12 ms·

Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

318 points by jbrins1 3y ago

kova12 3y ago
No P&L, no cost/reward analysis, no numbers at all. Just emotional "omg need more green". Have the author ever torn down a single parking lot? Doesn't look like that to me. Why is this article even on HN at all?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lifeformed 3y ago
Here in Taipei, most of the parking lots are built underground, and above them are green park spaces. It's great, a two-for-one deal.
gfs 3y ago
The book mentioned in this article (Paved Paradise) is eye-opening. I'm nearly done reading it and have a whole new perspective on the matter.
falcolas 3y ago
I'd rather they put in an indigenous meadow. Trees are awesome, but so are open green spaces that maintain themselves.
- Spivak 3y ago
  Why not both? Trees in the manner they're describing where it's just helping the forested area expand back out doesn't require human involvement either. The selfish human reason to want trees as a natural heat regulator is I think alone worth the benefit in areas with lots of asphalt where people will be near.
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    Cities are hot. Cities with lots of mature trees providing shade on the sidewalks make it a lot more bearable.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      Merely eliminating a lot of the black heat sinks (i.e. parking lots) and replacing them with native grasses would do a lot to help keep city temperatures a touch more reasonable. Asphalt both absorbs and radiates heat like mad.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    If the trees are native to the area, sure. But a tree monoculture doesn't seem to do a lot of good.
- smallerfish 3y ago
  What herbivores are you going to deploy to allow the meadow to maintain itself? Going to fence them in or let them run wild in town? In 99%+ of east coast US environments, grassland will become forest naturally (over time), even with the deer population as it is.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I had big meadows in front and back of my house when I moved in 25 years ago. I let about the 50-100 feet out by the road naturalize over time; the rest is cut by a tractor about once a year. The section out by the road is forest, albeit immature, at this point. There's far more forest in New England than there was 150 years or so ago.
  - CuriousCosmic 3y ago
    Why not do controlled burns? That's historically how most grasslands and meadows that didn't support large grazing populations stayed that way.
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  Meadows or trees would be nice, but I've noticed that underused parking lots tend to be common places to build restaurants and other retail. Not as great as trees or meadows but on the other hand I'd rather the new retail goes on parking lots rather than replacing currently existing trees & meadows.
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  A lot of places would benefit from more housing, too, or new business, or almost anything really. A parking lot is about the worst option possible. We look at a large section of a land and decide that we will destroy all life on it, pave over it with asphalt (so that even the rain cannot drain into the soil), all so that large vehicles can sit there unused. It really is the lowest opinion one can have on a piece of Earth.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    Most surface lots you see in a city are placeholders until the owner finds a project that pencils out. Why not charge people to park there until you are ready to build that new highrise?
    - Vegenoid 3y ago
      From an "I own this land and want to make the most money off of it" standpoint that makes sense. From an "I live here and want my community to be enjoyable and beautiful" standpoint it makes less sense.
- dcotter 3y ago
  Serious question: Why not plant trees & shrubs & grasses in parking lots? (as in, in containers or medians). Shade the parking lot and make it less hot. Make it prettier to park in and attract birds & other wildlife. You could even charge people for the privilege of parking somewhere nice for a change.
uudecoded 3y ago
How long does it take to break even on the carbon output of asphalt demolition and haul-away vs carbon input of optimal density trees planted in the same space?
- 2024throwaway 3y ago
  I don't think it's fair to look at carbon output in isolation here. This would greatly help with a variety of issues such as mitigating urban heat islands, providing wildlife habitat, aiding pollinators, and just generally making the world we live in less hellish.
  - mikeyouse 3y ago
    It's probably a pretty favorable comparison anyway. Asphalt is almost 100% recyclable. The demolition often just involves a single bobcat and a dump truck that hauls it to the recycling plant. A commonly used number is 10kg/tree/year for the first 20 years of a tree's growth so a plot with 25 trees would remove ~250kg/year. A gallon of gas releases about 10kg of CO2, so in that 20 year period, the little plot would capture about 5,000kg of CO2 or ~500 gallons equivalent.
- specialist 3y ago
  Unmaintained asphalt eventually reverts to gravel. No need to haul anything away. Were I replacing parking lots, I'd prioritize any abandoned / under utilized lots. Just start mulching and planting. Plant willows and maples to break up the surface. Or maybe mechanically break things up, if the best-available-science supports doing so, if you're impatient. Bonus Points: Convert planters, meridians, etc into P-Patch style community gardens. People love to garden. In my city, the wait list to join a P-Patch is years long.
wtp1saac 3y ago
Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread. In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. More places to meet people too, there’s so few third places. And not needing to drive would be a really big convenience. (To be clear, I doubt most of the US will urbanize given the rural nature of a lot of it, but I hope at least bigger cities can move in that direction)
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Fayetteville Arkansas was one of the first towns to remove the mandatory parking restrictions and a ton of abandoned downtown buildings quickly became restaurants. They were absolutely right.
  - 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
    My jaw hit the floor when I learned that some cities actually apply parking minimums to redevelopment of downtown properties and not just stuff like new surburban strip malls, to the point that some projects have bought adjacent buildings and demolished them in favor of parking lots. Maybe it's true that the r/fuckcars crowd likes to throw the term "carbrain" around a little too freely, but this kind of ass-backward policy makes me think we really do suffer from a self-destructive mind virus.
    - bsder 3y ago
      It's not always ass-backward. People forget that one of the reasons why the malls became so popular and helped collapse the old downtowns was, you guessed it, lack of free parking. With malls, you could come into a boundary and spend a significant amount of time in a walkable arena with lots of different stores. You knew there would always be parking except possibly at Christmas. Downtown? Not so much. And you probably had to pay for parking. And carry quarters for the meter. And risk getting parking tickets. etc. Malls were what all the anti-car people supposedly promise will happen when you remove cars. And yet, I know of no malls that ever gained residence areas within walking distance. Which seemingly, would have prevented the malls from collapsing. The anti-car brigade has yet to demonstrate why that should be different today.
datadrivenangel 3y ago
They (ought to) unpave the parking lot and put up a paradise! More green spaces are good for cities.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Not really. Some parks/green areas are good. However it is easy to put in more than are needed and make the city less dense which is not good for the city or your ability to do some of the things that make a city great.
  - davidw 3y ago
    Figuring out where parks go is the kind of things urban planners should be doing, rather than obsessing over overspecific zoning rules and parking regulations. Cities are best when they are allowed to gradually adapt, rather than trying to plan everything out 'just so' from the outset and being rigid about changes. But parks are tougher to put in once the land has been used up.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Which cities have too many parks?
  - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    I mean, sure, there can be healthy debate around what is the best use for a specific piece of land. But surely anything is better than a free parking lot, right?
    - bluGill 3y ago
      No, too many parks is just as bad as too many parking lots, for the same reason: they force the city to sprawl. A few parks are good - and the exact amount is debatable, but the proposal to turn all parking lots into parks will create too many parks. Everyone should have a park close to where they live. A place where kids can play and families can picnic is important to a good family life. A park is a good place for art, but it only needs to be accessible by transit as most people won't make regular visits. Many people enjoy playing volleyball, softball, or other sports, but they tend to want to play different teams so while a city should have this it should be accessible by transit but not close to everyone. There are a few variations on the above theme that I didn't mention. Once those uses are covered a city should not build more parks, instead the city needs more of the other things that make a city: places to live, work, shop, and be entertained.
