The REAL Downtown Parking Problem...
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- čas přidán 13. 12. 2022
- In cities, parking lots are a major urban planning consideration. Many believe that downtowns do not have enough parking spaces, but in reality, parking takes up valuable real estate which would be better served as walkable, mixed use, and high density development.
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@alanthefisher VIDEO: • Parking Garages Repres...
@RMTransit VIDEO: • NEVER Do This to Your ...
SPECIAL THANKS
Nathan Foster, Tulsa Planning Department
MUSIC
I Feel Like Partying Right Now - Nat Keefe & BeatMower
Bok Choy - Slynk
Colour Of Your Face - NoMBe
Night Time - Underbelly & Ty Mayer
So what do you think? How should we handle parking downtown? What has your city done to improve it's city center? Let's discuss.
Charlotte is redeveloping parking lots into more buildings downtown/Uptown.
Land value tax is the solution to land speculation. At 2:01 the guy you brought in said the problem is land speculation. And the solution to that is land value tax. Make speculators pay taxes on the full value of the potential of that lot and they will decide to develop it very quickly.
Yep, Land Value Tax - makes tearing down useful buildings for barely rentable parking quite unattractive.
Agree with the land value tax. Was wondering are there any downsides to the tax apart from the spectators? Was wondering why don't more US cities have this implemented?
@@johnnguyen6159 Not sure, I'll definitely look into the land value tax approach for a future video. It seems like a promising idea.
When people say "I hate downtown. There's no parking!" What they really mean is, "I can't find parking 15 feet in front of the front door and I'm too lazy to walk a couple of blocks"
What they also mean is there’s no free parking
Yeah that doesnt apply in many major cities.
Who wants to buy something heavy, such as a chainsaw, and then carry it for blocks? I used to work in a hardware store downtown in a large city. When the street in front of the store was closed to car traffic, the store eventually had to close and move out of town. Downtown, where there's lots of retail, the street parking needs to be limited to 30 minutes or an hour, perhaps shorter for businesses that can turn over customers faster.
@@bite-sizedshorts9635 There are so many better options for allowing someone to purchase a heavy object and transport it out of the store that don't require us to prioritize cars at every last corner of our cities. What you're talking about might be a semi-regular occurrence but the vast majority of people don't go downtown to go purchase big heavy items every time they go. Organizing our transportation system around making sure they can get their car parked right up next to the door in case that's the case is wasteful, shortsighted, and honestly just straight up silly to even suggest. You act as if a temporary parking spot or two can't be placed nearby for loading and unloading. That doesn't require the store to have a football field sized parking lot.
@@bite-sizedshorts9635 I’d buy something like that from Amazon so I get a better price and don’t have to mess with carrying it to my car.
In the future, Tulsa has become the first city to be 100% parking. The competition was rough. The finalists were Jacksonville, and Tulsa.
and everything else should be built underground, shops, housing, offices for example
And people will still complain that they're not enough parking
I’m from Jacksonville and really passionate about urban planning and densification, and I agree but it’s getting better pretty fast!
@@Lyerbait13 Jacksonville is one of the least walkable cities. For decades the city has ignored all infill opportunities in favor of sprawl because of the city county merger.
@@GenericUrbanism hahaha I know, I’m a native. I’m lucky enough to live in the most walkable area of the city, Riverside. We’ve got a massive 30 mile bike network coming online in the next year and a commuter rail project in the making, although probably ~7 years away. I’m hoping for the best and participating in city events, I want this city to thrive!
The problem with parking, much like highways, is that the more you build, the less there is to drive to and the longer you'll spend looking for somewhere to
@Will Swift the problem is we're still building the city around parking. Parking garages are not great places to be
@WilliamHelstadplease say this is a joke... 'ground level should be parking'... what!!! Build the city ontop of the parking? That's just a carbrain idea for a problem caused by cars.
