It's incredibly insensitive and inequitable to try and impose our idealized urbanist fantasies on residents of neighborhoods who have spent generations building systems to cope with disinvestment and forced car dependence.

Especially when we're doing it in the name of equity.

It doesn't matter how many trendy restaurants we have downtown.
If the people who live there can't get what they need without driving, then we need to accept that they're going to need a place to park their car.

@DrTCombs okay sure, but the problem isn't that some urbanists have fantasies, it's that geometry hates cars, and that we have a finite amount of space, and that the planet will kill us all if we don't quit cars, and that our government was/is constructed by racists. Forcing developers to provide parking is not doing anybody any favors, even in the short term. The inequity needs to be addressed, but it's far too easy/comfortable to (ab)use it to overlook non-drivers entirely.

@enobacon @DrTCombs

You're both right

@enobacon agreed that cars are a problem and space is finite and we have to find alternatives yesterday

fantasy was maybe a bad word choice, but in a sense it is a fantasy that we can create equitable, sustainable cities by expecting those with the fewest alternatives available to them to make bigger sacrifices than the rest of us.

@enobacon context note that my current rant is unfolding in a town with very little available housing, huge gentrification pressures, and a very unsustainable suburban ethos.

there's a whole lot of low hanging fruit with respect to reducing car use that we refuse to pick because it might annoy /important white people who worked very hard to earn the right to live in exclusive neighborhoods/

@enobacon I'm all for carrots and sticks, but it feels like we use the sticks in the lower income, historically black & brown communities and give the carrots to the enttitled white folk with the intergenerational wealth and then wonder why things don't get better.

@DrTCombs 👉 by expecting those with the fewest alternatives available to them to make bigger sacrifices than the rest of us. 👈 that's the basic injustice of our government, so the problem needs to get fixed at a level above the zoning code and transit and transportation. I'm not saying it should be fully top-down though, some of this needs to be figured out literally on the street. Municipal banking, tactical urbanism, other ways to enable investment+ownership by residents.

@DrTCombs I think a fair bit of the (very understandable) frustration with not having alternatives to driving is that there is nothing they can do with the current system of transit and "active transportation" planning (and failing to actually build or at least connect in a useful way). We (in Portland) have adopted plans but seem to think we're still going to use the freeway building machines (the DOT) to deliver them + ppl will somehow ride a bus without 10x more bus drivers?

@DrTCombs I will say that the "transportation wallet" and "biketown for all" bikeshare assistance have seemed like a good way to balance some of the parking changes in Portland, but we still do a 💩 job of covering the inequality as a whole from the city/county/state level and prefer to make it some exclusive burden of the city transportation bureau (in conflict with climate directives, but cars still come 1st too) 🙃

@DrTCombs So the point is that policies should seek to restore the proximity based accessibility equality. Regrow the grocery desert. Bring back primary education to the neighbourhood. Break car dependence. The challenge is how to do that and how to safeguard the needs of people that would suffer from an unjust transition path.

@Marrekoo @DrTCombs @enobacon

I might be what some people call a "doomer" but basically I think it's not going to be a question of planning for the future for very much longer: the economy and reality of climate change will make our incumbent infrastructure unbearable and will force these changes

The short-term winners (chief exploiters) will be the dollar stores, because they're already positioned well for a post-car world (lots of them, proximate to populations)