irusensei 3y ago
If it’s public properties then yes please. If private then hippity hoppity…
- fjoireoipe 3y ago
  use eminent domain to turn it into public property? hoppity heft property is theft
  - Philorandroid 3y ago
    "Just take it by force" isn't the rational answer you think it is
osigurdson 3y ago
You could always put together a group and purchase the land from the current owners. Once you take possession, put the land in trust, tear it up and plant trees. You could potentially recover some costs by donating to the city but there is always a chance that they would decide to change the zoning in the future.
- ericcumbee 3y ago
  unless they have a purpose in mind for said property, a lot of cities are hesitant to do that. because it takes the property off the tax roll when the city accepts it.
  - mkoubaa 3y ago
    Yes but property values near greenery and parks are theoretically higher, right? At least in some places. It could also be beneficial for water runoff management and flood resistance to have more trees
lgleason 3y ago
I like cars and spend a decent amount of time keeping my cars looking pristine. I personally prefer having more than enough parking rather than just enough. Most of the efforts to improve walkability makes it impossible to find parking when you are driving in and forces you to park in dense areas where you either have to pay a fortune to park or park in dense areas where your car is likely to get dinged by some jerk who opens their door into your car.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  > Most of the efforts to improve walkability makes it impossible to find parking when you are driving Most of the efforts to improve driveability make it impossible to walk anywhere.
  - the_snooze 3y ago
    Exactly. There isn't a place that's simultaneously nice for drivers and nice for everyone else. A space for cars necessarily reduces value, safety, and comfort for humans outside cars.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Most efforts to improve drivability also worsen drivability.
- epistasis 3y ago
  99% of development over the past half century has been focused on making it optimal for driving, at the expense of the ~20% of people that can not even drive. And this wasn't because the market decided to do that, it's all been mandated by law. I think it's good to have a diversity of types of development. Just as people who don't want to drive shouldn't expect access to car-dependent environments to be easy, people in cars shouldn't expect the very few pockets of hard-won walkable environments to be optimal for driving into.
- cassepipe 3y ago
  I get that you like your way of life (and that you are probably not given credible alternatives in your city) but please do consider the environmental and social costs of such a way of life: A car centric life is not sustainable for the planet. You've probably seen that propaganda around here but in case you missed it, here is some documentation : https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/
ortusdux 3y ago
I'd like to see more solar covered parking lots. Bonus points for integrated EV charging stations. They would be great in the hotter parts of the country. How much fuel/energy is spent cooling cars back down after they have sat in the sun for an hour?
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  Why isn't this actually happening? Parking lots are really 2D spaces, so leveraging the unused 3rd dimension is very smart and profitable.
  - throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
    If it were profitable, they'd be profiting. Parking lots are parking lots because they require low CapEx, almost no OpEx. You buy some abandoned land, raze it, asphalt it, charge $30 a day per space (at let's say 75 spaces), tow the rest (at the driver's expense). You're pulling in a little under $67k/month. Wait for a commercial developer to come buy and take it off your hands for 3x its value. You know how much it costs to dig up the ground, install power lines, a box, then bury footings, bolt in legs, install panels, etc, 9+ feet high? For a whole parking lot? $300k-500k, minimum (that's how much it costs just to install a small fleet of EV chargers btw, that's not doing major construction over an area the size of half a football field). How much you gonna make off these panels? A 200kW panel array generates about 480MWh/yr, which at 1MW/$40 comes out to about $19,200/year in SREC credits. PA energy price is $0.18/KWh, so 480MW is $24/hr. But you're making 80% efficiency and it's not sunny all day all year, so at even 50% usage, that's $24,960/year. Almost a third of what the parking lot makes a month. Before we talk paying back installation costs, assuming your net metering deal is perfect. It would be cheaper to build a multi-story garage, where you'd make WAY more money.
    - 1970-01-01 3y ago
      >How much you gonna make off these panels? You're dismissing the possibility of free EV charging attracting shoppers. Step 1 is getting people to visit your store, step 2 is getting them to buy something, and step 3 is getting them to come again. Step 1 & 3 would immediately get noticed by the corporate bean counters. The real problem I think is the up-front costs of the installation.
bloopernova 3y ago
Can we do the same with golf courses? I think it was George Carlin that said put affordable housing on golf courses? More seriously, if you have a brownfield ex industrial site, will trees etc grow ok there? Does converting brownfield sites to meadows or forests pose any risks to nearby humans?
- adregan 3y ago
  Speaking of brownfield, you may (more likely not) be surprised to know that golf courses are pretty nasty places themselves. You can find soils contaminated with arsenic, mercury, and cadmium from fungicides. So those rolling green links might not be the cheapest places to establish new housing when you include the remediation.
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    Oof, that's pretty bad. I did not know that. Do you happen to know if forests would help clean that soil? Feels kind of appropriate if you could grow forest on a site for 50 to 100 years or more. Then harvest the wood with all the nasty stuff in it. Then bury all that contaminated wood somewhere deep. Then build houses on the newly clean earth.
    - adregan 3y ago
      You can build new soil on top of contaminated soil to bury it. Here’s a permaculture site in an old rail bed in nyc that has nasty stuff lurking beneath many layers of new soil[0]. Not really sure if trees uptake heavy metals. 0: https://youtu.be/UqyK_9iybD8?si=rx7iCjsTu1Zn6YbO https://youtu.be/UqyK_9iybD8?si=rx7iCjsTu1Zn6YbO
      - efields 3y ago
        They won’t, but certain fungi will break them down.
        kardos 3y ago
mytailorisrich 3y ago
Trees are great to provide shade in parking lots. I have been to parking lots covered in mature Aleppo Pines (which smell great in the heat) and from far away you couldn't really tell there was a parking lot there.
xnx 3y ago
Much easier to let farmland go wild than tear up parking lots and destroy any chance of recouping the embodied energy of asphalt for something useful. Most farmland is in support of animal agriculture (boooo) and wouldn't make economic sense if farms had to pay municipal rates for the water they use.
- burkaman 3y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but it sounds like a kind of sunk cost fallacy. If a parking lot has been sitting empty for years and nobody has any plan to do anything with it, maybe it's time to tear it up. The bad decision to build it in the first place has already been made, we can't undo it by waiting and hoping. You can at least recycle the asphalt to get a bit of use out of it. Rewilding unnecessary farmland is also a good idea. As usual in these conversations, there's no reason we can't do both.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Take all the trees, put em in a tree museum. Charge the people, a dollar and half just to see em.
e_i_pi_2 3y ago
I'd even go a step further and set a maximum amount of parking in a given area to disincentivize driving. As an extreme example, if a mall is only allowed to have 5 parking spaces then they'll need to design around supporting public transit. So many places in the US are almost impossible to live in without owning a car - you might have bike paths if you're lucky, and in many places there aren't even sidewalks
- rtkwe 3y ago
  That's an ideal state but is a real chicken and egg problem, the same problem that's soft locked US cities as car centric as they are, you can't mandate away car reliance without the public transit to back it up and transit will have low ridership if it's even slightly less convenient than driving.
  - mkaic 3y ago
    I think underground metros, while expensive to build, solve this, because they are always more convenient compared to any traffic-ridden area. A bus can get stuck in the same traffic as the cars, and bikes taking over any significant portion of American commuting in the near-term feels laughable to me — we are quite culturally different from the Dutch :P
