First off, I want to point out that I am totally on team /c/fuckcars. I highly believe in transit, walking, and biking.
That being said, I think it’s fair to say that:
- Cars aren’t fully going away anytime soon
- Even in our wildest dreams, it still makes sense for cars to be usable in some way, just that the other transport methods are highly prioritized.
So the discussion I want to have is about parking garages, and the hate I see towards them from the urbanist community.
I feel like parking garages vaguely align with urbanist views, because they are high density, and they allow someone to drive to a general area after which they can do the rest of their transportation via other methods.
To put it into perspective, I’d rather have 1-3 dense parking garages in a neighborhood than have street parking along all the roads plus wide open parking lots around grocery stores and whatnot.
I understand this is a lesser of the two evils discussion but it seems to me like parking garages are the clear winner.
Especially your last paragraph I think is the key. We can’t top-down dictate and micromanage all city planning. Rather, we should strive to implement a tax and zoning system such that things are done or not done according to their true costs. So long as we tax land appropriately, reform our insane land use policies (e.g., parking minimums), and tax externalities correctly (e.g., vehicle weight, congestion pricing, carbon, etc.), we should be able to just let the economy run, and the market will reveal where and when it makes sense to build parking garages and parking lots.
Personally, I suspect what we’ll discover in the long run is parking, in all its forms, rarely makes financial sense.