How Parking Mandates Wreck Your City: Heinous Land Uses 4 

I know you love your top ten lists but I really love these standalone videos about a specific topic related to city planning and urbanism! I wished you'd do more of them (but you're free to do whatever you like of course) c:

My husband used to work at circa and they did not allow employees (dealers at least) to park in the fancy parking garage and made them pay to park in surface lots off property

Once you start noticing parking garages downtown you realize how empty it (the downtown itself) really is

One thing I love about parking reform is that it actually gives businesses more freedom to determine how much parking their business needs to be successful, and business owners can actually save money this way. It's something that actually makes the market more free and makes it easier for people to start businesses. I love parking reform.

Since there’s already so many defacto videos on “the best college towns”, I’d love to see a dishonorable list on the worst urbanist colleges (or the towns where you would be trapped on campus like on an island). Either that, or a sort of series where you visit a different top 10 for liberal arts vs SEC vs Pac 12 vs ACC vs state schools and etc. As always, love your work and analysis!

The City of Lakeland, FL, made a promotional tourism social media campaign, promoting the abundance of free downtown parking as a lure to visit our downtown. 🤦🏽‍♀️

Is it just me or is your camera settings/filter off? Looking a lot more white/gray than normal.

In some cases, a parking garage is a deal with the devil worth making. There's a great shopping plaza in my area but the vast majority of space is surface parking, which makes it really hard for pedestrians to get around in peace. If they took half the space used for surface parking and turned it into a pedestrianized zone and added more shops in exchange for moving all those cars to a garage nearby, I'd take that deal.

I really, genuinely thought that the name “garage mahal” was a joke from your side - until I saw it on the actual signs. Mind. Blown.

And I thought it was blasphemy when Trump built his own Taj Mahal-style hotel in Atlantic City (which is now a Hard Rock Hotel), but naming your parking garage after that is even more so. When I think of a bad use of land for a parking garage, Ronkonkoma LIRR and Newport Centre mall in Jersey City both come to mind. Ronkonkoma already has a huge parking lot on the southern side of the tracks, and only a small portion of it is even used by cars, so it's just a waste, even more if so with a parking garage on the northern side. Ronkonkoma is the easternmost electrified LIRR station, which makes it quite popular, so the area around the station has a lot of potential and yet...they prefer not to change. And then for Newport, they have no excuse to build a parking garage when they're in such an accessible location thanks to the PATH, dollar vans, and Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. Newport on the HBLR is the most popular stop, and yet instead of using the land the garage sits on for an expansion, it thinks the people of Jersey City, the majority of which takes transit, would find a garage useful...I can't.

Your point that parking garages are a pain to tear down is very interesting to me. Boston has been trying to tear down a parking garage downtown, and it's been a mess. They've repeatedly had to shut down the subway underneath for safety reasons, a busy street nearby is closed, and a worker died. The first generation of parking garages are reaching the end of their lifespan now (along with the rest of car infrastructure) and it's so expensive to deal with.

"So, a parking garage ends up being expensive shelter for cars at a time when we seem to have more and more *actual humans* who are unsheltered" Wow, well said!

the only benifit of parking garages is city centers is the view from the top haha

DC is interesting. Most of its parking garages are underground, so you have a lot of parking, but very little surface space and street facing property is taken up

"mahal" just means "mansion" - but is also used for other group accommodations (like dormitories, servants' quarters) Garage Mahal is quite fitting.

Parking reform !!!!!! I wrote my masters thesis on it and people still look at me funny when I try to describe how actually parking is at the center of everything

The survey of the Garage Mahal is one of the funniest things I've watched in months. I can see why you couldn't resist spending valuable holiday time to make this!

Given the recent flight cancellations, could you talk about the differences between air travel and rail and how they're each affected by extreme weather events etc?

Have you ever given any thought to the weird level of urbanism exhibited by trailer parks? They're unique, but are they CityNerd approved?

I like that transit center. Secure bike parking is a key amenity for me.

Parking garages are only good in 2 applications that I can think of Near venues for sports or music that are NOT located in dense areas Near park and ride style transit stops as part of more dense TOD to accommodate lower density residents using transit to access city centers

There is nothing wrong in principle with the title 'Garage Mahal' as mahal is just the hindi/urdu word for palace.

