this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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If you aren't going to give us walkable cities or really efficient public transit, then we need cars and therefore need the parking. There is no way in this or any world that I am hauling $300 worth of groceries to a bus stop, just to sit there and wait half an hour (at -20C) for a dilapidated bus that may or may not even run on time and has the risk of someone stealing some of those overpriced groceries on the 30 minute ride it would take to get home.
I live in Saskatchewan and it will very frequently get to -30 or below. I cannot ride a bike in that safely without risk of frost bite, so cycling is out of the question (at least in the winter). I drive as small of a car as I could buy, but even small cars are dwindling now in favor of the giant SUV's and pickup trucks that seem to think they own both the road and the parking lots. The public transit in my city is so inefficient that it would take me an hour worth of riding the bus, and a transfer, just to get downtown. I can drive that in 10 minutes. Getting to the other side of the city? 90 minutes to 2 hours and multiple transfers. Or 15 to 20 minutes by car.
Our public transit and walk-ability needs to be remedied long before you start building over parking lots. Businesses with no parking will suffer a lack of business if there is no parking and no change to the current systems.
“We need tons of parking lots until we get walkable cities” gets things totally backwards. Walkable cities are impossible because of the stupid amount of parking lots we have.
The dilemma you pose of “parking vs walkable cities” isn’t even real: we massively overbuild parking lots so we can stand to get rid of most of them. I’ve been to SK many times. Strip mall parking lots are half empty even during the busiest times of day. It’s insane. You could build housing on tons of that land without ever causing parking lots to fill up.
Here in Vancouver, there are almost no strip mall parking lots and the absolute number of cars is higher than anywhere in SK, and yet, there’s STILL too much parking. There’s almost always parking within a block or two of any store outside of the downtown core. The distance you walk probably isn’t that different from across those huge parking lots.
Honestly, we can go on a massive parking diet and, because we overbuild parking so much, there won’t even be any downside for drivers.