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.
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.
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
Many US citiea currently have large, surface level parking lots throughout downtown. Some well placed garages could free up that land and improve density. We will never be rid of private vehicle ownership