Tony Hsieh was in my AP Computer Science course in high school (there were only three of us in those days). When he said he was going to found a company selling shoes online I carefully explained to him that was a dumb idea and would never work because shopping is a social activity for women, and they will never buy shoes online without trying them on to see how they look and checking for size. It is possible that I miscalculated.

The Dutch parking solution! Bury it... Everywhere. So much underground parking.

I think that electric cars have a common thread with the parking garage as a land use. You have something that is more expensive and arguably "better" but still serves the overall function of reducing the friction of driving, making it just that one step easier to drive for everything. I know I have personally thought "well, it's short enough drive that I can do it in the Leaf so it basically doesn't count" but from an urbanism perspective I can know that is backward.

Drive-through wedding chapels!? I couldn't stop laughing for 5 minutes when I saw that.

I'd focus on three priorities in this order: 1. Allow developers to build little or no parking. This is typical in the more urban cities/districts. They tend to build just enough to keep rents high, but less over time. The less they build the more the car-less culture grows. Urban cities and even mid-majors like Seattle build a ton of buildings with no parking. 2. Put it below-ground. This is easier and cheaper in some places than others, but when possible it allows the above-ground space to focus on high-value human uses. 3. If it's above-grade, at least keep the walking environment positive. Make the driveways safe to cross, activate the primary streets, require interesting facades everywhere else, etc. 4. Enable conversion if possible, but who's going to build extra floor-to-floor height, and what will you do with the ramps?

One of the saddest things I've seen in Downtown Las Vegas in recent years is the Amtrak mural inside the Plaza Hotel's lobby, which used to mark the hallway to the Amtrak stop behind the hotel. Sigh.

The fact that a parking organization exists and rates parking garages is so peak American.

lmfao 'The Garage Mahal'. Man Vegas never ceases to impress me with the levels of tacky to which it will climb

Detroit's downtown "renaissance" is a perfect example of this. Every new building is dwarfed by the accompanying parking garage. But in a city with the worst public transit in the country it is perhaps inevitable. While other places are demolishing urban freeways Michigan is widening I-94 through a city has already been ruined by them.

Thanks for another great video! The city that I work in has so much surface parking, but it also has tons of garages. The city is basically an entire parking lot, and do you know what the number one complaint of everyone who works there is? Parking. I was like that too when I started, before I really got into urbanism, but it's truly incredible how space inefficient cars are when an entire city is essentially parking and a few office buildings and people still can't find parking. Anyways, I wanted to suggest a video topic for you: city aesthetics. RM Transit did a video talking about how European cities design transit that's more aesthetically pleasing, and I've always felt that cities outside of the US are just better looking. My suspicion is that's because of cars, but I was hoping you might be able to talk about how car infrastructure degrades our visual space and makes our cities uglier. Thanks!

You are on an epic white balance journey and I'm here for it.

I think the best was to use parking garages is to build a significant amount JUST outside a city center, and pedestrianized the crap out of the downtown. This would be a clear signal that the city is meant for people, not cars, and would encourage visitors to drive to a garage, and then navigate the rest of the city on foot, on bike, or with transit. Putting them inside the city center though is bad specifically because it makes people drive within the city center

The parking garages I use here in the Netherlands are often underground. Leaving room for stores, offices or a park on ground level.

Are their websites and orginizations we can use to help Canadians fix our parking problems? Thank you for the great video by the way!

video suggestion: how many homes for how many people could be built if the parking subsidies went to housing instead of parking, so the US would start prioritizing people over cars. i think we usually talk about the absurd amount of space parking steals from the cities and how many housing units could be built in that wasted space, and in that sense parking garages kind of tricks us into thinking the downtown areas are actually pretty built up, but when you take off the garages very little remains. but i think it would be interesting to flip the discussion a bit and talk about how many housing units a city could build if it dropped all the subsidies for free surface parking, and specially parking garages. not to mention the economic deadzone that free parking is, and how much more a city would profit if all the land was put to actual reasonable use

Have you done anything with malls/“lifestyle centers” with transit connections? Maybe something along the lines of your stadiums and airport transit videos. It came to mind because there are a couple of stops on the San Diego trolley that are labeled as being mall stops, but they’re really far away from the actual malls. Maybe other places do it better.