@WilliamHelstadno, ground level should be for people. Make the cars park underground
Absolutely mind blowing to me how city downtowns have been progressively demolished over decades. My question is why? Were building owners paid a lot of money to tear them down? Were buildings run down and replacing them with parking was seen as a reasonable option? Were old buildings torn down and never replaced and eventually filled in? The idea of letting this happen to your city, let alone your own building, is baffling!
It's a very good question, I think it's a combination of the things you mentioned, plus that most of the development towards the end of the 20th century, most development in the city was focused on building more car-centric sprawl. People didn't see the value in downtown, so it fell apart.
In historical terms, we're still in the early decades of most downtowns being expensive, upmarket, and desirable locations. Through most of the history of settlement, downtowns were the places of shipping, warehousing, poverty, and heavy industry. Many buildings that would be desirable in the current urban landscape made sense* to be torn down at the times they were torn down.
*to the decision-making class
(why it still happens is more of a mystery, but it's getting more rare. In most places, most of the gutting happened in a different time, under different circumstances.)
@@kevinjosephzaragoza7879 exactly. In the case of residential buildings, many were undermaintained, underoccupied and fetching only tenement-level rents.
To developers / captial, it's not about strict profitability as much as opportunity cost. If you have "only" 10 million dollars to throw around, you want to put it into the thing that you think will return 20 million rather than the thing you think will return 11 million over a given timeframe.
Deferred maintenance on some of these buildings turned ownership/management into almost an extractive industry. Quality "comes out" of the building in the form of deferred maintenance, and the extra cash is instead towards something with greater returns than the maintenance would have yielded. At a certain point of no return of ill-maintenance, the building becomes a depleted mine.
You very likely know all this, but we're talking to the whole comment section, so I thought I'd be thorough.
So the demolition of old buildings instead of repairing and renovating caused trillions of dollars of property loss over the last 60 years. Imagine if the United States never went to car centric suburbia and instead kept the old walkable, dense mixed used cities. The United States will be a far richer country today insane way more positively by Europe instead of a car centric hellhole. There will be a lot less wealth inequality as well
It's refreshing to see real on-site studies done for a video like this, and great graphics to go with. I'm feeling the beginnings of another major urbanist channel here. See you at 50k!
I am fascinated by the freeway ring in Tulsa. It is so huge and seems insanely outsized for the city.
Definitely. The IDL will be the spotlight of some future videos, but I'll need to work up to that. It's definitely wild though.
I am unsure if the videos by City Nerd have covered Tulsa in any of them but would be highly surprised if it never made even a dishonourable mention.
@@klobiforpresident2254 that oversized freeway ring has definitely been mentioned. I forget in which videos, though.
@@danieldaniels7571
Probably at least "top ten freeway heavy downtowns" (or equivalent title) and he may have done something on cities with most surface parking (I know he did largest lots).
2:01 This guy says very clearly that the problem is land speculation. People hold on to parking lots in hopes that one day a huge development will come and buy their land. The solution to this isn't to ban surface parking because those speculators will just hold on to empty lots instead. The solution is a LAND VALUE TAX. Speculators need to pay taxes on the full value of the land they hold on to, not substantially less because nothing is built there. Land speculation plagues LOTS of US cities.
We can ban surface parking downtown too, nothing wrong with that. But land value tax is the solution to the problem that you addressed.
This is a very good point, probably the conclusion I should've come to in the video. I'll definitely be looking more into this in the future.
@@eryngo.urbanism Thanks! I was hoping you'd come to that conclusion but I thought the video was excellent nonetheless.
Speculation might be an issue but often its just literally the LAW that X amount parking is required for Y.
Land value taxation doesn't fix the issue. The problem is that there is no drive to redevelop the land because of the lack of demand for anything that the lot could be redeveloped to. Adding a land value tax doesn't fix that issue. It just makes the land even more worthless.
