Parking structures are insanely expensive. Like, each parking spot in a parking structure costs like 30X what it costs to build a surface parking spot. It’s a crapload of concrete, and with climate change, concrete ain’t getting cheaper (concrete is extremely carbon-intensive, it releases CO2 intrinsically, not just from power-generation).
edit, since I’m getting downvotes and I assume this post is being read as an endorsement of city-destroying surface parking: The correct solution is just to not do parking at all except for extreme needs and focus on human-scale transportation.
Parking in general is expensive, along with all of the rest of car infrastructure.
Yes, but concrete parking structures are an order of magnitude moreso. Assuming $50k per parking spot and a 25-year mortgage, each spot will incur $328.58 in monthly mortgage costs. Assuming full occupancy every workday and zero on weekends (21 workdays per month) that means the daily parking fee should be $16 just to break even. This is a thumbnail sketch of course, but it shows the kind of costs we’re talking about.
I mean, yes.
To be fair, this is kind of a special case- it’s an area where it’s cheaper per square foot to build lots than buildings - but this is also a leftover of the 1960s-1980s. This aren’t done this way as much anymore, at least not in dense areas. You’ll never see this in New York City or in DC for example.
So much of America is so low density that it’s just a different set of issues than in other parts of the world. I went to visit family in West Virginia this weekend and it was literally 2 hours of driving through mountains and woods with no houses or towns in sight- no lots, no decks, no trains, you’re in the middle of nowhere.
You’ll never see this in New York City or in DC for example.
There are surface lots in Manhattan, though they are being developed into multistory buildings and no new surface lots are being constructed.
Some of the remaining surface lots probably continue to operate as placeholders for “future tall building site”, while rights/price/building codes are being hashed out. In the meantime, you can charge a lot of money for a parking spot in Manhattan.
We all get it, this is FuckCars, but you can’t reasonable expect people to have discussions without talking about reality as it is right now. Knowing how much a parking garage costs/is worth on the market is great knowledge when arguing against building more car infrastructure.
Are you stupid? That picture is from the 70s. Here is an updated shot from the same general area: https://imgur.io/tWzvSWq
We do?
Major cities are packed with parking decks, but decks are expensive, so they’ll only be built if land values are high. For most of America’s history it was simply cheaper to build out than up in most places.
It may be ugly, inconvenient, and environmentally problematic, but it shouldn’t be confusing.
Edit: it occurs to me that more parking, decks or otherwise, would actually be good for cars which seems antithetical to the point of this community… so I’m unsure what point is even trying to be made aside from calling America stupid
It would actually be bad for the cars, they would spend less time out in the sun causing them to develop a vitamin D deficiency, then they’d die from having weak bones.
But having parking garages wouldn’t reduce the number of cars as you say, but could potentially free up some land for useful things, which could make the cities more walkable at the very least
Pretty ironic to have obvious grammatical errors in a post calling an entire country stupid
The meme format is meant to be ironic, with an opinion full of holes and cadence similar to Lrrr from Futurama. Though that typo looks like an overzealous autoconnect.