Shout-out to the parking garage directly on the waterfront in Portland, ME. Not exactly the best thing to see from the window of your water-view hotel room.

The photo example from Chicago is interesting. It took me a moment to recognize it from above, despite being by there hundreds of times. It's on (and owned by) the campus of DePaul University in Lincoln Park. And other than the nearby garage which used to serve the Children's Hospital (which has, since, moved downtown) it's about the only place to park in the area that isn't what little is available on the street. As I recall, it used to be tennis courts. An irony is that the smallish gym and arena built around the same time next door was never seen as enough capacity for the men's basketball team. Meaning that the university long rented space in a big arena by O'Hare (where students were bussed if they actually cared to journey that far) with tons of surface parking (it was said the fan based lived in the burbs and didn't want to come into the city.) The city has since significantly funded a new stadium south of downtown, right by the convention center (which, of course, has tons of parking.)

Ray: "Near the top of the list would be parking garages..." Me: "Even closer to the top would be parking NON-garages. A garage at least allows the land footprint for cars to be stacked vertically, freeing up other land for better uses and you can at least cover a side or two of it with apartments, businesses or other attractions to mask the hideous facade. Surface parking, not so much.

In downtown St. Louis we don’t have parking minimums, but developers, renters, owners all expect parking. At least our loft in an old warehouse had our parking underground. When I was single & car-free I leased my space to a couple that had 2 cars. We’ve been car light for almost 9 years now, 1 car for 2 people. I’m interested in automated parking, they claim to need half as much space. A person who works in affordable housing says they can’t detach parking from units because rent must be inclusive - so market rate and low income housing all get parking included.

Another effect of minimums and the resulting garage in every condo mid-rise is the loss of potential commercial space to animate surrounding sidewalks. I was just looking at plans for a five story condo block here in Nashville in a district that should be trending walkable. After all, Nashville council abolished parking minimums about a month ago, but the design predated that. The parking is to be in an expensive excavated hole, and the ramps and two cutaways - one each for cars to enter and exit the garage - means there’s barely space for a lobby left over and no commercial frontage. So much for increasing space for shops so tenants can pop out to the street for a couple of items without unstabling the Toyota.

7:50 Your point on what comes next after parking reform is great! Abolishing minimums unlocks potential for big gains in housing, transportation, climate, and local wealth generation, but if the next steps aren't handled well, it could have minimal impact and we could even see the return of mandatory car storage.

Iron Gate Motor Condos in Naperville IL. It's literally housing ONLY for cars. Mostly very expensive ones at that.

A shipping container based food cart pod sounds awesome. Our downtown food truck lot was closed and turned into storage for a nearby garden store. :(

The 9th Avenue Parking Garage in Downtown Calgary is an interesting example of the future proofed parking structure. It was finished in 2021, cost $57M to build and is in a prime location next to the also new public library. Interestingly, it’s placed right along the CP rail corridor, which is used for freight. I can’t help but feel that money and land could have been put to better use! Great video.

God thank you for bringing this up. My home city of Springfield ma is absolutely riddled with parking garages. A few years back they built a 3,400. Car garage for a casino right in the middle of downtown. And just a few months ago the demolished a different large garage downtown, and are they gonna replace it with new housing? No. Commercial development? No. New park? Nope. They’re replacing this old garage, with a new modern fancy garage, but this one with some EV ports! And the best part is that this garage is for the neighboring mass mutual center, which already has a dedicated underground parking facility and is literally 2 blocks away from the aforementioned 3,400 car garage. American city planning and auto oriented development at its finest.

Horrifying. Horrifying. Horrifying... On another note, why not check out Montreal for your next urbanism base? Complete the NADTA trifecta (can we still say NAFTA?) and report out on the good, bad, and bewildering of NA's most bike-friendly city. I mean, you could also try out Ottawa but I wouldn't do that to you.

