatly increased congestion:
[http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180316/issue01/1803...](http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20180316/issue01/180319945/whats-
making-traffic-worse-in-chicago-signs-point-to-uber-lyft)

~~~
stretchwithme
But in the most popular areas, many cars get multiple riders and find their
next rides in the same area.

And out in the boonies, some people will keep their personal cars, as it will
take longer to get a ride.

Also, the average car size will shrink. Not only will we lose the driver's
seat, but peak demand as people go to work may be met with even smaller one-
seat cars.

You won't need a car that can handle your worst-case scenario for most of the
time. Bigger cars will still be available, of course, because people do like
to travel with their friends and family whenever possible.

All in all, it's a lot more likely that that most seats will be filled.

~~~
cozzyd
I disagree. The article I linked suggests in NYC that Ubers are empty 1/3 of
the time on weekdays. The problem of course is that no city is so mixed use
that destinations are equally likely to be origins at any given time of day.

taking labor out of the equation it will become cost effective to be empty an
even larger fraction of the time (presumably humans stop driving when they're
not getting enough fares to be worthwhile). It may also be economical for
these vehicles to never park (not only because parking costs money or might be
far away, but because it increases latency) for large fractions of the day.

------
nlawalker
_> > Parking spaces are everywhere, but for some reason the perception
persists that there’s “not enough parking.”_

I imagine most people will perceive that there's not enough parking unless
there's an open spot right out front of where they're going when they get
there.

Services that facilitate parking further away from your destination might
help.

------
loonyballoonys
In the USA, from what I have seen, public transportation is a punishment for
being poor.

------
yuhong
It would be fun to do the math if every one of the parking spots had EV
charging

------
gok
I wonder what we’ll do with all this space once AVs take over.

------
nickthemagicman
You either pay for parking or get a ticket. It must make incredible amounts of
money for all involved.

------
amelius
Self-driving cars will solve the whole parking problem.

~~~
amptorn
How? Being self-driving doesn't make a car take up less space.

~~~
lazyjones
A self-driving car will ideally drop you off in front of your commute target
and go find a parking space at a convenient location that might even be
outside town.

~~~
antoineMoPa
This would multiply traffic in cities, which would be a terrible alternative.

~~~
lazyjones
It would add some traffic to/from parking lots but reduce the “find a parking
space near my target” traffic.

------
MisterTea
edit tl;dr there is plenty of parking where it's not needed and too little
parking where it is needed.

I think the main problem is not the amount of parking but the distribution of
parking. I live in NYC and avoid driving around the city as much as possible
except off peak and short local runs.

The big problem is commercial centers tend to be high density and clustered
together. For example, queens boulevard between Forest Hills and Rego Park has
dozens of restaurants and shops where the number of parking spots on the block
vs. the number of people concentrated on that block is where the problem
begins. A restaurant with one or two parking spots in front might have two
dozen people people inside including staff requiring at least six parking
spots (assuming couples).

My neighborhood Ozone Park is in south Queens and live is a part that is a
block from the A train. Super convenient location as everything is in walking
distance of a few blocks including the train. There is also a school around
the block. So every morning dozens of commuters pack the neighborhood looking
for parking for the train and then add the teachers and other school staff who
only get about two dozen reserved spots and half are blocked by construction.
Your driveway is frequently partly blocked and finding street parking during
weekdays is brutal until about 7-8PM.

So the blocks along the train stations are municipal free-for all parking
lots. As you push out into the back areas away from the commercial cacophony
there is street parking so long as the neighborhood was built with sanity
meaning homes have functional driveways (most don't or can only fit a single
car). And there are plenty of those areas spread throughout the city but the
parking goes to waste. Then throw in neighborhoods of row houses with no
driveways and again, the housing density outweighs the parking.

Face it, no planning was done for the automobile in major cities. Parking
allotment is abysmal and to make things worse, maximizing the dwelling square
footage is what all developers aim for to maximize the value. So there is zero
incentive to build in sane parking. This is an example of a nearby 10
apartment home that was built with parking for about 8-10 vehicles if people
park front to back and side-by-side underneath the front half:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75...](https://www.google.com/maps/@40.683022,-73.8445675,3a,75y,75.15h,91.16t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-bqQmiu-
VhaU5mt2H5TjUQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

Not exactly a pretty example. Down the block from me a single story ranch with
a big back yard was bought by a developer, demolished and three two family
homes built with the easy ability to add an illegal basement apartment with a
little modding (it was so obvious when we toured them during sale). There used
to be more parking on weekends before those homes went in. Now even weekend
parking can be tough. And this type of development is happening all over NYC.
Single family homes are bought up demolished and replaced with 4+ apartments
each of which usually bring one car into the neighborhood. They also build
little or no parking in. The requirements for parking are easily cheated with
a long driveway that is only practical for one or two cars to use as you can't
practically park six cars back to back. No one is building single family homes
anymore.