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Don't forget that metros can also go on elevate viaducts for much less money. Underground is the best solution for dense areas, but the elevated is enough cheaper that you can afford to run a metro a long way out into the suburbs - then those become prime real estate to rebuild to mid rises making the entire city denser (assuming zoning allows this)
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      I would love to see metros in every reasonably sized city but it's going to run into the built in sprawl problem of US suburbs making it very expensive to run lines out to the outlying suburban areas at high enough density to make them viable. Best work around option I suppose is to build them out to the edges of the city and build a big park and ride infrastructure. I've long thought of the issues with public transit in the majority of US cities as being trapped at a local maximum where we're forced to implement inferior solutions because we're so far into the car infrastructure getting people to abandon their suburban homes to move to a more dense less car dependent urban structure until the underlying shape of cities would adjust to denser clusters again if they ever did.
housebear 3y ago
Does anyone have an idea of what it would roughly cost to purchase an unused parking lot, tear it up, dispose of the asphalt waste, re-soil, and plant 30 or so trees? Is this something some enterprising person could start a kickstarter for just as a public experiment? Is it even possible with zoning requirements or the like?
- mkoubaa 3y ago
  In time or money? You can cancel your gym membership and work on it an hour a day
- eikenberry 3y ago
  Why tear up the asphalt? Wouldn't perforating it with bigger holes cut for the trees be a lot cheaper. Tree roots grow perfectly fine under asphalt and perforation will allow for air and water to reach the soil in a more distributed manner for better growth. Seems like it would be a much cheaper option.
  - jackfrodo 3y ago
    Trees themselves are useful because they support biodiversity such as small mammals, insects, all the useful things along a forest floor. can't do that with asphalt.
tamimio 3y ago
Before attacking the parking lots, fix the return to office mandates, the public transportation, downtown concepts, and physically collocated XY (shops or other) and the parking lot issue will solve itself, going after the symptoms without fixing the root cause is just moronic nonsense that will lead to at least “other” parking lots increasing their prices.
- jackfrodo 3y ago
  Removing parking lots will increase public support for all of the other things you mentioned. It's easier to start with tearing out parking lots and if necessary, cap parking prices, in addition to the other decades long projects
notacoward 3y ago
"I don’t know that anyone besides Grabar is even thinking about this" A great many people are. Urbanist Xitter (Mastodon, Threads, whatever) is very much alive and well. The closest thing to a consensus about what to do with the reclaimed space is some trees, but primarily medium-density affordable housing, ideally with retail on the bottom. Sometimes the space can be used to make room for transit, too. By making these places denser and more livable, it prevents even more trees, meadows, etc. from being cleared for more exurbs. I'd start with Suburban Nation, move on to StrongTowns and MissingMiddle, then take it from there.
tomcar288 3y ago
I think he really hit the nail on head here: "Part of this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.”
- ayberk 3y ago
  I'm still reading this book, but so far it's been one of the few books I'd recommend to anyone. I try to be as stoic as possible, but contents of this book has managed to actually anger me. It makes it so clear that how much corruption and bad policies impact our lives.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > There are at least four parking spaces for every car What's the original source for that statistic?
  - jbrins1 3y ago
    https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/01/access39_parking.pdf https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/20...
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Thanks, but the linked source seems very sketchy, it never actually cites or even specifies where it got the information. e.g. >In addition, using data from a nationwide inventory, we reach a figure of 105 million metered spaces. It never mentions what the source of this 'nationwide inventory' is, who made it, when, etc...
- nonameiguess 3y ago
mattmcknight 3y ago
I find this sort of logic absurd. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time" So, if I have a two car garage in my house, a parking spot at work, and a parking spot at the local shopping district, how else is this going to work? I can't bring my parking spot with me. The idea that we should look at per existing car utilization as any kind of indicator is ridiculous. Now, if any of those spots is never used, that may be a good indicator- but it might be because a building isn't fully leased at the moment as well.
- bluGill 3y ago
  You don't have a parking spot at the local parking district. You share your spot with everyone else there. Sure you have one at home and one at work, but everything else is shared with people who use your spot when you are not there.
  - mattmcknight 3y ago
    Well, I do like to park when I go shopping, but it's still going to increase the ratio of spots to cars, even if 10 cars park in that spot over the course of the day. I just don't see a ratio of 4 spots per car being particularly egregious.
- JambalayaJim 3y ago
  The idea is that if parking lots are built, they should be at the very least well utilized. We have a big problem of shopping centres over-building parking. For example, optimizing for everyone being able to always find a spot even at peak holiday seasons. As opposed to optimizing for having that parking lot being ~90% full for most of the day. The fact that your home garage and work parking lot are also empty most of the time is also a huge problem. It makes cities much larger than they need to be, and serving public transit across them impossible.
  - mattmcknight 3y ago
    > The fact that your home garage and work parking lot are also empty most of the time is also a huge problem. I don't think it's a huge problem. My garage is part of the overall footprint of my home. My garage is under my office. It wouldn't help to have them full all of the time. Should I also have someone living in my house while I work? Or ensuring that all offices have shift work? Sure, there is a possible efficiency there, but we make certain concessions for convenience. A ratio of 4 spots per car doesn't seem obviously bad. I do think there are some places with too much parking, but there are also plenty of places where there is not enough.
bluGill 3y ago
The problem I have is most cities have plenty of green parks already. In a few places they could use a new park, but in general there are far more parking lots (often 50% of a city is parking lot!) than there is need for green space. Much better is tear up a parking lot and replace it with a building that lets people do something in the city other than pretend they are in a rural area. Nothing wrong with rural areas and parks, but there is more to life than those. Put in more apartments, offices, restaurants, opera houses - all those other things that make a city great.
- JambalayaJim 3y ago
  My area could very much use more green space
jiggliemon 3y ago
I live on the border of an urban forest. I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps. My homeless camp has is rife with crime, drug over doses, violence and fire. Last month I’ve had a leaf blower stolen, my car window broken, and an explosion due to them throwing a propane tank into a camp fire. Since they’re tucked into a forest - the city won’t take any action. The city does take action on homeless camps that are more visible. I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness. However that’s very much the case here in Austin, Tx.
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  "I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness." "I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps." You typed both of these sentences in the same post. One of them needs to be removed, because they don't make sense together.
- xtracto 3y ago
  That was my experience when I visited to California when traveling to the USA. I remember a nice town called Santa Cruz, with really nice parks in Google Maps, but once I took a walk in one of them an it was super scary, full of tents and homeless people that seemed either drug users or just bad in their head.
- aetherspawn 3y ago
  Yes agree, they recently opened up a small forest near me and yes, it’s just full of homeless people and their piles of trash and we can’t walk through it feeling safe anymore.
- sph 3y ago
  If you have homelessness problems, it is not because of urban forests, and the solution is not having as few forests and parks as possible.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
