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Parking Garage Of The Future
Spunk writes "Like something out of the Jetsons, this NYTimes article [no-reg link] describes a parking garage that automatically stores cars in a 3-dimensional grid, and retrieves them when you return. Europe and Asia have several already."
Would be to ban large vehicles from the city. Only allow one or two-person mini-vehicles in, while every SUV has to park on the border and take public transportation. It wouldn't be a politically popular move, but it would be space and fuel efficient.
George Jetson didn't need to park his car (ship/whatever.) It was his briefcase if I remember correctly. Seriuosly though, some parking facilities in Manhattan have something similar. The only real problem is that it is not automated and the operators aren't too fluent in English. I can't recall how long we had to wait to receive our car but it wasn't anything too outrageous. I just remember it because it was something I had never even considered. I really can't see the wait being too much of a problem. What are the odds of 300 people showing up at the exact same time wanting to get their cars? How much different would that be from 300 people arriving at a ramp based garage and all trying to leave at the same time. It would probably be a lot easier actually getting out onto the road then a ramp based garage would.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
I gotta tell ya, living near Boston has been an interesting ride/walk the past couple weekends. I've been in and out of town hundreds and hundreds of times, but it wasn't until two weeks ago that I actually walked across town. From BU to the Aquarium, via Copley Square and the Commons. Bar hopping.
Did it again last weekend for the Freedom Rally (aka Hemp Fest). This town is relatively easy to walk around in (not if you're in a hurry, I guess)... Even Chicago wasn't too bad on foot. An hour and a half puts you almost anywhere you want to go.
Americans are just lazy.
In the debate over public vs private transport, people overlook WHY there is so much traffic in the first place.
Low density suburbs with no commercial or industrial space cannot support mass transit. They barely have the tax base to support basic amenities like roads, police, sewers, water and firestations. It is a no-brainer that a high density neighbourhoods like those found in Manhattan, Tokyo or many European cities can support a lot more amenities per capita than can your typical American suburb. A city block like mine with 20 buildings each with 150 units has the same sewers, water pipes, telephone lines and other infrastructure under the street as any suburb. A look at policing cost will show that the neighbourhood is partly self-policing too.
When I moved into this neighbourhood (the West End of Vancouver, Canada), I quicky found that my car was useless. There is no parking anywhere for more than 2 hours at a time without a permit. Once I got my permit, the car didn't move from that spot for over a month. EVERYTHING is in walking distance. From specialty grocery stores to incredible restaurants to the commercial district for work, to bars, to the beach and forest (one block away), there is no need to drive. The only exception is the mountains for snowboarding, which take 45 mins by public transit or 25 min by car. Not worth the cost of owning a car! Needless to say, after three months, I sold the car and saved over $500 CDN /month, three quarters of the cost of my rent! That was seven years ago. Never looked back.
Part of the reason this neighbourhood developed the way it did is out of necessity. Long ago the city of Vancouver decided that they would never build a freeway. The suburbs built them, but they promptly end at the border of Vancouver. Parking is also limited. This makes driving in Vancouver difficult, to say the least. A city of only 2 million, we also have invested in 2 subway lines and we are building a third. This is not so much to help people get from existing neighbourhoods into downtown, as to to encourge more high density neighbourhoods to cluster around the stations.
In short, increasing population density is the solution to many of the problems facing American cities today. Counter-intuitively, lack of transportation can actually encourage good urban planning. Dense neighbourhoods save the government money , and save the consumer money. It is a win-win situation. Suburbs are simply, unsustainable. Want to fix the transportation problem? Don't build any more transportation infrastructure. Just loosen your zoning laws so developers can build up instead of out, stop subsidizing new developments farther out in the burbs, and let the marker do the rest.