@@1000rogueleader The other problem with it, is who determines the value of the land and how do they calculate it? It's maybe not an unsolvable problem, but not many people have good proposals for it.
there is this assumption that if the area wasnt a parking lot it would be housing or retail but the reason it was made into a parking lot in the first place is no one was willing to pay for those things in the first place . A parking lot is a sign the land has such low value that no one was willing to build on it in the first place .
If tiny homes were more acceptable, instead of a parking lot we could see tiny homes parked and rented out. This allows for the site to stay "undeveloped" while still providing housing. Events like Burning Man prove that we can take a plot of land literally in the middle of the desert and turn it into a semi-habitable community. Adding housing to an empty downtown parking lot should be much easier.
@@user-lz3ut8qp5j Tiny home communities become squatter areas, quuckly becoming dilapidated and fraught with crime. Nobody wants to live there. We tried it where I'm from.
@@user-lz3ut8qp5j Renting homes simply doesn't make as much money as parking, I'm afraid. The reason the homes and businesses on the land beforehand were bulldozed for parking lots is because the parking lots simply bring in far more money from parking fees than whatever was there before, with no upkeep really necessary. If there was a drive to build more business or housing downtown, the lots would have been bought and redeveloped a long time ago. The problem is that there isn't enough demand for whatever the lots could be redeveloped to, whether that be a new office skyscraper or a residential high rise.
I think we should fill some of those parking places with picnic tables, canopies, and planters. I can gaurantee that the people working in businesses would love outdoor seating for breaks during pleasant weather. Fill the rest of the parking places with more buildings to make it an actual downtown.
Tactical urbanism! I like it.
An farmer's market or similar event could also work as a demonstration. The difference between those markets and the classic shopping arcade(which I've recently become enamored with) is just in how permanent the infrastructure is; design some canopied lanes and fill them with destinations.
Reminds me of Not Just Bikes’ video on business parks. People should be able to step out of their stressful offices and find nice amenities to escape with.
You should look up a book by Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia called Tactical Urbanism, which is about how to do just that.
But “you can’t do that because loitering” lol our mentality around living is messed up.
Plus “how else will the cops and municipalities make money?!?”
Lol
There's a sweet irony in suggesting people park at a train station then ride into town while showing a train pulling autoracks. 😂
The only train I could find here in Oklahoma 😂
I visited Oklahoma C., OK-I couldn't believe there was no public transit to/from the airport.
5:40 I really appreciate the poetic statement about *preference of Turd over Diarrhea.*
I'm so glad I found this gem of a channel! We need more people to talk about and prove that there is a massive car problem in America. i hope that in the near future innovators like you will be able to pitch ideas that the public will see and push for.
Lots of videos about how bad urban parking is recently and I love it! Your production quality is again fantastic!
As a Dutchy I don’t understand how America has gotten to this point. When a single street in Amsterdam was bulldozed for a freeway the outrage was so great people still call it a scar and there are monuments set up for the disaster. But loads of American cities looked like they’re carpet bombed and nobody even bothered to take care of them anymore. Truly a sad site.
Part of the answer is racism. With whites fleeing to the suburbs, no one powerful cared about the people left in the city cores.
Taxes, maintenance costs, and lack of another willing buyer. It costs money to tear down and dispose of these buildings, so the logical conclusion is that taxes and maintenance costs for the life of the building were greater than tearing it down and paving it over for parking.
The failure is not urbanism, the failure is rooted in failed national and state government economic policy and probably a downtown which until recently was not safe.
Notice how the op carefully avoids any mention of when these buildings disappeared in other words lost value.
Very surreal to be recommended this video. I am a Tulsa resident myself and someone who watches a lot of urbanist videos. Didn't expect this one to be from a local. Even featured the parking lot I've been parking at every week for the past couple years (at TCC downtown). The more I've learned about urban planning, the more I see what a miserable example this city is. Especially downtown as you showed, it's just amazing how EMPTY it is for such a big city. I highly encourage you to keep making videos, keep up the good work. We need more people talking about this topic, especially in Tulsa.