If only 75% of spaces are empty, while sad, that seems shockingly efficient. If you have a car you need at least one place to park for each location you will ever visit with it. That means most people are only driving their cars to 4 places. Home, work, school and the grocery store? Hopefully for store owners, not all at the same time. I would have expected a lot more unused spaces in parking lots. If we have cars we should be expecting a hell of a lot of empty parking lots. Maybe cities should just require some minimum amount of plant life in the lots themselves. I'm sure customers would approve. Also any expectation of "the demise of malls and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail" is hasty. Globally, during the pandemic, 80%+ of retail was brick and mortar [1], and it actually increased in 2021, though it appears to be correcting. Research shows consumers don't trust stores with an online only presence [2]. I think banking on that will be too little too late. We need better solutions sooner. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA/ [2] https://www.kbbreview.com/6657/news/consumers-lack-trust-online-retailers/ https://www.kbbreview.com/6657/news/consumers-lack-trust-onl...
kusuriya 3y ago
heck even if we just did more trees and shade cover of parking lots it would be better for the environment all the way around, and make drivers happier so they don't have to crawl into a complete oven of a car.
midasuni 3y ago
Soon you’ll have to pay a dollar and a half just to see the parking lots in the parking lot museum.
SoftTalker 3y ago
In general, if you don't like how a piece of property is being used, you should buy it and then use it the way you see fit.
- agent281 3y ago
  The big issue is that there are many land use regulations so you by and large can't use it as you see fit. Parking minimums are a good example of this.
efields 3y ago
Baltimore resident. I went to that staples for the first time a week ago and thought the parking lot was strangely huge. I don’t think an urban forest makes sense there tho. Baltimore actually has a decent amount of forest and park per capita. The Roland park country club is becoming a public/private thing. Getting around town without a car sucks though. There’s no growth to incentivize bigger transit projects. More busses would be nice. I don’t think Baltimore and other hollowed out blue collar cities need trees as much as they need to enable entirely different industries. And I don’t know what those industries are! But there’s a lot of talented craftspeople here, and not enough capital to pay them. Or we go anarcho-collectivism.
dukeofdoom 3y ago
Money could be spent to aquire larger amounts of land on outskirts of cities ti create a larger park or forrested area.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Baltimore has no money, ain't nobody paying for that. In cities outside of Baltimore, where there aren't 20,000 abandoned buildings (when last I lived there), where there's a public housing shortage and a rising cost of living, they need affordable homes, not trees. I love trees but they're better for cities that don't have housing shortages, yet have the money to pay for trees. Baltimore (and Philly, similar in some respects) has large concrete and brick deserts. But they also have large and small parks with lots of trees. That's where you get mugged after dusk (and sometimes during the day). You don't walk through Patterson Park at night. IMO it's a privileged thing to think of first. Certain websites that cater to this kind of post don't seem to discuss civic issues from the perspective of the people who need the most help. It's more a certain kind of person who's more interested in a closer walk to the Starbucks and Trader Joe's.
Ekaros 3y ago
I say we wait until someone demonstrate area working which totally bans all types of vehicles. Only allowing ambulances and firetrucks. Absolutely nothing else, no vans, no taxis(or ridesharing). Maybe provide wheelchairs for those that need. Keep this going at least for 10 years and see how much the people will enjoy it.
- lionkor 3y ago
  In switzerland there are towns like Zermatt, Saas-Fee, Wengen and Mürren that are car-free.
- abdullahkhalids 3y ago
  What a ridiculous straw-man extreme argument. When people say "car-free" they do not mean 0 cars. They mean a city where the incentive structure has been changed so driving cars is expensive and annoying, while walking or transit is easy and simple. But in such a "car-free" city, there should/can be * emergency vehicles * other essential government vehicles like post office, garbage, etc. * commercial delivery vehicles (dozens per 1000) * taxi services (dozens per 1000) * personal vehicles for those with disabilities * personal vehicles for those who are willing to pay a lot of money+time for them (hopefully not many dozens per 1000). You are thinking that the terminal goal is no cars. But the terminal goal is to live on Earth in a sustainable fashion so we don't destroy the only habitable ecosystem for humans. Fewer cars is a secondary goal in service of this very reasonable requirement.
aetherspawn 3y ago
Wow, you guys have unused parking lots? We chronically don’t have enough, anywhere.
HenryBemis 3y ago
> remove the unnecessary asphalt and plant some trees. Or do something constructive with this unused, paved space — new housing, a solar energy field It's always about the money. Who will sell the land, who will buy the land, who will build the houses, who will buy the houses (for how much), and so on. If I am a developer I don't care to make a $100k house. I prefer that there is 'some' scarcity in the market so I can be selling $300k houses instead. This 'motivational' speech is socialist-like (I like socialism but the Scandinavian one - aka capitalism with enhanced social care). If there is money to be made, then money will be made. I am sure that these places will go down in prices enough to become 'attractive', and not a day before.
kulahan 3y ago
As of a few years ago, all parking lot sizes were effectively guesstimates, at least for a not-insignificant number of companies. iirc, the problem Donald Shoup is an economist with a seemingly infinite hatred for our massive waste of parking. Cool ideas for how to fix it (e.g. metered parking that goes up as parking goes down, money goes to the neighborhood that's being metered directly) and he helps drive home how insane the entire thing is. He's got some old lectures and interviews on youtube that can be pretty damn interesting, for a video of an economist talking about parking lots...
nraynaud 3y ago
it's funny how older countries are sometimes ahead of some trends. Here in France we can ignore some local height limits to install solar pannels, it's now forbidden (in the genreal case) to toss your rainwater to the street, you have to get in back in the ground on the area it was collected, etc. But it's true that being an old country they did not really trash everything for the car, so we are not too much left with the very wide scar of a highway cutting through a downtown.
megablast 3y ago
Tear up all car parks.
notorandit 3y ago
Planting trees is not trivial. Nor a green-ish solution. 1. What to plant is important as not all places/soils are the same. 2. Are you also thinking about maintenance (watering and pruning included)? 3. Are you also thinking about environmental compatibility with existing fauna and flora? Planting trees is not trivial!
- notso411 3y ago
  [dead]
- JR1427 3y ago
  I don't think the author suggested that planting trees is trivial. It might not be trivial, but it absolutely can be done. I think you are correct, though, that we want to avoid planting trees for the sake of it, and ending up with areas with inappropriate species devoid of much life.
- Faaak 3y ago
  Well, your list is not exactly complicated.. I've planted around ~300 trees in a 4-year long restoration project. Selecting native species needs to be done, but that's not that complicated (either by asking organizations, or by reading the recomended list by the state/country/whatever). Maintenance is low. Sure, don't plant trees that need water every day, but that's it. Irrigate them every week the first year. Pruning ? But they're not fruit trees ?
JR1427 3y ago
It's interesting reading the comments that are from a US perspective, where there are vast amounts of untamed land for wildlife and recreation. Many US commenters are highlighting that they would rather that cities be cities, because there is already plenty of green space outside cities. In the UK, most land is either farmland, or built on, so urban green areas are much more important for wildlife. There is a drive in the UK to create more "green corridors" linking green areas together, but this is facing stiff competition with the drive to develop second cities. Ripping up parking lots (car parks) and planting trees would be even more important in the UK.
aurizon 3y ago
We need denser housing = low rise densification with roof terraces/gardens on impenetrable = never leak roofs with zero structural maintenance using stainless steel rebar = never corrode, but add only 2-3% to base costs. We have millions of structures failing after 30-50 years due to steel rebar corrosion. The construction industry is aware of this, but does not implement it by intent. With impending zero population growth looming in many areas, we need zero cost growth housing.
silexia 3y ago
What a dumb idea. The massive amount of fuel it would take to build and run the huge machines necessary to tear up a parking lot, then just move it to another lot of land far outstrips the benefits of a few trees. Simply let plants and trees grow up through the lot and go back to a natural state over time.
RecycledEle 3y ago
Parking lots are a capital investment. The vast majority of "unused" parking lots will be used if they remain in place and receive a small amount of maintenance. Tearing up a parking lot and later building a new one is not only expensive but it does significant environmental damage.