Thank you for pointing out the new development in Vegas, but I noticed they still have massive streets. I guess it is hard to wean us off cars as the main choice.

The upside of garages is in creating political opportunities to reallocate parking space that is otherwise politically off-limits. There are plenty of downtown streets in US cities that allocate lanes to parked cars. If you can arrange to swap the street parking for the garage parking, an immediate benefit to every other transport mode can also be pitched, it's just a question of how to make the stakeholders agree on financing such a scheme. This is roughly how the story played out with San Francisco's JFK Drive. An underground parking garage was added to the Music Concourse many years ago, but the terms of its management were such that it was not useful to the public compared to parking on JFK - the prices were too high and the hours were too limited, because that was what the private operator found profitable. JFK closed to car traffic early in the pandemic, and years after, it went to the voters, in separate ballot propositions, to decide whether or not JFK should reopen(back to the status quo) and whether the garage management should be made city-operated to fix its operational issues. The voters went strongly towards both keeping JFK car-free, and to hand over the garage to the city. It took a very tortured story where the plan had to fail before it succeeded, but the original promise of the garage has finally been realized. (It probably cost too much.)

I'd love to better use space, but until we solve the problem of suburbia being super low density, we will never have a better connection between our dense areas and the low-density areas that help to fuel them. Even in our public transit friendly cities, we don't have good access to our dense areas aside from driving. If downtown is 20 miles east, why drive 5 miles south to get to transit and then take transit 20 miles to get downtown? That adds extra distance and often more than doubles the one-way access time. Until we make our suburban areas dense to support good public transit we are faced with three bad choices: have flat parking lots which immediately kill the urban feel and use of a neighborhood; have parking garages that are expensive and difficult to replace, but can with good planning at least preserve the street level urbanism of a neighborhood; or have little parking and just accept that a great deal of the suburban money will just choose to not bother with the inconvenience and spend their money at strip malls, lifestyle centers, and single level office parks instead. As it stands, I'd pick downtown Portland with its numerous parking structures over a pavement with several buildings called downtown (Tulsa), or over more and more suburbs.

Topic suggestion for heinous land usage: Suburban street parking. Some issues: - Wider than necessary carriageways. If parking along the kerb wasn't permitted, a 6m wide carriageway would be more than sufficient for two way traffic, leaving extra space for the footway, landscaping and community use. - a more dangerous road environment. Suburban street parking tends to be provided in such abundance that it is rarely all in use. This contributes to a sense of wide open space for drivers that encourages faster, less safe driving. - it encourages car ownership and use. Having plenty of space to store multiple cars at home reduces the cost of owning those cars. This means people think less about acquiring extra cars and in turn think less about using them once they have then. - it hinders the development of adjacent higher order nodes. High per capita car ownership and use injects high levels of traffic and congestion into adjacent higher order nodes. This in turn puts pressure on these nodes to either limit their development or dedicate more of their valuable land to car infrastructure. - it entrenches low density in the built form. A significant reason for opposition to higher order land uses in low density suburbs is that it might overwhelm the available street parking.

I love downtown Vegas and the Smith Center. They are heading in the right direction, but the people of the US are still stuck in the past for the most part. Thanx for mentioning PRN. I'd not heard of them.

Five stars for "discerning vehicle storage customer"!

That’s two weeks in a row DePaul university footage has been shown, as a geography student there I am glad we are being recognized for both our bad and good uses of prime Chicago real estate.

I would be interested in a video on if (and how) traffic demand can be converted into transit demand. I live in a small city (Rockford, Il) with a metro pop around 300km, and the transit system is absolutely terrible, but it never gets improved because the only people who use it are people who can't afford to drive, and thus don;t have any political power to improve it. The argument against improving it is always that there just isn't enough demand to justify the investment, but meanwhile there are countless 2-3 lane stroads that are backed up with traffic at peak times. Can this car demand ever be turned into transit demand, and what factors play into this?

I’m currently visiting New York. They was the city approches parking is a guide for the rest of us. The physical and dollar cost of parking is high. Driving in Manhattan isn’t for the faint; you must be agressive but also have your wits together. More importantly, parking is not free, it is not cheap. These two items, when added to a comprehensive transit system and a walkable grid ,make driving the last attractive mode.