I love how every urbanist channel acknowledges that they all share the same audience
I remember visiting Tulsa several years ago and I really enjoyed the architecture. I spent a few days walking around downtown and I was just floored at how much parking there was. I have never seen so much surface parking in my life.
I knew Tulsa had parking problems (like most US cities) but I don't think I had ever truly realized the extent of it until I saw the skyshot in this video
Don't make surface parking illegal, just tax the crap out of them. Extra taxing will dissuade people from just sitting on the land and drive land "supply" up and lower housing costs. Not only this, the revenue from surface parking taxes could go into developing more transit options. It's a win-win for the city.
I opened this video because I saw the Tulsa skyline. I love the city and love the downtown, sans the parking. Highly recommend going to Reservoir Hill north of downtown at night for a beautiful view (and a giant “TULSA” with an arrow that points to the airport).
downtown Tulsa reminds me of downtown DC from the 90s, where most was parking. now it's mostly mixed use and parking is underground. love it!
I am completely for walkable cities, and I am very active getting at least 10,000 steps per day, and yet I will still choose to drive down the road than walk because it’s so much easier and slightly less depressing than walking on a sidewalk with loud cars going by.
Your editing is getting REALLY good. Out of all the urban/transit CZcamsrs, yours seem to be the most... on the ground? In any case, I really appreciate how you are actually on camera in the places you talk about. CityBeautiful is the only other one I can think of who does this.
On a good news story, the city of Canberra, which for most of its history has been entirely surface car parks (see any old photo of wasteland)-- is slowly building city out of them!
Or rather, it has changed more in the last 10 years than 70 years.
Unfortunately though we have not done away with minimum parking requirements (replace a surface lot? Get _5-storey basement_ parking!)
Of course, the same car arguments remain, but seeing Tulsa has given me some...uh, perspective.
The ironic thing is that the original plan by the Griffins' is basically modern urbanist utopia
Richmond city council currently has a proposal to abolish and at least lower minimum parking regulations in the downtown area. I'm optimistic that they will do the right thing. The city center is a glut of parking garage that mostly sit empty and create a boring concrete jungle that diminishes quality of life.
Your channel deserves more views. Love that one of the newest urbanist CZcamsrs is from Oklahoma! I’m a civil engineer for OK, working on projects in the okc area and sometimes Tulsa. Definitely trying to apply urbanist principles to projects whenever possible, but not a lot is within my power unfortunately. It’s more up to the local municipality. Having your videos around is great for sharing with my friends and family in OK, as videos that talk about one’s local area is way more interesting and attention grabbing.
Ah yes, the problems of good old AMERICA 🇺🇸 💀 I’m still shocked at the amount of car parks in USA, my family moved to Orlando from belfast like 50 years ago
A wild Lloyd Noble bus appears! Never used it as I didn't have a car the whole time I was in Norman.
Your channel was a great discovery!
Congratulations, great job!
It's crazy how much space parking lots and freeways take up in downtown Tulsa.
We have a parking map very similar to this for sioux falls south dakota. We feel your pain. And I applaud you for standing up for your city.
great video :D
The solution is deeper. Instead of making downtown just Office, create living spaces, and built a giant train station that serves to all the suburbs...then turn those suburbs into railroad suburbs, then boom! No need to even park. Just take the train. (Getting rid of the freeway belt would really help too.)
The TARDIS sound effect at 3:11 !!! Fantastic!!! …And the Minecraft sfx too :)
“Parking downtown is such a pain. Oh look, there’s a spot!”
*camera pans out to reveal massive empty parking lot*
The fact that a place with no minimum parking requirements still turned into a parking crater proves how absurd the concept of minimum parking requirements is.
3:07 Honda CRX, dream car, nimble efficient fun.
That map of surface parking was wild. Thanks for working to raise awareness!
I have family in Tulsa and its crazy how hollowed out their downtown area is from what was once a booming town.