318 points by jbrins1 3y ago

No P&L, no cost/reward analysis, no numbers at all. Just emotional "omg need more green". Have the author ever torn down a single parking lot? Doesn't look like that to me. Why is this article even on HN at all?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lifeformed 3y ago

Here in Taipei, most of the parking lots are built underground, and above them are green park spaces. It's great, a two-for-one deal.

gfs 3y ago

The book mentioned in this article (Paved Paradise) is eye-opening. I'm nearly done reading it and have a whole new perspective on the matter.

falcolas 3y ago

I'd rather they put in an indigenous meadow. Trees are awesome, but so are open green spaces that maintain themselves.

Spivak 3y ago
Why not both? Trees in the manner they're describing where it's just helping the forested area expand back out doesn't require human involvement either. The selfish human reason to want trees as a natural heat regulator is I think alone worth the benefit in areas with lots of asphalt where people will be near.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Cities are hot. Cities with lots of mature trees providing shade on the sidewalks make it a lot more bearable.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    Merely eliminating a lot of the black heat sinks (i.e. parking lots) and replacing them with native grasses would do a lot to help keep city temperatures a touch more reasonable. Asphalt both absorbs and radiates heat like mad.
- falcolas 3y ago
  If the trees are native to the area, sure. But a tree monoculture doesn't seem to do a lot of good.
smallerfish 3y ago
What herbivores are you going to deploy to allow the meadow to maintain itself? Going to fence them in or let them run wild in town? In 99%+ of east coast US environments, grassland will become forest naturally (over time), even with the deer population as it is.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I had big meadows in front and back of my house when I moved in 25 years ago. I let about the 50-100 feet out by the road naturalize over time; the rest is cut by a tractor about once a year. The section out by the road is forest, albeit immature, at this point. There's far more forest in New England than there was 150 years or so ago.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  Why not do controlled burns? That's historically how most grasslands and meadows that didn't support large grazing populations stayed that way.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Meadows or trees would be nice, but I've noticed that underused parking lots tend to be common places to build restaurants and other retail. Not as great as trees or meadows but on the other hand I'd rather the new retail goes on parking lots rather than replacing currently existing trees & meadows.
UtopiaPunk 3y ago
A lot of places would benefit from more housing, too, or new business, or almost anything really. A parking lot is about the worst option possible. We look at a large section of a land and decide that we will destroy all life on it, pave over it with asphalt (so that even the rain cannot drain into the soil), all so that large vehicles can sit there unused. It really is the lowest opinion one can have on a piece of Earth.
- brewdad 3y ago
  Most surface lots you see in a city are placeholders until the owner finds a project that pencils out. Why not charge people to park there until you are ready to build that new highrise?
  - Vegenoid 3y ago
    From an "I own this land and want to make the most money off of it" standpoint that makes sense. From an "I live here and want my community to be enjoyable and beautiful" standpoint it makes less sense.
dcotter 3y ago
Serious question: Why not plant trees & shrubs & grasses in parking lots? (as in, in containers or medians). Shade the parking lot and make it less hot. Make it prettier to park in and attract birds & other wildlife. You could even charge people for the privilege of parking somewhere nice for a change.

uudecoded 3y ago

How long does it take to break even on the carbon output of asphalt demolition and haul-away vs carbon input of optimal density trees planted in the same space?

2024throwaway 3y ago
I don't think it's fair to look at carbon output in isolation here. This would greatly help with a variety of issues such as mitigating urban heat islands, providing wildlife habitat, aiding pollinators, and just generally making the world we live in less hellish.
- mikeyouse 3y ago
  It's probably a pretty favorable comparison anyway. Asphalt is almost 100% recyclable. The demolition often just involves a single bobcat and a dump truck that hauls it to the recycling plant. A commonly used number is 10kg/tree/year for the first 20 years of a tree's growth so a plot with 25 trees would remove ~250kg/year. A gallon of gas releases about 10kg of CO2, so in that 20 year period, the little plot would capture about 5,000kg of CO2 or ~500 gallons equivalent.
specialist 3y ago
Unmaintained asphalt eventually reverts to gravel. No need to haul anything away. Were I replacing parking lots, I'd prioritize any abandoned / under utilized lots. Just start mulching and planting. Plant willows and maples to break up the surface. Or maybe mechanically break things up, if the best-available-science supports doing so, if you're impatient. Bonus Points: Convert planters, meridians, etc into P-Patch style community gardens. People love to garden. In my city, the wait list to join a P-Patch is years long.

wtp1saac 3y ago

Strong Towns has called a good amount of attention to the mandatory parking requirements in many cities (and shockingly, many downtowns). Thankfully, it seems a fair number of cities are removing such restrictions, but hopefully it becomes more widespread. In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. More places to meet people too, there’s so few third places. And not needing to drive would be a really big convenience. (To be clear, I doubt most of the US will urbanize given the rural nature of a lot of it, but I hope at least bigger cities can move in that direction)

7thaccount 3y ago
Fayetteville Arkansas was one of the first towns to remove the mandatory parking restrictions and a ton of abandoned downtown buildings quickly became restaurants. They were absolutely right.
- 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
  My jaw hit the floor when I learned that some cities actually apply parking minimums to redevelopment of downtown properties and not just stuff like new surburban strip malls, to the point that some projects have bought adjacent buildings and demolished them in favor of parking lots. Maybe it's true that the r/fuckcars crowd likes to throw the term "carbrain" around a little too freely, but this kind of ass-backward policy makes me think we really do suffer from a self-destructive mind virus.
  - bsder 3y ago
    It's not always ass-backward. People forget that one of the reasons why the malls became so popular and helped collapse the old downtowns was, you guessed it, lack of free parking. With malls, you could come into a boundary and spend a significant amount of time in a walkable arena with lots of different stores. You knew there would always be parking except possibly at Christmas. Downtown? Not so much. And you probably had to pay for parking. And carry quarters for the meter. And risk getting parking tickets. etc. Malls were what all the anti-car people supposedly promise will happen when you remove cars. And yet, I know of no malls that ever gained residence areas within walking distance. Which seemingly, would have prevented the malls from collapsing. The anti-car brigade has yet to demonstrate why that should be different today.

datadrivenangel 3y ago

They (ought to) unpave the parking lot and put up a paradise! More green spaces are good for cities.

bluGill 3y ago
Not really. Some parks/green areas are good. However it is easy to put in more than are needed and make the city less dense which is not good for the city or your ability to do some of the things that make a city great.
- davidw 3y ago
  Figuring out where parks go is the kind of things urban planners should be doing, rather than obsessing over overspecific zoning rules and parking regulations. Cities are best when they are allowed to gradually adapt, rather than trying to plan everything out 'just so' from the outset and being rigid about changes. But parks are tougher to put in once the land has been used up.
- specialist 3y ago
  Which cities have too many parks?
- UtopiaPunk 3y ago
  I mean, sure, there can be healthy debate around what is the best use for a specific piece of land. But surely anything is better than a free parking lot, right?
  - bluGill 3y ago
    No, too many parks is just as bad as too many parking lots, for the same reason: they force the city to sprawl. A few parks are good - and the exact amount is debatable, but the proposal to turn all parking lots into parks will create too many parks. Everyone should have a park close to where they live. A place where kids can play and families can picnic is important to a good family life. A park is a good place for art, but it only needs to be accessible by transit as most people won't make regular visits. Many people enjoy playing volleyball, softball, or other sports, but they tend to want to play different teams so while a city should have this it should be accessible by transit but not close to everyone. There are a few variations on the above theme that I didn't mention. Once those uses are covered a city should not build more parks, instead the city needs more of the other things that make a city: places to live, work, shop, and be entertained.