Also New York City mostly stopped operating public garages, like the ones that used to stand at Queens Plaza and 8th Avenue and W 53rd St.

How do drive-thru weddings even work? I’m so both confused, yet unsurprised. How do they stay in business? What are their customers?

Great video. The UK traffic related fatalities compared to other countries is a surprise, living there. But I'm a pedestrian and public transport user.

If you're looking for suggestions on topics for future videos, I've noticed that there is a difference between older neighborhoods in American downtowns, where buildings tend to have smaller lots, almost like row houses, vs current urbanist developments which seem to often be much bigger projects that cover a large portion of a city block or even a whole neighborhood. I'd be interested in seeing how this affects the fabric of the neighborhood and whether it has a positive/negative or neutral affect on the city long-term. It seems to me like the smaller lots would be more flexible & easier to repurpose/redevelop in the future, and also tend to support more variety in a smaller area due to smaller street frontage, but those rarely seem to be built anymore. I'm curious whether my thoughts about this are on-point.

Until cities provide convenient and efficient ways to shuttle people in and out of the downtown areas, parking garages are not going away. In the meantime, the harm can be reduced. The worst parking garages are those that waste a lot of ground level space. Even if there must be an ugly parking structure rising majestically into the sky, the ground level should at least be designed as space for shops and restaurants so that the garage doesn't ruin a long stretch of prime street-facing real estate. I wonder if existing ones could be retrofitted on the ground level to provide some retail space that opens onto the street. Underground garages are less heinous than the others since they are largely invisible and don't ugly up the city so much, but they are expensive. If the numbers of cars are ever drastically reduced, maybe the underground garages could be converted into storage space or offices. These underground spaces are naturally somewhat insulated from extreme exterior temperatures, so they could turn out to be energy efficient. In a place like Las Vegas, eliminating the parking garages will be a challenge. Las Vegas has a horrifically hot climate; I can't imagine walking or riding a bike around there in the height of summer. Attempting to do so would likely land me in the hospital. I'm sure there are plenty of people besides me who won't ever want to face that heat and will stick stubbornly to their air conditioned vehicles. Fortunately, I do not live in Las Vegas or a similarly oven-like place, so if good alternatives to running around in a car are ever constructed in my area, I'll be able to take advantage of them. Those residential buildings constructed atop massive garages are truly hideous. Even the stereotypical dreary Soviet apartment complexes are more attractive.

Loving your videos! Can you do an snapshot of a city? Like Ogden, Utah - we could use the attention, city planners are... struggling :(

What is your opinion on underground parking garages? Still horribly expensive, but they don't use up land and are not visible.

As a resident of a city which allows on street parking on almost any street, including arterials, I would say parking garages are pretty okay compared to it. And a far superior way of providing parking for nearby residents of apartments and townhouses compared to having parking on every last square feet of outdoor space. I still think garages are the only correct way to provide parking in cities. (Assuming of course we are honest about the cost of it. But that is also a problem for the other forms of parking. On street parking in particular is criminally underrated)

I look at parking garages as the lesser of two evils. At least it's not surface parking.

Nearly all the new, tall, luxury buildings in Downtown Jersey City have parking pedestals. But, they're also required to have ground floor retail, which solves most of the "castle on a hill" look of the ones in Las Vegas, while creating a street level neighborhood. What you showed looks imposing. They're also trying to get developers to make them look less like a parking garage, which is something, I guess. There is a push to have less parking in newer buildings, we'll see what comes of that. People like the amenity space that an offset parking garage creates.

Do you have a list of city/urbanism/transportation books you’d recommend? Apologies if you’ve already made a video and i haven’t seen it. Ive read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer and I got Strong Towns for Christmas. I have a few on my to-get list like Walkable City and Great Streets.

Color on the video is very washed out. Would look into the color balance.

How do you transition away from parking garages when existing options to get downtown are poor or non-existent? I feel like there’s a chicken and egg here.