That downtown Tulsa Home Depot reminds me of the German city Essen (population almost 600k) having an IKEA with parking lot right next to the city center. The difference to American cities being here that they didn't punch a few squaremiles worth of wasteland into their city on purpose, a decision I'd find a big baffling to be honest.
Sounds like Tulsa is needs a land value tax. The dude basically said land owners were just sitting on surface parking lots until land values increased (land speculation). A land value tax is the solution to land speculation.
Great content! Signing up for Patreon to support more videos
Great video ❤
Excellent video! :]
Here's Jacobs on junkyards. I think it also applies to surface parking. It's a symptom of broader issues not a cause.
"s it true that city diversity invites ruinous uses? Is permissive-
ness for all (or almost all) kinds of uses in an area destructive?
To consider this, we need to consider several different kinds of
uses-some of which actually are harmful, and some of which are
conventionally considered to be harmful but are not.
One destructive category of uses, of which junk yards are an
example, contributes nothing to a district's general convenience,
attraction, or concentration of people. In return for nothing,
these uses make exorbitant demands upon the land-and upon
esthetic tolerance. Used-car lots are in this category. So are
buildings which have been abandoned or badly underused.
Probably everyone (except possibly the owners of such ob-
jects) is agreed that this category of uses is blighting.
But it does not follow that junk yards and their like are there-
fore threats which accompany city diversity. Successful city dis-
tricts are never dotted with junk yards, but that is not why these
districts are successful. It is the other way around. They lack junk
yards because they are successful.
Deadening and space-taking low economic uses like junk yards
and used-car lots grow like pigweed in spots which are already
uncultivated and unsuccessful. They sprout in places that have
low concentrations of foot traffic, too little surrounding magnet-
ism, and no high-value competition for the space. Their natural
homes are gray areas and the dwindled-off edges of downtowns,
where the fires of diversity and vitality burn low. If all controls
were lifted from housing-project malls, and these dead, underused
places found their natural economic level, junk yards and used-car
lots are exactly what would sprout in many of them.
The trouble represented by junk yards goes deeper than the
Blight Fighters can plumb. It achieves nothing to cry "Take them
away! They shouldn't be there!" The problem is to cultivate an
economic environment in the district which makes more vital
uses of the land profitable and logical. If this is not done, the land
might as well be used for junk yards, which after all have some
use. Little else is apt to be successful, and this includes public
uses, like parks or school yards, which fail catastrophically pre-
cisely where the economic environment is too poor for other uses
that depend on magnetism and surrounding vitality. The kind of
problem symbolized by junk yards, in short, is not solved by
fearing diversity, or by suppression, but rather by catalyzing and
cultivating a fertile economic environment for diversity."
Great vid🎉
TBH, it really comes down to the parking structures should be favored more than surface parking in this scenario. all that surface level parking lots are all a waste of space while parking structures are less of a waste of space.
This is so relevant to swaths of downtown Buffalo too, and then some.
cool a new fresh channel!
No one wants to live near car traffic, and parking creates that traffic.
This is a great video
This city feels like a GTA game where you run it on lower graphics so less cars spawn in lol
Great video, I love the amount of effort you put into these, and how you base it around the town you live in. I’ve been learning some video editing and I’m thinking of starting a urbanism channel based on my home city in North Carolina. Love all of your videos, keep it up!!!!
Yes! The more the merrier! Plus it's great to hear perspectives from different cities, because while all cities have a lot of similar issues, there's always a few that are unique to each region or municipality. Best of luck to you!
no-mass transit
Another great video! It would be nice to see if there were any studies about what would happen if surface parking were banned.
This totally flipped my preconceived notions of mandatory parking minimums. I guess I am now a parking ban advocate.
Combination parking lot with solar panels on top. 2 ways to make income.