irusensei 3y ago

If it’s public properties then yes please. If private then hippity hoppity…

fjoireoipe 3y ago
use eminent domain to turn it into public property? hoppity heft property is theft
- Philorandroid 3y ago
  "Just take it by force" isn't the rational answer you think it is

osigurdson 3y ago

You could always put together a group and purchase the land from the current owners. Once you take possession, put the land in trust, tear it up and plant trees. You could potentially recover some costs by donating to the city but there is always a chance that they would decide to change the zoning in the future.

ericcumbee 3y ago
unless they have a purpose in mind for said property, a lot of cities are hesitant to do that. because it takes the property off the tax roll when the city accepts it.
- mkoubaa 3y ago
  Yes but property values near greenery and parks are theoretically higher, right? At least in some places. It could also be beneficial for water runoff management and flood resistance to have more trees

lgleason 3y ago

I like cars and spend a decent amount of time keeping my cars looking pristine. I personally prefer having more than enough parking rather than just enough. Most of the efforts to improve walkability makes it impossible to find parking when you are driving in and forces you to park in dense areas where you either have to pay a fortune to park or park in dense areas where your car is likely to get dinged by some jerk who opens their door into your car.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
> Most of the efforts to improve walkability makes it impossible to find parking when you are driving Most of the efforts to improve driveability make it impossible to walk anywhere.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  Exactly. There isn't a place that's simultaneously nice for drivers and nice for everyone else. A space for cars necessarily reduces value, safety, and comfort for humans outside cars.
- specialist 3y ago
  Most efforts to improve drivability also worsen drivability.
epistasis 3y ago
99% of development over the past half century has been focused on making it optimal for driving, at the expense of the ~20% of people that can not even drive. And this wasn't because the market decided to do that, it's all been mandated by law. I think it's good to have a diversity of types of development. Just as people who don't want to drive shouldn't expect access to car-dependent environments to be easy, people in cars shouldn't expect the very few pockets of hard-won walkable environments to be optimal for driving into.
cassepipe 3y ago
I get that you like your way of life (and that you are probably not given credible alternatives in your city) but please do consider the environmental and social costs of such a way of life: A car centric life is not sustainable for the planet. You've probably seen that propaganda around here but in case you missed it, here is some documentation : https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/

ortusdux 3y ago

I'd like to see more solar covered parking lots. Bonus points for integrated EV charging stations. They would be great in the hotter parts of the country. How much fuel/energy is spent cooling cars back down after they have sat in the sun for an hour?

1970-01-01 3y ago
Why isn't this actually happening? Parking lots are really 2D spaces, so leveraging the unused 3rd dimension is very smart and profitable.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  If it were profitable, they'd be profiting. Parking lots are parking lots because they require low CapEx, almost no OpEx. You buy some abandoned land, raze it, asphalt it, charge $30 a day per space (at let's say 75 spaces), tow the rest (at the driver's expense). You're pulling in a little under $67k/month. Wait for a commercial developer to come buy and take it off your hands for 3x its value. You know how much it costs to dig up the ground, install power lines, a box, then bury footings, bolt in legs, install panels, etc, 9+ feet high? For a whole parking lot? $300k-500k, minimum (that's how much it costs just to install a small fleet of EV chargers btw, that's not doing major construction over an area the size of half a football field). How much you gonna make off these panels? A 200kW panel array generates about 480MWh/yr, which at 1MW/$40 comes out to about $19,200/year in SREC credits. PA energy price is $0.18/KWh, so 480MW is $24/hr. But you're making 80% efficiency and it's not sunny all day all year, so at even 50% usage, that's $24,960/year. Almost a third of what the parking lot makes a month. Before we talk paying back installation costs, assuming your net metering deal is perfect. It would be cheaper to build a multi-story garage, where you'd make WAY more money.
  - 1970-01-01 3y ago
    >How much you gonna make off these panels? You're dismissing the possibility of free EV charging attracting shoppers. Step 1 is getting people to visit your store, step 2 is getting them to buy something, and step 3 is getting them to come again. Step 1 & 3 would immediately get noticed by the corporate bean counters. The real problem I think is the up-front costs of the installation.

bloopernova 3y ago

Can we do the same with golf courses? I think it was George Carlin that said put affordable housing on golf courses? More seriously, if you have a brownfield ex industrial site, will trees etc grow ok there? Does converting brownfield sites to meadows or forests pose any risks to nearby humans?

adregan 3y ago
Speaking of brownfield, you may (more likely not) be surprised to know that golf courses are pretty nasty places themselves. You can find soils contaminated with arsenic, mercury, and cadmium from fungicides. So those rolling green links might not be the cheapest places to establish new housing when you include the remediation.
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Oof, that's pretty bad. I did not know that. Do you happen to know if forests would help clean that soil? Feels kind of appropriate if you could grow forest on a site for 50 to 100 years or more. Then harvest the wood with all the nasty stuff in it. Then bury all that contaminated wood somewhere deep. Then build houses on the newly clean earth.
  - adregan 3y ago
    You can build new soil on top of contaminated soil to bury it. Here’s a permaculture site in an old rail bed in nyc that has nasty stuff lurking beneath many layers of new soil[0]. Not really sure if trees uptake heavy metals. 0: https://youtu.be/UqyK_9iybD8?si=rx7iCjsTu1Zn6YbO https://youtu.be/UqyK_9iybD8?si=rx7iCjsTu1Zn6YbO
    - efields 3y ago
      They won’t, but certain fungi will break them down.
      - kardos 3y ago

mytailorisrich 3y ago

Trees are great to provide shade in parking lots. I have been to parking lots covered in mature Aleppo Pines (which smell great in the heat) and from far away you couldn't really tell there was a parking lot there.

xnx 3y ago

Much easier to let farmland go wild than tear up parking lots and destroy any chance of recouping the embodied energy of asphalt for something useful. Most farmland is in support of animal agriculture (boooo) and wouldn't make economic sense if farms had to pay municipal rates for the water they use.

burkaman 3y ago
I understand what you're saying, but it sounds like a kind of sunk cost fallacy. If a parking lot has been sitting empty for years and nobody has any plan to do anything with it, maybe it's time to tear it up. The bad decision to build it in the first place has already been made, we can't undo it by waiting and hoping. You can at least recycle the asphalt to get a bit of use out of it. Rewilding unnecessary farmland is also a good idea. As usual in these conversations, there's no reason we can't do both.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Take all the trees, put em in a tree museum. Charge the people, a dollar and half just to see em.

e_i_pi_2 3y ago

I'd even go a step further and set a maximum amount of parking in a given area to disincentivize driving. As an extreme example, if a mall is only allowed to have 5 parking spaces then they'll need to design around supporting public transit. So many places in the US are almost impossible to live in without owning a car - you might have bike paths if you're lucky, and in many places there aren't even sidewalks

rtkwe 3y ago
That's an ideal state but is a real chicken and egg problem, the same problem that's soft locked US cities as car centric as they are, you can't mandate away car reliance without the public transit to back it up and transit will have low ridership if it's even slightly less convenient than driving.
- mkaic 3y ago
  I think underground metros, while expensive to build, solve this, because they are always more convenient compared to any traffic-ridden area. A bus can get stuck in the same traffic as the cars, and bikes taking over any significant portion of American commuting in the near-term feels laughable to me — we are quite culturally different from the Dutch :P
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Don't forget that metros can also go on elevate viaducts for much less money. Underground is the best solution for dense areas, but the elevated is enough cheaper that you can afford to run a metro a long way out into the suburbs - then those become prime real estate to rebuild to mid rises making the entire city denser (assuming zoning allows this)
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    I would love to see metros in every reasonably sized city but it's going to run into the built in sprawl problem of US suburbs making it very expensive to run lines out to the outlying suburban areas at high enough density to make them viable. Best work around option I suppose is to build them out to the edges of the city and build a big park and ride infrastructure. I've long thought of the issues with public transit in the majority of US cities as being trapped at a local maximum where we're forced to implement inferior solutions because we're so far into the car infrastructure getting people to abandon their suburban homes to move to a more dense less car dependent urban structure until the underlying shape of cities would adjust to denser clusters again if they ever did.