Criminals have an easy time robbing cars and pedestrians in a lot of garages

I'm sorry, I heard drive through wedding chapel and didn't hear anything else you said

I know of one underground parking garage, at the Statehouse in Columbus and if you didn't know it was there you'd never know it was there. I imagine they're rare but assume there's more somewhere and I think more could be done with them. Provided there's good geology and hydrology, instead of putting your apartment building on top of the garage to reduce footprint, why not put the garage under the apartment building? Or the Walmart? Or the endless strip mall? As new ones are built, or course; they'd be hard to retrofit.

I'm not necessarily pro parking garage or parking lot, but I'd rather have cars parked off the street, leaving more room for bikes and pedestrians. I just can't picture the US without cars, but maybe that's my lack of imagination. What do you hope car ownership will look like 25 years from now? Will car sharing/rental be more prevalent? Will people ditch cars for transit? Or bikes? Or will we simply learn to live within a smaller radius from our homes? What would a road trip of the future look like?

Let's by saying, I am an American designer (not urban, transport, or anything related to this topic) though I reside overseas on a land-scarce island with a large population. I have seen a lot of creativity when it comes to shoehorning developments into narrow or zigzagged plots of land. From what I observe, this issue around cars, parking, walkability, etc all seems like value signaling. I guess it's time for me to also do some signaling. I believe in the rules of improv, "Yes, and". I believe the vast amounts of land that the US possesses have made us lackluster when it comes to creative solutions while at the same time thinking we must force our way of life upon our fellow brothers. I don't know what you want to call it but it comes from both sides of the spectrum. Why can't we have walkable cities that also accommodate people who drive as well? I would much prefer city ordinances that restrict surface parking in favor of structured (yes, all of your points about costs are valid, no disagreement) While I am a designer, now, my education and early years in business were as a financial economist and M&A banker. I believe in using economic principles to guide market behavior. Restrict surface parking by raising taxes and fees on them, increase the cost of permitting and building them by mandating green coverage and permeable materials and blah blah, but also get rid of mandated parking minimums. Stop subsidizing the construction of all parking structures. If developers begin to feel true costs, they will in turn change their calculus. The final point, create city ordinances that for permitting purposes parking structures must provide commercial retail space at street level. Streets lined with street-facing retail at ground level go a long way in creating a sense of walkability. The structured parking can be located behind and above the retail space. I envision the street-facing facades being occupied commercial or residential and the parking occupying the rear cheaper portions without a view so you don't see towers resting on a platform of parking. To me, it's a packaging problem. I'll talk about street parking in a different post.

I don't get it. I will absolutely agree that surface parking is a horrible usage of land space, but if I want walkability, and walkability is something you get when you make more efficient use of land, then I don't see what is wrong about having the lower floors of a structure (not the ground floor, as that would be better for shops and such, but say floors 2-5) being used for parking. I was waiting this entire video for an argument as to why garages specifically are bad, and the closest thing that was said was that they are for cars, and anything we do for cars is automatically bad, which is an extremely absolutist anti-car message. I for one think it might be possible to have better city design and increase walkability and so-on without necessarily equating even occasional car usage to worshiping Satan.

Missing the "sub count check"

ok "Garage Mahal" is actually camp so I can't totally hate it

I am from a Central European city founded in the Middle Ages, and parking garages are very common and hugely popular. Built by the city (!) the represent significant revenue from parking from people who would otherwise go to the city centre and drive back and forth anyway.We have a six storey one one block from the 17th century city hall, it is nicely incorporated in the surrounding architecture, and the square around the corner is now a pedestrian zone, it used to be a parking lot for people without permits (meaning they would try parking there even without one). Let’s admit that some people simply WILL drive to the city centre (such as my friend from a village just outside the city who has three kids under 10). More importantly, I am shocked by the existance of "courts" for traffic violations in the U.S., we have a "city hall office" for that, plus cops can collect the fees to a limited extent. But hey, a city owned and operated parking garage can wipe from the face of the earth many outdoor spaces that can be used for bike lanes or playgrounds

I have an idea for heinous land uses. I think airports to close to the city take up valuable land and restrict building heights and crest noise and traffic. I also think cities with more then one airport are a waste of space. I feel one airport is more efficient as you can save land area as you only need to add a runway don’t need additional admin and freeway interchanges and concentrate activity to one area of the city

