Parking – or people?

Want your city to thrive? Start by rethinking parking lots.

The topic of excessive parking was covered in a recent StrongTowns newsletter. Yeah. We get it. it seems like there is never enough parking available in Asbury Park. Whether you drive, walk, or roll the subject of parking is fraught with misunderstanding, and sometimes triggering.

Read on.

The Washington Post opinion piece (gift article) on March 27th about the damaging effects of excessive surface parking lots in our cities describes the problem:

Surface parking lots eat up people space. “They’re often large fields of empty space,” says Derek Hoetmer, founding principal at urban design firm MCLV, “contributing nothing beyond the sole purpose of storing personal property (cars). They lack the ingredients of what makes cities great: a sense of place.”

“These micro wastelands drain the life from neighborhoods, blighting American cities. It’s time we imagine better.”

Did you know that there are 8 parking spaces for every car in the US?

America has eight parking spaces for every car.

Cities like Buffalo are getting rid of parking minimums and changing zoning, which opens up valuable space.

Many former parking lots are turning into housing. (Some are also becoming parks, in cities including Dallas and Detroit; in San Diego, part of one parking lot has been restored to a salt marsh.)  As cities realize that they’ve built more parking than they need, dozens have eliminated parking requirements in new buildings, as described in this Fast Company article.

Excessive property dedicated to parking also has a negative effect on kids’ health. There’s a short anecdote in the WP article about kids playing in an empty parking lot being kicked off the property. A bank that owned the lot didn’t want the liability. The lot has been vacant, and unused for years; but this use of empty space for play could not be permitted.

Advocates for open streets and open playgrounds know that if cities aren’t built with the health, development, and independence of kids in mind, the  result is an insidious public health emergency.

School playgrounds should be open off school hours, public parks should have active play equipment, and parking lots can be repurposed as play spaces for kids and families.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about the great rewiring of childhood in his new book, The Anxious Generation

Haidt says childhood is increasingly being spent in virtual worlds rather than the real one, and early years are so solitary, sedentary, and coddled.

For the first time — maybe in history? — a middle-aged man is more likely to be admitted to the hospital for unintentional injuries than a boy aged 10-19.

 

The move from a play-based childhood to a device-based one has contributed to an epidemic of obesity, and mental illness among young people, especially girls. The rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, and even suicide are skyrocketing. There are other related factors, including what Haidt describes as “collapse of adult solidarity”

Matt Levy’s 2010 documentary, New York Street Games opens with the words: “Before cellphones, BlackBerries and Facebook . . . before a neighbor’s doorstep required an invitation . . . before ‘playdates,’ there was play.”

There’s been a decline in outdoor activities since the 1970s. Bike riding to school is down 31% since 1995, according to American Sports Data, a research firm. Only 6% of children ages nine to 13 play outside on their own. Kids in low-income communities, are spending 40 hours a week with electronic media, according to the Kaiser Foundation.

“I worry that we’re going to be a society in 50 years of computer kids, people who are desensitized to other human beings,” said Levy. “If I start using technology to talk to you on a full-time basis, that’s a problem.”

 

 

 

The Price Of Automotive Addiction. New Yorker Book Reviews.

What’s your main mode of transportation?

Like most Americans it’s probably vehicular.

Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of two new books:

Daniel Knowles’s “Carmageddon” is a serious argument against cars. Henry Grabar’s “Paved Paradise” is an anti-parking with an entertaining tilt. Both books make an argument for alternative like rapid transit, trains and trolleys, bicycles, but they mostly criticise the current systems. 

“We pay an enormous price for our automotive addiction—in congestion, time wasted, neighborhoods destroyed, emissions pumped out, pleasant streets subordinated to brutal expressways—but telling the addict that the drug isn’t actually pleasurable is a losing game. There is some slight hope in saying that it isn’t healthy, and that the replacement for the drug is about as good. But understanding this emotional infrastructure in favor of cars is vital to imagining their possible replacement.

The grip of the car as a metaphor for liberty is as firm as that of guns, if perhaps with similarly destructive results.”

Any thoughts about parking?  It’s the most contentious issue in many US cities. Gopnik references Donald Shoup’s 2005“The High Cost of Free Parking,”

Americans have been brainwashed to believe that they’re entitled to parking. Bitter battles about storing cars, and mis-belief that more cars = more business leads city leaders to backtrack on beneficial community projects like Open Street on Cookman Ave.

Cookman while it was open to people, and car-free.
Cookman after the brief single season of being open to people is again a car sewer.

Parking has its very own official committee in Asbury Park, with enough stuff about car storage to discuss in lengthy monthly meetings. We propose a Transportation Equity Committee, but that’s another story.

Parking minimums were established by The  Institute of Transportation Engineers, (which still exist in Asbury Park) whereby builders have to provide x-number of spaces for residences, and businesses, leading to cities’ swaths of asphalt dedicated to car storage, contributing in part to a housing shortage, suburban sprawl, and the development of neighborhoods where you can’t get anywhere to do or buy anything without a car.

Asbury Park is a “15 minute city”, as the now contentious concept is described in the article. It’s a walkable, rollable city, but private cars still rule. We propose on-demand transit to reduce car dependency, mitigate the parking problem, and to make our streets safer. Yes, that’s another story.

Now that parking minimums are being abolished in many cities, car owners are angry that they have to pay for it themselves. Oh the inequity of it.

What if we had reliable, affordable, convenient transit options? What if we didn’t need cars?

Read or listen to the book reviews:

How To Quit Cars

They crowd streets, belch carbon, bifurcate communities, and destroy the urban fabric. Will we ever overcome our addiction?