housebear 3y ago

Does anyone have an idea of what it would roughly cost to purchase an unused parking lot, tear it up, dispose of the asphalt waste, re-soil, and plant 30 or so trees? Is this something some enterprising person could start a kickstarter for just as a public experiment? Is it even possible with zoning requirements or the like?

mkoubaa 3y ago
In time or money? You can cancel your gym membership and work on it an hour a day
eikenberry 3y ago
Why tear up the asphalt? Wouldn't perforating it with bigger holes cut for the trees be a lot cheaper. Tree roots grow perfectly fine under asphalt and perforation will allow for air and water to reach the soil in a more distributed manner for better growth. Seems like it would be a much cheaper option.
- jackfrodo 3y ago
  Trees themselves are useful because they support biodiversity such as small mammals, insects, all the useful things along a forest floor. can't do that with asphalt.

tamimio 3y ago

Before attacking the parking lots, fix the return to office mandates, the public transportation, downtown concepts, and physically collocated XY (shops or other) and the parking lot issue will solve itself, going after the symptoms without fixing the root cause is just moronic nonsense that will lead to at least “other” parking lots increasing their prices.

jackfrodo 3y ago
Removing parking lots will increase public support for all of the other things you mentioned. It's easier to start with tearing out parking lots and if necessary, cap parking prices, in addition to the other decades long projects

notacoward 3y ago

"I don’t know that anyone besides Grabar is even thinking about this" A great many people are. Urbanist Xitter (Mastodon, Threads, whatever) is very much alive and well. The closest thing to a consensus about what to do with the reclaimed space is some trees, but primarily medium-density affordable housing, ideally with retail on the bottom. Sometimes the space can be used to make room for transit, too. By making these places denser and more livable, it prevents even more trees, meadows, etc. from being cleared for more exurbs. I'd start with Suburban Nation, move on to StrongTowns and MissingMiddle, then take it from there.

tomcar288 3y ago

I think he really hit the nail on head here: "Part of this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.”

ayberk 3y ago
I'm still reading this book, but so far it's been one of the few books I'd recommend to anyone. I try to be as stoic as possible, but contents of this book has managed to actually anger me. It makes it so clear that how much corruption and bad policies impact our lives.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
> There are at least four parking spaces for every car What's the original source for that statistic?
- jbrins1 3y ago
  https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/01/access39_parking.pdf https://www.accessmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/20...
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Thanks, but the linked source seems very sketchy, it never actually cites or even specifies where it got the information. e.g. >In addition, using data from a nationwide inventory, we reach a figure of 105 million metered spaces. It never mentions what the source of this 'nationwide inventory' is, who made it, when, etc...
nonameiguess 3y ago

mattmcknight 3y ago

I find this sort of logic absurd. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time" So, if I have a two car garage in my house, a parking spot at work, and a parking spot at the local shopping district, how else is this going to work? I can't bring my parking spot with me. The idea that we should look at per existing car utilization as any kind of indicator is ridiculous. Now, if any of those spots is never used, that may be a good indicator- but it might be because a building isn't fully leased at the moment as well.

bluGill 3y ago
You don't have a parking spot at the local parking district. You share your spot with everyone else there. Sure you have one at home and one at work, but everything else is shared with people who use your spot when you are not there.
- mattmcknight 3y ago
  Well, I do like to park when I go shopping, but it's still going to increase the ratio of spots to cars, even if 10 cars park in that spot over the course of the day. I just don't see a ratio of 4 spots per car being particularly egregious.
JambalayaJim 3y ago
The idea is that if parking lots are built, they should be at the very least well utilized. We have a big problem of shopping centres over-building parking. For example, optimizing for everyone being able to always find a spot even at peak holiday seasons. As opposed to optimizing for having that parking lot being ~90% full for most of the day. The fact that your home garage and work parking lot are also empty most of the time is also a huge problem. It makes cities much larger than they need to be, and serving public transit across them impossible.
- mattmcknight 3y ago
  > The fact that your home garage and work parking lot are also empty most of the time is also a huge problem. I don't think it's a huge problem. My garage is part of the overall footprint of my home. My garage is under my office. It wouldn't help to have them full all of the time. Should I also have someone living in my house while I work? Or ensuring that all offices have shift work? Sure, there is a possible efficiency there, but we make certain concessions for convenience. A ratio of 4 spots per car doesn't seem obviously bad. I do think there are some places with too much parking, but there are also plenty of places where there is not enough.

bluGill 3y ago

The problem I have is most cities have plenty of green parks already. In a few places they could use a new park, but in general there are far more parking lots (often 50% of a city is parking lot!) than there is need for green space. Much better is tear up a parking lot and replace it with a building that lets people do something in the city other than pretend they are in a rural area. Nothing wrong with rural areas and parks, but there is more to life than those. Put in more apartments, offices, restaurants, opera houses - all those other things that make a city great.

JambalayaJim 3y ago
My area could very much use more green space

jiggliemon 3y ago

I live on the border of an urban forest. I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps. My homeless camp has is rife with crime, drug over doses, violence and fire. Last month I’ve had a leaf blower stolen, my car window broken, and an explosion due to them throwing a propane tank into a camp fire. Since they’re tucked into a forest - the city won’t take any action. The city does take action on homeless camps that are more visible. I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness. However that’s very much the case here in Austin, Tx.

UtopiaPunk 3y ago
"I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness." "I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps." You typed both of these sentences in the same post. One of them needs to be removed, because they don't make sense together.
xtracto 3y ago
That was my experience when I visited to California when traveling to the USA. I remember a nice town called Santa Cruz, with really nice parks in Google Maps, but once I took a walk in one of them an it was super scary, full of tents and homeless people that seemed either drug users or just bad in their head.
aetherspawn 3y ago
Yes agree, they recently opened up a small forest near me and yes, it’s just full of homeless people and their piles of trash and we can’t walk through it feeling safe anymore.
sph 3y ago
If you have homelessness problems, it is not because of urban forests, and the solution is not having as few forests and parks as possible.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

If only 75% of spaces are empty, while sad, that seems shockingly efficient. If you have a car you need at least one place to park for each location you will ever visit with it. That means most people are only driving their cars to 4 places. Home, work, school and the grocery store? Hopefully for store owners, not all at the same time. I would have expected a lot more unused spaces in parking lots. If we have cars we should be expecting a hell of a lot of empty parking lots. Maybe cities should just require some minimum amount of plant life in the lots themselves. I'm sure customers would approve. Also any expectation of "the demise of malls and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail" is hasty. Globally, during the pandemic, 80%+ of retail was brick and mortar [1], and it actually increased in 2021, though it appears to be correcting. Research shows consumers don't trust stores with an online only presence [2]. I think banking on that will be too little too late. We need better solutions sooner. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA/ [2] https://www.kbbreview.com/6657/news/consumers-lack-trust-online-retailers/ https://www.kbbreview.com/6657/news/consumers-lack-trust-onl...

kusuriya 3y ago

heck even if we just did more trees and shade cover of parking lots it would be better for the environment all the way around, and make drivers happier so they don't have to crawl into a complete oven of a car.

midasuni 3y ago

Soon you’ll have to pay a dollar and a half just to see the parking lots in the parking lot museum.

