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.
They are ugly, bad land use, and incentivise people to drive places rather than use other modes of transport.
They are better land use than surface level parking lots. North america can’t just snap its fingers and be rid of car dependancy. I think parking garages can be a good middle ground but should be accompanied by transit and walkability.
It can incentivise people to drive, to help fix this, make transit stops close to the area/throughout the area while having parking garages on the outskirts requiring people to walk farther than if they took transit. This will keep the cars away from pedestrian areas while still allowing die hard car owners to drive to locations.
Overall parking garages can be a step towards removing on street parking and densifying urban areas. Even The Netherlands, posterchild of urbanism, uses parking garages.
Too many people who oppose parking garages are stuck with black and white thinking when the world is mostly gray. I can agree that we should work for a future where people can live in a nice city with no need for cars, but you have to agree that we’re not there yet. Getting there is a very long process, perhaps a continuous process, and at least for US cities is many decades away. We need to be able to make improvements, even when they are not the ultimate goal
Yeah park and ride on the outskirts is a different story. Though in that case a surface parking lot would probably meet demand just fine and be easier to redevelop in the future. Stacked parking is typically used in city centres, where it is a terrible land use for the value of that land.
It doesn’t solve any of the social geographic “Daseinsgrundfunktionen” (Fundamental functions of existence). Motorised vehicles are needed in cities for specific services beyond these functions as well (fire brigade, ambulance) and one could argue they fit in with ‘Provide’ or ‘Dispose’, but parking garages won’t help with any of that, they are arguably merely a convenience for a privileged class.
Very good points here already. So I just provide an example:
They are planning to build a parking garage in the middle of my town (17000 people). The promisse is, that they will remove parking spots in many streets around the center, as the parking garage would easily compensate for them.
I see the positive aspects, less cars parking on the roads and more parking space overall.
For me the negative aspects outweight the positive here:
- More parking spaces invite more people to take the car into the city. The sourrounding streets have less parked cars but will be much more used by cars in motion. The space we ‘won’ would be gone again.
- the parking garage is very ugly, in the middle of an otherwise nice city center. It takes away the space of projects that would attract more tourists.
- The city wants to have reduced car traffic in the city, but the parking garage is a long term investment into more car traffic, that is not easily reversed in the next 20-30 years.
- the induced car traffic leads to all the negative things we all know… More noise, pollution, unsafe, expensive, unhealthy
My town has lots and three garages around the center of town. They are set back so you don’t see any ugliness or direct traffic (plus they’re small because we’re not very big). However they do support a bustling “old time Main Street” as well as transit. They are a big win for exactly what OP stated: more people can drive to enjoy the town center, including shops and restaurants, walking, or taking trains or buses into the nearby major city. The alternative is they wouldn’t come to the town center. People who don’t live right there would find it easier to drive to their suburban shopping centers and malls with huge parking lots
While there is still on street parking, it’s all very walkable and the town has been experimenting with turning a section into a pedestrian mall
Parking Garages Represent Lazy and Terrible Planning | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGG5WRBPeFk
- Induced demand
- They still take away a lot of space that could be used for housing or third places.
