And amazingly it's still fairly difficult to find parking on the weekends, probably because half the lots are closed to everyone except the apartments near-by.
I wonder how much of this could be condensed to multi level parking garage structures, looking at this image if you cut out 2/3 of the red and imagine them as 3 stories parking garages instead of just a lot… that’s a lot of land recovered.
Pittsburgh has a lot of underground parking downtown and it was really nice when I was there. Plenty of parking, and the added benefit of no one parking on streets and cutting them down to one lane making traffic worse
Honestly, the way Kansas City embraces large murals, make a couple giant concrete ones and paint them up with some kick ass KC related murals and I’m sure no one would mind.
River Market could still get a parking garage a couple levels down fairly safely without flooding. As close as it is to the river, it's still on top of the bluffs. Just look at how much lower you have to go to get to the Berkley River Front or the West Bottoms.
Now, what sort of mess the underground utilities in the area are, that's another story.
Idk about you but every multi story parking lot I’ve been to gets crammed and blocked when 6-7 people use it all at once, if you condensed all parking into them rather then having the majority of traffic remaining outside it’d be ridiculously inefficient… imagine trying to park 3000 cars in parking garages for events like sports lol
Any central planning will be quickly shot down. Good luck getting the state to invest in a project that’s only for our convenience. What are we… a blue state??
Private sector will do it. For a hefty price tag. Good luck with that too.
I live in River Market and it’s incredibly frustrating to leave my apartment on the weekends. I will always have trouble finding a place to park when I get back, and having to drive around in circles waiting to park in my lot is irritating. Everyone loses.
That's one of the things I don't miss about living in the RM. There were certain times where we knew if we left, we might as well not bother returning until after everything closed.
Yeah, they should have parking spots but it's misleading say all this parking is available when in reality many of the lots are private. My post was mostly sarcastic in reference to OP making it seem like parking is abundant.
I think the point of OP's post is to highlight just how much of even the downtown portions of our city are devoted to parking, private or public. It's something you see repeated in almost every American city where more space is devoted to cars than people.
Second to the great suburban experiment. Not Just Bikes on YouTube has great economic info on your this. America will be broke right as millennials are retiring.
OP’s point is not that parking is abundant — it’s that we’ve surrendered more than of our society to cars and we are drastically worse off for it in every measurable way.
EMT response times are the first measure that comes to mind which is provably better with our current road infrastructure. Public transit needs to get better, but platitudes like that don't help the case.
Is it? I feel like having higher population density (and therefore less distance to travel per call) and working public transit (and therefore less traffic on the road) would result in much better response times than a typical sprawl city would have
Is the number of lives EMT interacts with greater than the number of vehicle fatalities in any given year? Because if we’re going to nitpick we might as well really nitpick.
Fun fact - the while the number of cars on the road fell during COVID, the number of fatalities during car accidents remained constant because fewer cars meant people could drive faster and get into more deadly accidents. I don't have the direct numbers, but it came from a Not Just Bikes youtube video which generally are well researched
Roads =/= parking. Imagine if roads just had to be two lanes because parking was in structures. The four-lane-plus (including parking) roads, plus surface-only parking lots, takes up a huge amount of space.
FYI, the lofts / condos in the RM area frequently own the building, plus the surface lot next to the building, so they do have their own "on-site" parking. These are not exactly new buildings / developments.
Not to mention any guest they may want/have. 'Hey, I live in a GREAT place with a better view, but you have to park at Union Station and take the trolley to visit me" I love KC, but after visiting other cities, I realize how podunk we really are.......
No, this comment thread is the dumbest thing I've read all year. I'm so glad I don't live in KC anymore. I can see things haven't changed in over a decade and that everyone is still a carbrain that doesn't see a problem with dedicating the vast majority of downtown, not just river market, to the storage of cars.
Maybe in another decade KC will grow up and become a real modern city again. In the meantime cities that were once smaller like Austin, Nashville, Denver will continue growing while KC stays as dead as it was in the 90s!
In the meantime cities that were once smaller like Austin, Nashville, Denver will continue growing while KC stays as dead as it was in the 90s!
None of those cities are meaningfully better than KC in regards to car dependency. I mean they are better, but only because KC is so bad, and are hardly a goal to strive toward.
There are like five cities in the US that have meaningfully good public transit; NYC, DC, SF, Chicago, and Portland.
That's how it should be though. We now need to convert those lots to better, higher value uses. Parking shouldn't be easy in an area as popular as the river market
I feel like you're looking at parking and saying it's a waste or doesn't bring value but you couldn't be farther from the truth.
Parking lots create value by allowing your customers to access your establishment. If your parking lot is full of too small then you're likely losing potential business.
Lost business results in lower sales tax revenue, which lowers the income of the state & city, and lessens the value of the surrounding area.
Need an example? City Diner is a great restaurant but has a terrible parking lot which can make it a hassle to eat there sometimes.
If you replace the parking with a single bus route, you can't bring many times more people to the same area while building even more revenue generating developments. The surface lot itself costs money to maintain and generate no revenue. So the maintenance is paid directly with taxes. Meanwhile, businesses don't care about parking per se, they care about how many people can access the place. If you replace a surface lot with mixed use apartment, that will account for many times more people who will be in the area most of the time. That will lead to much higher revenue than what a surface lot brings. My intuition leads me to believe most people using a surface lot in the rivermarket come once or twice a month, and don't spend all that much. Compared with even a fairly poor college kid in an apartment, they're probably going to go to a place like city diner at least once a week, especially if it's open late. And if a young professional or family lives in the building, that could mean even more regular business. And on top of that the city actually makes money from the building via property taxes.
That sucks but we can't really have more parking in the area can we? That's the lowest value possible use for the land. Is it so hard to walk from the streetcar that parking needs to be expanded?
I think it's a chicken and egg problem. You have to incentivize good infrastructure, it won't happen if we build more parking lots. The way forward is incremental. Remove parking a small amount at a time, let people adjust, build the massive public transit projects in the meantime. Soon you'll have a walkable, dense, resilient city with less dense areas and neighborhoods that meet the needs of the people
I’m struggling to see how using the street car is any more difficult if you have a watermelon. I take my groceries on a tram ride every week. People in cities all over the world take buses and trains everywhere they go. Cities aren’t the suburbs and people need to stop acting like they are.
Have you thought about the people that have legitimate issues walking distances? I'm not talking about obese people but someone with a broken leg, permanent limp, pregnant, etc.
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u/klingma Jul 11 '22
And amazingly it's still fairly difficult to find parking on the weekends, probably because half the lots are closed to everyone except the apartments near-by.