Nice video's, watched 2 and it's interesting to see. Subbed! Greets from the Netherlands
Here's a video of some cycle lanes here, if you are interested, and you seem to look for alternatives (I watched bus video earlier) czcams.com/video/c1l75QqRR48/video.html
Yaay, the pink urbanist has come to visit us again!
Decrease property taxes and increase land taxes! This makes tearing buildings down less attractive and makes holding and speculating land (without improving it) much more expensive.
Basically the problem isnt "Nowhere to park" the problem is
"Nowhere to go" Everything people want to go to is extremly close together, so all the nearby parking is used, that leaves huge swatch of empty space used for nothing that parking and noone wants to park there cause there is nothing nearby
Great video as always! It's unbelievable how much surface parking there is in downtown Tulsa. It's a real shame because the architecture and buildings there are so wonderful.
Tulsa is America in nutshell.
How did you find the online zoning map you used?
tulsaplanning.org/resources/maps/
I'm a simple man - I see a new video of yours, I press the like button 💪
Parking Maximums maybe? I drive to downtown Tulsa about once a week, at various times of day (so I’ve seen workday midday and weekend evenings out) and I have never not found an open parking spot fairly close to my destination. Not a single time. That in itself means there is FAR too much land wasted on parking. Only once did I have to walk more than about two blocks (which was during the recent Post Malone concert, maybe the toughest ticket downtown this year.) I’ve never even needed to park in one of the paid lots. Vast swaths of which sit empty almost all of the time.
I love downtown! But Tulsa needs to get rid of all the huge, empty, desolate parking lots occupying some of the most valuable land in the city. Anyone who says otherwise has not tried very hard, or it has not occurred to them that walking a couple blocks in a vibrant downtown space is actually very pleasant!
Extremely interressant that the existence of minimum parking requirements is not a prerequisit for this kind of city-center-parking-lot-hellscape !
Just do what we do, build underground parking garages, they can even used as bunkers so.
Things are in no way perfect here in Germany and we need way more effort and money put into bike, pedestrian and public transport infrastructure. But when I want to get from my parents house into the center of our city, it takes me a 15 minute bus ride. And when I want to get to cologne which is 16 miles away, I need to take one Bus for 15 minutes and from there a train for another 12-15 minutes. The bus stop is about two minutes from their house, so it would take about half an hour. Right now it would take me 50 - 60 minutes if I want to make the same trip by car. And I would have to find somewhere to park and would have to pay probably the same as the public transport if I wanted to leave my car there for several hours. Even my parents only drive there if they need to transport something, and trust me they're quite conservative. So they're not taking the train for the environment, they're doing it because it's way cheaper and faster. And that's the way to empower car alternatives. You can talk to people all day about some consequences, they probably stick to what works best for them. So you have to make leaving the car at home work better...
Watching your and some other videos that focus on NA really makes me appreciate what we already have achieved in some places here in Germany.
You need more videos. Your content is fire.
If you live in a city like Tulsa and you're not a fan of all the shitty zoning restrictions, GO TO A TOWN HALL!!! The only people who go there is old retired people who want more parking lots
This makes me want to move to Tulsa
Love the Doctor Who reference
If I could do one thing I would stop the federal funding of city budgets.
I mean, at least that might make cities a bit more hesitant to pour soo much money into expensive highway construction.
I live in Bern, Switzerland, which is just 1/3 the size of Tulsa. 57% of the households don't have a car, there are 5 streetcar lines and 22% of the traffic is on bicycles. In the whole city we have just about 17k surface parking lots for 150k people - it's enough. Our city center is walkable and very well frequented - it's a place to be. Why are U.S. cities so reluctant to do the same?
It blows my mind that there wasnt a legal parking requirement and people were still like "lets destroy it all for fun"
I think it should be a law in the US that if a city block has a building on it, all the adjacent city blocks need to be surface parking only. That should alleviate any parking problems.
Why stop at free parking? Maybe the city should pay you to park
This is probably insufficient. There should also be a rule that a parking-only city block may be adjacent to only one block with a building on it. Otherwise, we might run out of parking spaces.
