Not taking a side but still trying to start a fight. Interesting take.
But sure if you want it: Drivers or not, free parking and the driving incentive it provides are massive drains on the taxpayers. It’s a net-negative. The fuckcars crowd can back everything with historical examples, studies, and all manner of hard evidence and the people that don’t even know how many cylinders their cars have only have embarrassing outrage. Of course they’re annoyed, car-centric infrastructure is actively hurting everyone and not a scrap evidence shows that it’s truly beneficial for literally anyone save for incredibly niche cases that aren’t ever what anyone is talking about. You should be pissed.
A few points to be had: we are (probably) arguing about viability in two very, very different worlds. I am predominantly small-town & country. Somebody from Chicago referred to our one big city as a “small city”, lol. So for where I live and our lifestyle, pay lots are frustrating AF. Dumb AF. By & large unnecessary. Hell I only know of a few in the area. My experience with pay-lots is when I visit larger cities like Chicago, I think Nashville at one point.
Now I can see how people that live & work in a bigger city, land usage is at a ridiculous premium. You’re all living on top of each other. Big, empty, free parking lots would be a waste & headache. I can see city dwellers, more used to the nonsense, maybe with a streamlined process to park & pay (passes & whatnot) can benefit. I’m all for helping the taxpayers.
Pay-lots are just a part of somebody else’s life that I don’t have to (and do not want to) deal with. But I say…respect the car boot, pay the fines, because the alternative is worse for all of us.
Oddly enough, mid and high density areas aren’t just for big cities. I know that’s not how North America handles things when it comes to medium-sized cities and small towns but absolutely you can create more efficient towns and living situations even away from large city centers.
The biggest thing that really put it well for me is someone pointing out that frontier towns, or really any town before the car, weren’t spread out just because the population was lower and they had the space. Everything had to be walkable because that’s the only way you could get around; it was human-scaled. There’s no reason we can’t build like that today to create better, stronger cities even when they’re “small”.
Heck where I grew up if you’re lucky enough to live closer to the actual village and not sequestered away in one of the residential-only suburbs you don’t even need a car for your basic life. For commuting yes because we’re not there yet as a society but you can do a lot of stuff in the village as it and the nearby housing was built before the car. Where I live now in Montréal I can happily say that if you dropped my 15min city/borough onto a patch of land by itself you’d need very few modifications to make it a fully functioning city all on its own. I have never felt like people in my mid-density area “live on top of one another”, either, despite literally having upstairs neighbours.
My point is that you don’t need to sprawl and make driving a requirement at any scale. You can make a town of 500 people just as close and connected as a city of 1mil people.
Not taking a side but still trying to start a fight. Interesting take.
But sure if you want it: Drivers or not, free parking and the driving incentive it provides are massive drains on the taxpayers. It’s a net-negative. The fuckcars crowd can back everything with historical examples, studies, and all manner of hard evidence and the people that don’t even know how many cylinders their cars have only have embarrassing outrage. Of course they’re annoyed, car-centric infrastructure is actively hurting everyone and not a scrap evidence shows that it’s truly beneficial for literally anyone save for incredibly niche cases that aren’t ever what anyone is talking about. You should be pissed.
A few points to be had: we are (probably) arguing about viability in two very, very different worlds. I am predominantly small-town & country. Somebody from Chicago referred to our one big city as a “small city”, lol. So for where I live and our lifestyle, pay lots are frustrating AF. Dumb AF. By & large unnecessary. Hell I only know of a few in the area. My experience with pay-lots is when I visit larger cities like Chicago, I think Nashville at one point.
Now I can see how people that live & work in a bigger city, land usage is at a ridiculous premium. You’re all living on top of each other. Big, empty, free parking lots would be a waste & headache. I can see city dwellers, more used to the nonsense, maybe with a streamlined process to park & pay (passes & whatnot) can benefit. I’m all for helping the taxpayers.
Pay-lots are just a part of somebody else’s life that I don’t have to (and do not want to) deal with. But I say…respect the car boot, pay the fines, because the alternative is worse for all of us.
Oddly enough, mid and high density areas aren’t just for big cities. I know that’s not how North America handles things when it comes to medium-sized cities and small towns but absolutely you can create more efficient towns and living situations even away from large city centers.
The biggest thing that really put it well for me is someone pointing out that frontier towns, or really any town before the car, weren’t spread out just because the population was lower and they had the space. Everything had to be walkable because that’s the only way you could get around; it was human-scaled. There’s no reason we can’t build like that today to create better, stronger cities even when they’re “small”.
Heck where I grew up if you’re lucky enough to live closer to the actual village and not sequestered away in one of the residential-only suburbs you don’t even need a car for your basic life. For commuting yes because we’re not there yet as a society but you can do a lot of stuff in the village as it and the nearby housing was built before the car. Where I live now in Montréal I can happily say that if you dropped my 15min city/borough onto a patch of land by itself you’d need very few modifications to make it a fully functioning city all on its own. I have never felt like people in my mid-density area “live on top of one another”, either, despite literally having upstairs neighbours.
My point is that you don’t need to sprawl and make driving a requirement at any scale. You can make a town of 500 people just as close and connected as a city of 1mil people.