Summary: it's a damn mess.

------
Semirhage
I’m from Italy, and until I lived in America for a while I’d never understood
just how massive the US really is. I lived on two coasts, in two states that
were both much larger than my entire country! People like to point to Berlin
or Paris as model cities, but they’re population centers in countries that
could fit inside Texas without making a splash. I’m not saying that US car
culture is entirely healthy, or that it couldn’t benefit from more and better
public transport in major cities. I’m always annoyed though, to see these
conversations on HN ignore the sheer size of the country in question. Of
course it’s spread out, it’s enormous!

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-
reme...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hifamb4LTgQooDBYj/worth-remembering-
when-comparing-the-us-to-europe)

~~~
microcolonel
For some, the grass is always greener on the other side. It is stylish today
to criticize every tradeoff the U.S. has made in order to credibly claim that
every habitable square foot of every state is "inhabited", but a lot of it
makes perfect sense.

There is one piece of public transit which makes a lot of sense in the U.S.:
the bus (both local and coach buses), but it is unstylish and so gets no
attention.

Imagine how much better it would be getting from city to city if the money
that went into subsidizing AmTrak (which approximately nobody uses, least of
which the lower classes) was available as a grant or credit for every
passenger mile on the already-thriving network of American bus carriers
(Greyhound, Megabus, and 24 others in the long-distance category alone).

~~~
ghaff
Amtrak is very popular on certain routes, predominantly in the Northeast
Corridor. And, in fact, those routes are being upgraded. But poor people
certainly don't use it. They take something like Megabus. And the money Amtrak
makes in the northeast covers, though not entirely, a lot of long haul routes
that aren't competitive with air.

~~~
microcolonel
Sure, if AmTrak restructured around a lack of federal subsidies for lines in
the red, the Northeast Corridor (possibly incl. Acela Express) would clearly
remain in operation. It's just that a major part of the network is composed of
routes where the subsidy exceeds the fare, and the fare is still too high for
most people to consider.

Also, not really sure why the federal government is subsidizing $10-40+ one-
way fares (receiving an average of 25 dollars in federal subsidy) as
"commuter" service, even in the less-bad Capitol Corridor.

------
dawhizkid
Personally very excited Travis (former Uber CEO) is CEO of City Storage
Systems now to basically future proof antiquated urban real estate like
parking or retail.

------
21
> Parking is also extremely expensive to construct and maintain.

Say what? It's a fucking concrete slab.

Maybe they mean expensive in land cost.

~~~
black6
Extremely expensive compared to an undeveloped lot...

~~~
gruez
when your benchmark is $0, everything's expensive by comparison.

------
paulsutter
“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk

------
RickJWagner
This is good-- it's where those fantastic barn-finds come from.

------
Felz
We can build over all of the parking lots once driverless cars become a thing,
can't we?

Public transportation looks awfully like a dead end in that light. If you
don't have to park and drive them, cars are better in nearly every way.

~~~
antoineMoPa
Public transport also reduces the amount of congestion in roads that
driverless cars can only worsen.

~~~
Felz
Probably true, but completely missing my point.

Buses are inflexible solutions, far from ideal transport. You have to find the
bus, abide by its schedule, and the bus can only deliver its passengers sort
of near its destination. If the bus isn't near full, it's also very wasteful.

A better solution would be on-demand, and could come much closer to the
passenger for pickup and dropoff. It would be cheaper to scale as needed.

I think that describes driverless cars, and less perfectly Uber/Lyft.
Improving congestion is a matter of improving thoroughput, and our society
would be better off focusing on ways to pack more driverless cars into less
road, or have more roads, or have more road alternatives (point to point
electric scooters), or have better traffic routing, than make a bunch of buses
and have people drive them around all day.

And I don't even need to mention the crushing inflexibility of subways and
trains.

