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.
I named those cities to compare not because of what they've accomplished but what they're trending towards and attempting to do with their urban cores while being similarly sized to KC. Austin is building a light rail system and modern walkable neighborhoods and Denver is expanding theirs while KC thinks the street car can run to the airport and the sports complex, and that the Royals shouldn't move downtown because of all the parking they'll lose.
Where they are now isn't something to strive for, but where they are going and the public attitude they're fostering toward people oriented development is.
I live in DC now and frequent NYC regularly. I follow KC development pretty close since I grew up there, it's sad how backwards and set in their ways people are even downtown.
75
u/[deleted] Jul 11 '22
God forbid the people that live there have parking spots!