Space used for parking cars.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
378 points (97.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
9666 readers
86 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Uh yeah it would be funny to add red to all the roads
It's even better when it's done in a different colour. Then it makes it really clear that the freeway is wider than the 3 parking that abut it on the left.
*car storage
space used for cars would include streets, roads, and highways as well
Yup. I came to point this out too.
A lot of the time, there are minimum parking requirements - e.g. a mall is required by law to have enough parking for their busiest day of the year. So the other 364 days of the year, guess what happens...
there's a Costco in Torrance CA that is just completely packed full of cars at all times i don't even understand.
Honestly that's just Costco from my experience. Packed even before they open in the morning
yea. i used to go to one in Tacoma that was almost never full.
Why aren’t there more underground or at multilevel parking available instead of the expensive real estate used as parking lots anyway? Surely it’s more efficient is it not?
Genuinely curious here.
Garages are expensive to build and if you design your roads so that no person with the means would choose anything but driving and ignore the rest, then sprawl becomes the reasonable choice, since people are driving to every destination anyway. What's the point of the added expense of a garage if you don't really care about being close to other things nearby?
I mean it could free up more space for apartments and other mixed use buildings in the area. Gives a chance for the walkability in the area too, if executed well.
Yes but that's socialist.
And goes against my donors paycheck.
/s but many people in charge are willfully ignorant that society can be built in a way that doesn't rely on cars.
*communist
In addition to what others have said, parking lots are also an easy and cheap way to keep vacant land for speculative purposes.
Basically, our current property tax system allows you to buy a vacant lot, sit on it for a number of years while paying pennies in taxes (because a vacant lot or a parking lot is very low value, even if the land is very high value), and then resell for a much higher price after the city has grown around it. Basically no work, but tons of free profit.
The remedy? Tax land instead. That way, your tax burden is based on the value of your land, not the value of your improvements, so that this form of land speculation becomes uneconomical, while also strongly incentivizing you to develop something more valuable, e.g., housing, offices, etc.
There is a guy near where I live that I think does this. One of the lots has a tiny restaurant on it that I'm like 95% sure is a front, with a huge parking lot. They've bought a few lots nearby and do by the month parking permits. The whole area is being turned into apartments so it feels like he's just sitting on them for the right offer.
Not much underground because Houston is basically a swamp.
Nothing up high because why do that when there’s a whole bunch of flat ground?
Never mind the lack of public transport, bike infrastructure, or the general fact that literally everything is built way to far apart to make walking an option…
Welp, thanks for the info.
Houston is built on a swamp so you can't really dig a lot without dealing with humidity, water, etc. Multilevel means investment and debt. It can take many years to break even. You can make $25/hr per space and quickly make profit and sell in 10 years for 10 times what you paid for. There are multi level parking though.
Basically, it's greed.
It’s always greed…
One reason is it is millions of dollars more expensive to build underground parking.
I think I’ve seen examples where the underground parking for a commercial building costs as much as or more than the building above.
There is underground parking in downtown Houston as well, but during heavy rain they flood like crazy. I want to say the underground garage near the theatre district was closed for a few months after Harvey.
edit: right, europe. But i don't think it's better in US.
Cities are designed for cars now. Ridiculous
In some places.
That color scheme is really hard for my color blind eyes to see, since the orange (?) and green blend together, but dang, what a fucking statement it makes! Just imagine what could be there if people weren't driving. Amazing visual.
At some point all there'll be is car parks and nowhere to actually go once you step out of your car.
in Houston one would suffer without a car. it's designed completely around cars and trucks.
Assuming the random dafa I got off the internet is true, 5% of the US is covered by parking and the area of the US is 2.4 billion acres, digging these fucking things up and planting trees could sequester about a billion tons of CO2 per year (while, you know, preventing billions of tons from cars). Making all surface parking in to parks with grass and trees could sequester about 6 billion tons per year.
Did this come from CityNerd's video or someone else?
CityNerd's maps tend to be much prettier than this (not trying to throw shade, I would literally do much worse than this) and lately, he's just be using this instead of making his own.