Rewatching this video in light of the recent absurdity: the city I live in is trying to make one of its largest parking garages a historic landmark because “cool architecture”

Parking garages are like the extra six lanes on a freeway all stacked on top of each other. I suppose the premise is that it they are supposed to make accessing the city more streamlined, but all I see the owner of the garage profiting off of attracting lots of car traffic downtown. Like imagine if parking garages were all magically connected and replaced with commuter railway or tram stations

I enjoy your channel very much. I think you’re even improving. But in your last three or four episodes, the lighting on you in your home colors you weirdly. I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe it’s the hue, or maybe the lighting is just too bright.

Parking garages are actually extremely useful and very efficient in use of space. I can't understand your negativity about them. They take way less space. You can park near the centre of a city/town and do your work/shopping etc. by using public transportation or going by foot. This is how Europe is using parking garages. Even here in Europe, most small towns and villages barely have good functional 24/7 mass transit, so people need their cars to drive from and to the near bigger cities for work/shopping/studying etc... By the way " fully autonomous vehicles" (Level 5) are still science fiction. And very far away to be used commercially. Maybe in 15-20 years, when the technology is ripe enough.

If i walk from my Downtown Albuquerque apartment to one of the ART stations, i pass FIVE parking garages. In just a few blocks. In Lil old Albuquerque. Not to mention all the surface parking that's left over from the "Urban Renewal" movement. And with about 18000 parking spaces in the Downtown Core, most of which are empty day or night, people still tell me they hate going downtown because "it's so hard to park." Awful! At least Albuquerque is now also discussing some zoning changes and parking requirement reforms.

Well, parking garages are still better than surface lots... Also, you still need to crank up the color saturation on your camera!

You should look at Jacksonville, FL. First Baptist Church owns most of the downtown parking garages and then gets revenue from people who use them during the week.

Heinous???? LOL!!!!!! Isn't that the point of Vegas, to be over the top, extravagant, or just really garish? And damn it, I find it quite objectionable that I am subsidizing the unappreciated "education" of others children, not the free parking (please tell me where to find free parking in a city 🤨). Edit for spelling error.

Walking around the Minneapolis/St. Paul Skyways it's *always* instantly clear when you're walking through a parking garage, it just has a completely different feel to any other type of building You walk through a skybridge and suddenly you're in a poorly warmed/cooled hallway with no windows, no shops, and very bland walls, at best maybe a few ads around (80% of the time for parking)? You're in a parking garage.

I am very skeptical, if autonomous vehicles really solve this issue, because they still need to be stored somewhere - and this might make things even worse. The "typical American way" to do this might be to use the roads as a "storage" aka keep them constantly driving (bringing traffic congestion into a whole new dimension…). Having centralized parking not per store but per area (as Europe already does for human drivers) might be seen as "communist" by many in the US and also still requires some parking garages. Oh, and I'm still waiting for the "now even toddlers can have their own cars and be independent!" claim by the typical "more cars solve everything" guys… :)

You made a nice but very short list of the harms that car-storage structures cause to cities, so here's a few more - They add large volumes of traffic to constrained city streets (car traffic, which is the least efficient and most noxious [noise, stink, pollution] version of transport in terms of space usage in a public right-of-way). - Availability of parking at a designation is the top generator (or one of the top generators) of car traffic demand; it depresses transit use and arrival by other modes - The exit and entry driveways cross public sidewalks, which introduces more or less constant vehicle-pedestrian movement conflicts directly into a pedestrian zone - They block off light and cast shade, with their huge bulk chunking up large volumes of air and light with inert concrete and darkness - They interrupt the continuous streetwall of economic activity and pedestrian interest (i.e., storefronts and restos, shops and services) that is part of the essential engine of downtown success - They take foot traffic (pedestrians) off the sidewalk usually for a block or more; this foot traffic is part of the essential engine of downtown economic activity - They are a very low-value use of high-value urban land - Contribute nothing to the economic synergy effect of having densely active uses in close proximity to one another (the reasons downtowns work) - They are usually either (1) subsidized with scarce public funds, eliminating the other more important things that can be done with public funds; - or they are (2) imposed by non-market forces (regulations) - If they are attached to one particular land use or enterprise, such as a casino, or a hotel, they are generally unavailable as a car-storage resource for other businesses. If parking is provided at all in a downtown, it should at least be publicly available to serve multiple uses, or you may get an even WORSE situation which is MULTIPLE, DUPLICATIVE parking structures = exponentially worse than even just one such structure. At least if there is to be car storage downtown, it should be a "park once, walk around to your multiple destinations" type. Dedicated parking lots and structures are thus compounding the harm - They are impossible to re-use and adapt to anything but car storage. Ability to flex structures to new uses and economic conditions is a core strength of downtown buildings' (old hotel -> senior apartments; a storefront building can convert to a shop, a restaurant, offices, a maker space, anything that relies on high visitation really) adaptivity that helps downtowns thrive over time. Parking garages are completely non-market-responsive and can't contribute anything but generating more traffic. I hope you like this list and if I missed anything, I'm sure other commenters will catch it ;)

