
In Some US Cities, There Are Over Ten Times More Parking Spaces Than Households - laurex
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3epmm/parking-spots-outnumber-homes-us-cities
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timoth3y
This is not really surprising since parking is designed for maximum capacity,
not average capacity. Parking lots for stadiums and shopping malls are mostly
empty most of the time.

A city could have 10x the number of parking spaces as households and still not
have nearly enough parking spaces available for, say, downtown parking.

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tzs
This is one of those things that sounds surprising and important at first, but
when you think about it a while it seems like it might be obvious.

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perl4ever
My immediate reaction is that some places have a lot more people visiting on a
daily basis than live there.

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hinkley
I’d like to invite anyone who thinks Seattle has _twice as many_ parking spots
as it needs to come to lunch with me downtown on a weekday. I’ll pay for the
food, you pay for the parking. If you can find it, that is.

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prolikewh0a
I don't think Seattle has enough parking for it's current car intake, but I'll
pay an hour of parking downtown for lunch as long as it's nowhere near Pike
Market :)

I'd like to see most parking gone and cars into the city banned (unless you
reside downtown, or are a delivery vehicle/bus) or a high dollar toll on
downtown exits. This would force public transit to get better and make people
demand it get better. It would cut commute times significantly for the lower
classes commuting every weekday.

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hinkley
Well there are really only about 4 clusters of restaurants in downtown, (~6 if
you count SLU but I don't, and that's as bad if not worse), and one is near
Pike, one near the courthouse (both are lousy for parking). The ID isn't
impossible but it's getting worse.

The city taxes parking spaces pretty heavily. So 70 minutes in a garage
(you're gonna have to walk back and forth to the garage), I'm still only
paying for half to 2/3rds of that lunch even if we eat someplace decent.

Personally I think we're just about right. Parking is tough but not quite
impossible. But I'm also not averse to reducing car traffic in the core. Going
east-west has always been impossible anyway. But I don't go downtown as much
anymore except by bus because my SO -hates- the traffic and parking situation.

The bus situation is getting worse because the city loses something like $1 on
every bus trip, so they cut routes during the last job crunch instead of
expanding them, leading to very crowded buses. If you aren't travelling during
rush hour there may not be any buses near your house at all.

Still twiddling my thumbs for the rail expansions to land. I'll be close to
retirement (I think that's the first time I've typed those words and a little
shiver went down my spine) by the ETA for my neighborhood, and I probably
won't still be here by then anyway.

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prolikewh0a
>Well there are really only about 4 clusters of restaurants in downtown, (~6
if you count SLU but I don't, and that's as bad if not worse), and one is near
Pike, one near the courthouse (both are lousy for parking). The ID isn't
impossible but it's getting worse.

I was just thinking something like Mod Pizza :). Most restaurants downtown are
too overpriced for me. I do really like El Borracho, but that's $25/hr
parking. Capitol Hill has really good Sushi, Tacos, & Ramen which is where I
usually go for restaurants. Parking up there is much cheaper too.

I bus from North to downtown for work every week day and over the past 3-4
months my bus is packed so much that it's people almost involuntarily
molesting each other, packed in like sardines. I see the double decker Sound
Transit busses going way over their maximum limit of passengers. I would
really like to see Seattle & surrounding areas put in a much larger effort for
Transit since we already have so many people, and we keep gaining thousands
more every year.

I am about to move south near the light rail, so that will be quite nice. It
looks like Northgate station is coming together quite nicely and I see them
starting demolition of buildings for the light rail in Lynnwood as of a few
weeks ago. I hope a lot of the north light rail is completed early.

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kartan
Similar to "American Cities Are Drowning in Car Storage"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17530813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17530813)

> it’s more lucrative to operate a parking structure than a housing unit. This
> is great for landowners who are looking to make a big return on their
> investments, but it makes real estate markets inhospitable to new home
> buyers and renters.

This is why public transportation is so important. The private car is a local
maximum. Once everybody has one it is very expensive to create a cheap and
efficient massive public transportation network. But if you have an efficient
massive public transportation network, it is cheaper, healthier, and
convenient than private cars.

That is why Uber can operate at a loss. If New York, for example, losses its
massive public transportation to cheaper at-a-loss car transportation they can
raise prices afterwards without fear of massive public transport competition
again, as it requires to jump over the local maximum to the optimal.

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1123581321
It doesn’t make sense to me that a city has too much parking if a parking
structure is more lucrative than housing. What is distorting the market if
this is happening? (For those who haven’t read the article yet, this is not a
question about the ordinances that require retail to provide a number of free
parking spaces.)

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garrettskj
Obviously, not Portland