SoftTalker 3y ago

In general, if you don't like how a piece of property is being used, you should buy it and then use it the way you see fit.

agent281 3y ago
The big issue is that there are many land use regulations so you by and large can't use it as you see fit. Parking minimums are a good example of this.

efields 3y ago

Baltimore resident. I went to that staples for the first time a week ago and thought the parking lot was strangely huge. I don’t think an urban forest makes sense there tho. Baltimore actually has a decent amount of forest and park per capita. The Roland park country club is becoming a public/private thing. Getting around town without a car sucks though. There’s no growth to incentivize bigger transit projects. More busses would be nice. I don’t think Baltimore and other hollowed out blue collar cities need trees as much as they need to enable entirely different industries. And I don’t know what those industries are! But there’s a lot of talented craftspeople here, and not enough capital to pay them. Or we go anarcho-collectivism.

dukeofdoom 3y ago

Money could be spent to aquire larger amounts of land on outskirts of cities ti create a larger park or forrested area.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Baltimore has no money, ain't nobody paying for that. In cities outside of Baltimore, where there aren't 20,000 abandoned buildings (when last I lived there), where there's a public housing shortage and a rising cost of living, they need affordable homes, not trees. I love trees but they're better for cities that don't have housing shortages, yet have the money to pay for trees. Baltimore (and Philly, similar in some respects) has large concrete and brick deserts. But they also have large and small parks with lots of trees. That's where you get mugged after dusk (and sometimes during the day). You don't walk through Patterson Park at night. IMO it's a privileged thing to think of first. Certain websites that cater to this kind of post don't seem to discuss civic issues from the perspective of the people who need the most help. It's more a certain kind of person who's more interested in a closer walk to the Starbucks and Trader Joe's.

Ekaros 3y ago

I say we wait until someone demonstrate area working which totally bans all types of vehicles. Only allowing ambulances and firetrucks. Absolutely nothing else, no vans, no taxis(or ridesharing). Maybe provide wheelchairs for those that need. Keep this going at least for 10 years and see how much the people will enjoy it.

lionkor 3y ago
In switzerland there are towns like Zermatt, Saas-Fee, Wengen and Mürren that are car-free.
abdullahkhalids 3y ago
What a ridiculous straw-man extreme argument. When people say "car-free" they do not mean 0 cars. They mean a city where the incentive structure has been changed so driving cars is expensive and annoying, while walking or transit is easy and simple. But in such a "car-free" city, there should/can be * emergency vehicles * other essential government vehicles like post office, garbage, etc. * commercial delivery vehicles (dozens per 1000) * taxi services (dozens per 1000) * personal vehicles for those with disabilities * personal vehicles for those who are willing to pay a lot of money+time for them (hopefully not many dozens per 1000). You are thinking that the terminal goal is no cars. But the terminal goal is to live on Earth in a sustainable fashion so we don't destroy the only habitable ecosystem for humans. Fewer cars is a secondary goal in service of this very reasonable requirement.

aetherspawn 3y ago

Wow, you guys have unused parking lots? We chronically don’t have enough, anywhere.

HenryBemis 3y ago

> remove the unnecessary asphalt and plant some trees. Or do something constructive with this unused, paved space — new housing, a solar energy field It's always about the money. Who will sell the land, who will buy the land, who will build the houses, who will buy the houses (for how much), and so on. If I am a developer I don't care to make a $100k house. I prefer that there is 'some' scarcity in the market so I can be selling $300k houses instead. This 'motivational' speech is socialist-like (I like socialism but the Scandinavian one - aka capitalism with enhanced social care). If there is money to be made, then money will be made. I am sure that these places will go down in prices enough to become 'attractive', and not a day before.

kulahan 3y ago

As of a few years ago, all parking lot sizes were effectively guesstimates, at least for a not-insignificant number of companies. iirc, the problem Donald Shoup is an economist with a seemingly infinite hatred for our massive waste of parking. Cool ideas for how to fix it (e.g. metered parking that goes up as parking goes down, money goes to the neighborhood that's being metered directly) and he helps drive home how insane the entire thing is. He's got some old lectures and interviews on youtube that can be pretty damn interesting, for a video of an economist talking about parking lots...

nraynaud 3y ago

it's funny how older countries are sometimes ahead of some trends. Here in France we can ignore some local height limits to install solar pannels, it's now forbidden (in the genreal case) to toss your rainwater to the street, you have to get in back in the ground on the area it was collected, etc. But it's true that being an old country they did not really trash everything for the car, so we are not too much left with the very wide scar of a highway cutting through a downtown.

megablast 3y ago

Tear up all car parks.

notorandit 3y ago

Planting trees is not trivial. Nor a green-ish solution. 1. What to plant is important as not all places/soils are the same. 2. Are you also thinking about maintenance (watering and pruning included)? 3. Are you also thinking about environmental compatibility with existing fauna and flora? Planting trees is not trivial!

notso411 3y ago
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JR1427 3y ago
I don't think the author suggested that planting trees is trivial. It might not be trivial, but it absolutely can be done. I think you are correct, though, that we want to avoid planting trees for the sake of it, and ending up with areas with inappropriate species devoid of much life.
Faaak 3y ago
Well, your list is not exactly complicated.. I've planted around ~300 trees in a 4-year long restoration project. Selecting native species needs to be done, but that's not that complicated (either by asking organizations, or by reading the recomended list by the state/country/whatever). Maintenance is low. Sure, don't plant trees that need water every day, but that's it. Irrigate them every week the first year. Pruning ? But they're not fruit trees ?

JR1427 3y ago

It's interesting reading the comments that are from a US perspective, where there are vast amounts of untamed land for wildlife and recreation. Many US commenters are highlighting that they would rather that cities be cities, because there is already plenty of green space outside cities. In the UK, most land is either farmland, or built on, so urban green areas are much more important for wildlife. There is a drive in the UK to create more "green corridors" linking green areas together, but this is facing stiff competition with the drive to develop second cities. Ripping up parking lots (car parks) and planting trees would be even more important in the UK.

aurizon 3y ago

We need denser housing = low rise densification with roof terraces/gardens on impenetrable = never leak roofs with zero structural maintenance using stainless steel rebar = never corrode, but add only 2-3% to base costs. We have millions of structures failing after 30-50 years due to steel rebar corrosion. The construction industry is aware of this, but does not implement it by intent. With impending zero population growth looming in many areas, we need zero cost growth housing.

silexia 3y ago

What a dumb idea. The massive amount of fuel it would take to build and run the huge machines necessary to tear up a parking lot, then just move it to another lot of land far outstrips the benefits of a few trees. Simply let plants and trees grow up through the lot and go back to a natural state over time.

RecycledEle 3y ago

Parking lots are a capital investment. The vast majority of "unused" parking lots will be used if they remain in place and receive a small amount of maintenance. Tearing up a parking lot and later building a new one is not only expensive but it does significant environmental damage.