Complaints about too much parking?

1668 Views 2 Replies 3 Participants Last post by losangelino, Oct 1, 2017

LovingLife

Discussion Starter · Sep 28, 2017

Can someone enlighten me on this topic, I am asking out of curiosity. I notice that with a lot of new projects being proposed, the majority of people complain about the project consisting of too much parking? Why are people complaining about this? Are these people hoping that LA eventually becomes like New York and ditches the car scene for the public transportation scene? I am all for more people taking public transportation and the streets and highways in turn being less congested, but taking the bus in LA just isn't practical. Unless you cant afford a car, I don't see why anyone would take the bus or metro. It takes about 2 or 3 times the amount of time to get anywhere. So to reiterate, why the complaints of "too much parking"?

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unmentioned

· #2 · Sep 29, 2017

The general line of thinking is that if you make it easy and free to park everywhere throughout the city then people will have no reason to consider using their cars less and consider other methods of getting around (I'll leave others to debate whether those other methods are viable or not). There's also an argument that large parking facilities are a waste of space and resources that drive up construction costs, chew up land area and produce little to no economic benefit in and of themselves. There's also a particular school of urbanist thought that takes issue with so much of the design of our physical environment being dictated by the maneuvering and storage needs of private motor vehicles ("forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends"). These are all value judgments of course and can be debated in many different ways but those are the major points, I think.

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losangelino

· #3 · Oct 1, 2017

unmentioned said:
The general line of thinking is that if you make it easy and free to park everywhere throughout the city then people will have no reason to consider using their cars less and consider other methods of getting around (I'll leave others to debate whether those other methods are viable or not). There's also an argument that large parking facilities are a waste of space and resources that drive up construction costs, chew up land area and produce little to no economic benefit in and of themselves. There's also a particular school of urbanist thought that takes issue with so much of the design of our physical environment being dictated by the maneuvering and storage needs of private motor vehicles ("forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends"). These are all value judgments of course and can be debated in many different ways but those are the major points, I think.

Sort of a catch 22. I live in the Valley. The city needs adequate schedules and coverage before we can insist on most going car-less. I would love to take the train in (and Metrolink has more during weekends now) but it is ridiculously expense (much more than it takes for me to buy gas) and then once downtown, it isn't so easy to go all over. Despite its reputation, our downtown is pretty spread out. Get the infrastructure in and the frequent 24x7 schedules and then we can talk about giving up cars and parking. I loathe our parking lots as much as everyone else but for now what are we to do?

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