i wonder what the association is between the size of a parking lot and the frequency of its stores buggies not being returned by shoppers. from the pictures of beautiful european cities and towns i’ve seen, walkability seems to be an important development concern. i’m sure not everywhere, but by contrast, many shopping areas in the us are concrete wastelands with stores wrapping around massive, massive parking lots. perhaps parking 1/4 mile away from the store you just left makes it easier for people to excuse themselves from doing the right thing. i guess we don’t have a great track record with doing the right thing in any context though.
walkability seems to be an important development concern
While true for more modern development, many beautiful, walkable European cities were simply built before cars were around, so it’s not like they made an extra effort to make them walkable, that’s just how things were done
I mean cars do a lot of good, but yeah. The thing that messed up the US was a policy introduced in some places making a ridiculously high minimum number of parking spaces required for any business. And now, it’s pretty tough to overcome the way that made cities take shape, since now you kind of need to take a car to get places reasonably, meaning places need parking spots to make their customers feel like they can get in… It’s a viscous cycle
100%. it seems to me that the broad scaling of community played a critical factor, being born out of the privilege of personal vehicle transportation. now we live in one place, work in another, play in another, eat in another, etc. in some cases sure, maybe that could theoretically give you 3+ different circles of orbit and thus 3 different communities of fellowship and support. from experience though it looks more like an incongruent/lacking distribution of the kind of important ties between others that would otherwise develop organically within in a given community. ultimately it seems to reinforce our isolation and undermines a sense of belonging.
i wonder what the association is between the size of a parking lot and the frequency of its stores buggies not being returned by shoppers. from the pictures of beautiful european cities and towns i’ve seen, walkability seems to be an important development concern. i’m sure not everywhere, but by contrast, many shopping areas in the us are concrete wastelands with stores wrapping around massive, massive parking lots. perhaps parking 1/4 mile away from the store you just left makes it easier for people to excuse themselves from doing the right thing. i guess we don’t have a great track record with doing the right thing in any context though.
While true for more modern development, many beautiful, walkable European cities were simply built before cars were around, so it’s not like they made an extra effort to make them walkable, that’s just how things were done
thanks for the insight, which makes sense. stupid cars.
I mean cars do a lot of good, but yeah. The thing that messed up the US was a policy introduced in some places making a ridiculously high minimum number of parking spaces required for any business. And now, it’s pretty tough to overcome the way that made cities take shape, since now you kind of need to take a car to get places reasonably, meaning places need parking spots to make their customers feel like they can get in… It’s a viscous cycle
100%. it seems to me that the broad scaling of community played a critical factor, being born out of the privilege of personal vehicle transportation. now we live in one place, work in another, play in another, eat in another, etc. in some cases sure, maybe that could theoretically give you 3+ different circles of orbit and thus 3 different communities of fellowship and support. from experience though it looks more like an incongruent/lacking distribution of the kind of important ties between others that would otherwise develop organically within in a given community. ultimately it seems to reinforce our isolation and undermines a sense of belonging.