First off, I want to point out that I am totally on team /c/fuckcars. I highly believe in transit, walking, and biking.
That being said, I think it’s fair to say that:
- Cars aren’t fully going away anytime soon
- Even in our wildest dreams, it still makes sense for cars to be usable in some way, just that the other transport methods are highly prioritized.
So the discussion I want to have is about parking garages, and the hate I see towards them from the urbanist community.
I feel like parking garages vaguely align with urbanist views, because they are high density, and they allow someone to drive to a general area after which they can do the rest of their transportation via other methods.
To put it into perspective, I’d rather have 1-3 dense parking garages in a neighborhood than have street parking along all the roads plus wide open parking lots around grocery stores and whatnot.
I understand this is a lesser of the two evils discussion but it seems to me like parking garages are the clear winner.
In addition to the other comments, I’ll add that parking garages are “non-places” and can make an area feel unsafe or sketchy. A few times I was walking around downtown with some friends and the girls were like “oh no, we’re not going down here”. I looked around and noticed that the entire block was parking garages. And no one was around. But if we turned around, we saw people and that felt safe.
And to add again, parking garages cost $50k or more per spot and is space that is not used for people or businesses. They rarely ever pay for themselves and, while is a more efficient car storage space than flat parking, is worse than actually doing something with the space such as home, businesses, etc.
One thing I noticed in the last downtown I was in was that roughly half of the volume of every building was parking and these buildings often had additional parking available next to the in the form of another garage. It’s pretty insane.