inner city residents aren't better off without parking if the inner city is a grocery desert. they're not better off without parking if their zoned high school is 5 miles away in a no-walk zone. they're not better off without parking if they work nights & weekends in a city whose transit system is virutally nonexistent nights & weekends

I'd love to ban cars entirely in our downtown core. But I don't have to live there. I live 2 miles away, in an in-town neighborhood that was once a suburb, where I get to pretend I live a car-free lifestyle but I actually have a garage and a driveway and a car I rely on at night and on weekends and whenever I want something I can't get to on the very limited bike infrastructure available to me.

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.

@wordshaper thank you for finding the words my exasperation was hiding from me

you have hit so clearly on a big part of the problem, which is that those of us with the loftiest expectations rarely reflect on whether we are also the builders of the tallest barriers

@DrTCombs You're welcome and/or I'm very sorry? :)

@wordshaper Ha. I think I am welcome and you should not be sorry ;)

@wordshaper @DrTCombs

Lol "so never" was my immediate reply as well...

But for a much more cynical reason...and that is that the wealthy will never not exploit the poor.

@danbrotherston @DrTCombs It turns out that a small number of municipalities are actually looking, if only because they're running out of money and credit and need to see where they revenue and expenditures differ.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/10/19/value-per-acre-analysis-a-how-to-for-beginners

and there was a firm that actually did full analysis though I can't remember who at the moment.

@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)

@DrTCombs that was basically my comment last night at a public meeting. I’m primarily a cyclist but I want the focus to be on transit - the bus has to work for old people, blind people, people with young kids, etc. to function and to be honest it’s a win as a cyclist, too - professional bus drivers are rarely who I’m worried about.

@DrTCombs It feels like you could make a nearly identically worded argument about how people in those neighborhoods shouldn't be forced to pay for parking spaces to prop up the car-centric lifestyle imposed on society by suburbanites. Off-street parking especially in dense areas is ruinously expensive, sometimes doubling the cost of building small units. Elimination of parking minimums is an affordable housing measure and helps increase density which helps support proper transit etc.

There's nested problems here and there will always be tradeoffs, the right answer will be different location by location. For example if it's a food desert, requiring a grocery store where the parking garage would have gone is probably a much bigger benefit to residents.

@Lyle I suspect our challenges are very similar!

Chapel Hill just did manage to pass a land use ordinance amendment last night to allow duplexes in residential neighborhoods, but with so very many "guardrails." The number of parking spots was one of the negotiation points.

@DrTCombs Yes, your descriptions sounds very familiar to me

@DrTCombs Ha, we worked with Phillip Kash too, good team. https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/orange-county/article275501356.html

@Lyle Also I'm just really annoyed at all the really privileged white men complaining that the Black woman on town council doesn't know what she's doing / suggesting she didn't even know what she was voting on.

I mean that says a lot about how much we're actually willing to understand how complex this situation is.