"they're just there"
I mean, they're just there, consuming vast amounts of valuable space downtown, subsidizing a car-centric society, potentially doubling the time to go somewhere, etc.
I don't know what the breakeven point for car-centric environments are in terms of density but I strongly suspect downtown Tulsa is way way beyond it and that there is some kind of socially harmful behavior happening as a result of market forces here.
6:29 Yooo literally my car
7:14 I personally had a good experience with the park and ride systems in MA.
1) Boston is expensive and I grew up 50 miles west of Boston
2) The MBTA Commuter Rail connects basically every medium size town (25K people or more) in a 60 mile radius to Boston (the ride is about an hour on the longest route)
I have never ONCE driven into Boston. I have always driven to a commuter rail station, parked there, then taken the train in and out
@1:13 really should have been accompanied by horror music and the screams of tortured souls.
I wonder why all those businesses decided to build parking lots on their land instead of anything else. Do they have to prove to the city that it's still theirs somehow? Because I imagine that maintaining a lot in perpetuity is more expensive than planting a rock garden or something
Because parking lots make money. Far more money than what was there before. So it makes more sense to have a parking lot on the land and wait for the next developer to show up and buy the land to redevelop it into something else.
@@1000rogueleader These lots are half empty at best though. And how much money does barren asphalt make? About as much as a bunch of rocks, but at least rocks don't increase your chances of flooding.
They don’t want people to live there until they can begin gentrification. Stalling pays for these corporate slum lords.
@@guy-sl3kr - It actually makes a lot if there are desirable locations; such as theaters, stadiums, or other venues near by.
In Detroit an empty asphalt lot can make all it yearly money in one week at the public auto show when it was in January
Just make transit so good that it’s the most convenient way to get into the city
Being from the Netherlands, I wanted to mention that park and ride schemes are quite widespread here. I think nearly all major cities have them in some form of another. They're useful because long-distance transit can be quite expensive and bothersome for people from non-urban areas. Park and ride enables people to travel between cities over an intercity highway but not congest whatever city they are visiting. They're often cheaper than parking in the city center, for example in Nijmegen you can park for €3,50 and ride the bus with up to 4 people, and in Enschede it is even €3 with up to 5 people. Those daily rates are comparable with hourly daytime rates for parking downtown! (Parking is usually cheaper at night, which compensates for the worse or nonexistent bus service at those hours.)
Great video. I'm from the UK, and we definitely don't have as big of a problem here, but problems still exist. In fact, in my small town, our local council recently announced plans to re-organise the town centre by downsizing their office, building a parking garage on the space created and then removing the existing surface parking lot and putting houses on it. They said the total number of spaces would not reduce. Even with all that, the NIMBYs are coming out in force saying it will "ruin the historic views" (of what? cars?) and that people with disabilities will have to walk further, which is bad. I have to admit they have somewhat of a point there, and I'm definitely not against the idea of leaving some parking spaces for the disabled, elderly and perhaps even parents with children, but you could still remove 50-70% of the spaces and it would be absolutely fine. What is disappointing is that our council doesn't seem to be doing much to improve walking and cycling infrastructure, when it could be pretty easy and cheap to do so.
If downtown has many places where 5000 people want to go, there's only place for 2000 cars, and the only way to go there is by car, of course there's going to be a problem. Solutions:
- Make downtown a wasteland where nobody wants to go,
- Destroy all buildings in downtown and make it 100% a parking lot, which will be always empty,
- Build public transportation so people will use it instead of the car. People could still go to downtown, and those who choose the car can find a parking spot.
Minor point, but I really wish people would distinguish between free and paid parking in a lot of these discussions.
I was in Tulsa on a work trip about 10 years ago. Silly Yurpian that I am, I thought I'd go to 'downtown' or the city centre as we call it. I couldn't believe what I saw. There was nobody there!
