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A lot of the time, there are minimum parking requirements - e.g. a mall is required by law to have enough parking for their busiest day of the year. So the other 364 days of the year, guess what happens...
there's a Costco in Torrance CA that is just completely packed full of cars at all times i don't even understand.
Honestly that's just Costco from my experience. Packed even before they open in the morning
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Why aren’t there more underground or at multilevel parking available instead of the expensive real estate used as parking lots anyway? Surely it’s more efficient is it not?
Genuinely curious here.
Garages are expensive to build and if you design your roads so that no person with the means would choose anything but driving and ignore the rest, then sprawl becomes the reasonable choice, since people are driving to every destination anyway. What's the point of the added expense of a garage if you don't really care about being close to other things nearby?
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I mean it could free up more space for apartments and other mixed use buildings in the area. Gives a chance for the walkability in the area too, if executed well.
Yes but that's socialist.
And goes against my donors paycheck.
/s but many people in charge are willfully ignorant that society can be built in a way that doesn't rely on cars.
In addition to what others have said, parking lots are also an easy and cheap way to keep vacant land for speculative purposes.
Basically, our current property tax system allows you to buy a vacant lot, sit on it for a number of years while paying pennies in taxes (because a vacant lot or a parking lot is very low value, even if the land is very high value), and then resell for a much higher price after the city has grown around it. Basically no work, but tons of free profit.
The remedy? Tax land instead. That way, your tax burden is based on the value of your land, not the value of your improvements, so that this form of land speculation becomes uneconomical, while also strongly incentivizing you to develop something more valuable, e.g., housing, offices, etc.
There is a guy near where I live that I think does this. One of the lots has a tiny restaurant on it that I'm like 95% sure is a front, with a huge parking lot. They've bought a few lots nearby and do by the month parking permits. The whole area is being turned into apartments so it feels like he's just sitting on them for the right offer.
Not much underground because Houston is basically a swamp.
Nothing up high because why do that when there’s a whole bunch of flat ground?
Never mind the lack of public transport, bike infrastructure, or the general fact that literally everything is built way to far apart to make walking an option…
Houston is built on a swamp so you can't really dig a lot without dealing with humidity, water, etc. Multilevel means investment and debt. It can take many years to break even. You can make $25/hr per space and quickly make profit and sell in 10 years for 10 times what you paid for. There are multi level parking though.
Basically, it's greed.
One reason is it is millions of dollars more expensive to build underground parking.
I think I’ve seen examples where the underground parking for a commercial building costs as much as or more than the building above.
There is underground parking in downtown Houston as well, but during heavy rain they flood like crazy. I want to say the underground garage near the theatre district was closed for a few months after Harvey.
That color scheme is really hard for my color blind eyes to see, since the orange (?) and green blend together, but dang, what a fucking statement it makes! Just imagine what could be there if people weren't driving. Amazing visual.
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At some point all there'll be is car parks and nowhere to actually go once you step out of your car.
Assuming the random dafa I got off the internet is true, 5% of the US is covered by parking and the area of the US is 2.4 billion acres, digging these fucking things up and planting trees could sequester about a billion tons of CO2 per year (while, you know, preventing billions of tons from cars). Making all surface parking in to parks with grass and trees could sequester about 6 billion tons per year.
CityNerd's maps tend to be much prettier than this (not trying to throw shade, I would literally do much worse than this) and lately, he's just be using this instead of making his own.