Yeah, I just assumed the OP also covered street parking, that's my bad.
No bad. You're making me think in ways I never had. (Thx to everybody for that.
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In my head, turning city folks against cars is also going to turn them against street parking, which if nothing else is the cause of so many accidents and so much gridlock.
I imagined street parking being dealt with separately, as a local issue, with a national plan for parking lots, because that strikes me as a bigger (& more intractable) problem.
I also imagined the growth of parking garages making street parking unnecessary, as capacity rises. (That may be taken up by the increased traffic engendered.
It may drive a greater need for garages. Does that lead to the same gridlock as with highways: more capacity actually raises use?
Where's the "top" of that graph?
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Per the graph up-thread somewhere, car ownership levelled out in that time period at a substantial minority of US population. I'd suggest that it's possible in this era for someone to argue that surface parking spreads out a city, making it harder for the common man to go about his business. From there you might be able to get a mandate for new construction not to take up more than a certain amount of land above that required for the premises themselves, which would force all but the smallest new buildings to solutions other than surface parking.
That works. It might fall under the same rubric as Prohibition, namely, done in the name of betterment of society.l
On street parking is a harder sell, but if you make cities more compact (as above) there'll automatically be less of it, and parking meters are likely to become necessary to control access.
I'd agree you get less parking with less sprawl, but I don't see a need for meters on suburban streets. Even given smaller lots, I'd say parking could be allowed for without requiring it on street with meters. However...
In neighborhoods where there are townhouses or row houses, there may not be room for parking in each lot; there some "neighborhood garages" might have to go up when some new construction replaces some of the old.
That's also true, & that's a factor I hadn't thought of.
What I picture, tho, is mass transit taking many cars out of cities entirely, & the garages taking up the transitory traffic (shoppers, tourists).
Streets in older city neighborhoods that are built on a grid are going to be an obstacle here (although in many older neighborhoods, like lower Manhattan or the center of Boston, streets already follow "crooked" patterns). But traffic islands and conversion of an occasional intersection into Blah-Blah Square will help break up grids.
I wouldn't go so far as to rebuild entire older neighborhoods.
I'd favor traffic circles at every intersection, tho.
(Put grass & trees on all of 'em, while you're at it.
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