Turns out downtown Tulsa is just offices, and on Saturday everyone goes to the malls on the outskirts of town. Really sad.
The big question I have about planning in America is how did it go this far wrong before anyone realised? You've been building car-dependent hell for decades...
Long story short, Murican.
Government subsidize the type of development we saw today, while ban development that will lead to walkable city.
Then automobile industry (and everything associated to make a 2 ton steel and plastic), oil industry, etc create a narrative of transit is for the poor.
It does not help transit is actually the most useful for lower middle class and people of lower socioeconomic class, which only feed into the narrative.
I had this same experience when visiting a friend in Birmingham, AL. I'm a New Yorker and I've traveled all over Europe. I've never been as shocked by any place as by (empty, dead, full of parking lots) Downtown Birmingham and finally understood the expression "there's no there there."
A lesser known historic event was the Tulsa Massacre, a Jim Crow era event in which white men rampaged through the black part of town, killing people and burning homes and businesses. Not to sideline the real need for rezoning, but reparation should be part of any rebuilding in Tulsa. I wonder if any portion of that paved over downtown used to be the black neighborhood?
Parking can feel scarce even though there are all these surface lots because they are too expensive to feasibly park in. I lived in Portland ME for a bit as a college student and I didn't have anywhere to park my car. It's a very urban area and I've visited it many times by train before living there. However there was a sort of "parking mafia" that owned a bunch of lots around the city. It was kind of crazy because there would be really high density and then somewhere random would just be a parking lot. There would be many times that street parking was pretty much full yet there would be a nearly empty surface lot. I would drive around for 10 mins looking for a space, and if I couldn't I'd just park illegally (the fines were cheaper than the parking mafia lots). This happened because the parking mafia can charge any outrageous price for their parking spaces because they actually don't need to make any, since it's really a real estate investment. The worse part is that the parking mafia is literally just one company (UPP parking) so they have a monopoly on the surface lots. Being in Maine there are a lot people who live out in the countryside and drive into Portland for whatever cosmopolitan thing they want to do, so the city needs parking. However, the surface lots are so ugly and make the city feel so much worse. Someday soon I hope that the surface lots are sold to developers or the city (to make parks or garages). Until then I prey on the downfall of UPP.
Who could’ve expected that the owners of these lots don’t usually have the public’s best interest in the forefront of their minds
The majority of the surface parking is on the wrong side of downtown from the businesses that people want to patronize. A lot of the old buildings were demolished because they sat empty for decades. It became too costly for the owners to keep those buildings, so they turned their sites into surface parking.
Spanish here who has lived all his life in a normal city? european style?. I can't understand that city center and its surroundings lol. It all seems very very very strange to me.
I also do not understand, what is the logic of not having mixed areas, shops in the basement of apartment buildings, streets, parks, tramways, restaurants, squares, schools, cultural centers, etc walking, having fun. What makes a city alive, and economically and healthy positive.
I hope that changes. These channels do a lot of good for that to change. 100% to your work.
For rail to truly become viable for people it needs to have its own right of ways or the government needs to own them. The reason we have goodish rail transit here in the Northeast is Amtrak and transit agencies often own the rails, This means they do not have to bend a knee to CSX or whatever corrupt freight railroad owns the tracks in the area. Otherwise the passenger train can get tossed on a siding so the company train can have priority.
I was absolutely shocked when I visited Chicago(was really in a burb so I took Metra into the city) and a freight train roared through the station, Would never see that on Metro North.
on a side note I wonder if a city has ever considered Maximum parking laws, That is instead of how many spots you MUST have(minimums). Instead set a maximum percent of a property that may be occupied solely by parking infrastructure.
Who in the hell said there isn't enough parking in Tulsa?
driving is navigating
Woah who knew you were worth $599
God Oklahoma looks so depressing 😂
Walkable, until it rains, snows, is excessively cold, or hot, or you have tons of bags to carry.