I live in a building with the first 5 floors being parking which means it’s built into the cost of the building, plus I have to ride past it going up and down the elevator, plus the extra stops from people getting on and off the elevator to/from the garage. Also the pedestrian entrance shares space with cars coming in and out of the garage plus sone ground level parking, so you have to dodge cars when you’re coming and going. My work also has the first 5+ floors being parking plus 2 more underground. And yet the building is considered “LEAD” environmentally friendly???

when you show the fatalities in "per 100K" people think "oh ok 5.8 for Canada" is not that high. Canada has 30M people. every year 1800 man/woman/children dies in car crashes. every year 1800 loss is no joke for a first world country it's shameful

Las Vegas, the national capital of anything goes, hahaha, best urban definition ever. But Miami, competes closely. PS: structured parking is horrendous land using. Greetings from Bogotá Colombia

The building with 8-10 floors of parking before getting to the apartments was pretty hideous. There is a building along Miami Beach which, while more pleasing to the eye, is in its conception a monstrosity. It is the Porsche Design Tower, where you and your Porsche take the elevator to your condo. (I have only seen it while walking or riding the bus by it. I like walking in the Miami area. The sidewalks are so empty of pedestrians!)

i'm a big fan of reusing structures in ways that preserve their original layout, so a parking garage would probably turn into some sort of weird mini mall where the long sloped surfaces play host to an emergent accissibility compromise that's uncomfortable for both wheelchair and leg users. since large swaths of floor area are not level.

To get rid of parking garages is tricky. In a car centric country like the US, it's not like they don't get used. You'd have to put in the pedestrian focused infrastructure before phasing out the parking garages closest to or in downtown, otherwise you'll still have all the drivers looking for parking spaces, because they still come from car dependant areas. The biggest change that would improve things is getting rid of R1 zoning entirely, and replacing it with general mixed use, with noise restrictions on areas not specifically for industry. Having a height limit on buildings is common in the rest of the world. My town has a ten floor above the ground maximum, for example. Once you have medium density areas, all of a sudden public transport becomes much more viable. But if you have the US model where you go from big high rise condos, hit the R1 zoning line and go straight to single family homes as far as the eye can see, buses can't service all that area efficiently, so people don't use the buses unless they have no other choice. So they drive everywhere, which leads to minimum parking requirements. So to reverse this, you need to go back and get rid of the R1 zoning, and base the maximum density of any given area on what the power, water and waste management infrastructure can handle.

I'd vote for parking garages over street parking and surface lots any day. Just one parking garage can clear up SO much street space. So I think they still have some time in the sun as cities work to densify downtowns, but only in place of surface parking. And of course, minimum parking requirements should also be reduced. 11:28 Oh no, cringe detected.

Yeah but autonomous vehicles is looking more and more like fusion energy, technology with a ton of promise but also beyond the capabilities of the state of human knowledge. And if so, I can point to nearly every successful pedestrian-oriented downtown/main street-type district and find at least one if not multiple structured parking garages in the mix. The "numbers" for nearly every kind of commercial activity to not work on without car trips in virtually every place in America outside of Manhattan.