A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Everytime i see my hometown mentioned it's never for anything good lol. Fuck you Spokane, glad I left ya.
This looked so absurd that I had to look at the satellite view to believe it but it's true. This planet has skin cancer and it's us.
And most of the cars that use that parking are in use for maybe 2-3 hours per day. The rest of the time they're just taking up space.
We really need to get people to abandon personal cars. Even if everyone switched to electric cars we'd still need all this parking space. We'd also still have all the microplastic pollution from their tires.
There's a catch 22 though. A lot of people feel like they need their cars because there's no alternative. Because of that, they oppose any law that could make cities less car-centric because it makes it harder for them. But, that just means they continue to need their cars. I don't know how that can be fixed.
Where I live, most people have cars. But a) they're cars, not trucks; b) parking is highly restricted, mostly to multi-story garages. Since parking takes up less space it means that walking distances get much smaller, which means you don't need the car as much.
Would honestly love to live in a building or neighborhood that maintains a fleet of cars to share. I can't afford to operate a truck/van as a daily driver (and I honestly hate driving them), but I often find myself wishing I had a large vehicle to move stuff around in.
In many places there are car share services. Zipcar, Communauto, Flexicar, etc.
If the parking lots were eliminated, buildings would be so close to each other that you could walk and you wouldn't even need parking lots.
Lemme tell you a story.
A few years back I was on a trip to the US, I was visiting a small town, not much going on there but they had an airport.
When I checked out from the hotel the receptionist asked me if I wanted her to call me a cab, I said no because the airport was 1.5km away from the hotel and I'll just walk there. Poor woman was looking at me as if I was stabbing a baby right in front of her, a look so bevildered and confused that I actually felt sorry for her.
Then the hotel driver appeared from the office and took me to the airport... Such a weird country
Anyway, moral of the story is, good luck convincing those people to walk.
In many parts, walking is suicide simply because there are no safe ways to cross many roads and in some places it is entirely impossible. But even where walking is possible people are not even considering it as an option. I had a similar experience in a mid sized town, where we walked maybe 30 min into the centre from an inner suburb. The walk was nice, except for a scary part where we had to cross a highway with its looped exit lanes. People at our destinations looked in the exact same way, as if we were pure lunatics. This whole thing could only be explained by us being Europeans and Europeans do this kind of crazy stuff.
Roads should also be colored to dig it deeper
Something something pave paradise something.
I can see there's a lot of potential for parking space development on that island in the middle there.
Just...
😐
It's so depressing I can't describe it in words
did not expect to be jump scared by my hometown lol
Dude, me too! I didn't see the title and thought the island looked familiar.
wow, there's so little city in this city.. where are the people supposed to be?
In traffic
And people struggle understanding why I would prefer a shift from 6-2. Spokane traffic is why.
Just move literally anywhere in Europe. Fucking Bulgaria has better city planning than this insanity. And public transport!
The people are all expected to live at least 30 minutes away in the suburbs. This is what's commonly referred to as "The American dream".
Spokane is a very sprawling city. It's the second most populous in Washington but a third the density of Seattle. Including the "metropolitan area" of both Spokane is a seventh as densely populated.
Are there lots of parking lots because it's sprawling or is it sprawling because there are a lot of parking lots?
A bit of both but the root is that land is comparatively cheap. Building out is economically incentivized over building up. Municipalities can put their thumb on the scale by raising land taxes based on acreage but zoning restrictions are the actual solution (and these tend to be unpopular because the immediate effect is that development costs rise and bring rents with them)
We could turn all that blue stuff on the map into more parking lots ya know
It's perfectly shaped for a ten lane highway.
That green thing in the middle can be a toll booth
...what? ALL OF THAT IS PARKING LOTS?!!?
Build a wall, across the Atlantic. Protect Europe from the American menace. They would definitely turn the entirety of Europe into one big parking lot.
The Greek hanging gardens? Parking lot. Colosseum? Colossal parking lot. Venice? Underwater parking lot. The Netherlands? Parking lot with tulips.
And so on, and so forth. What else do you think Americans would turn into a parking lot of they every carpet bombed Europe?
All suburbs in PNW are like this. "Asphalt ocean"
This is city center. The park is nice. It was the 1974 world's fair grounds, it's a bunch of bridges over waterfalls and there's been a decent amount of investment / upkeep the last few years.
The business owners in the 70s all opposed it's construction because they didn't think it would be good for downtown. Since then they've really doubled down on surface lots to charge people going to the park / mall / downtown businesses.
Where city
What this place needs is clearly more parking lots.
Bonus fun: Spokane's city govt named a parking garage a historic building worthy of subsidizing for preservation. It also won an award for 'excellence in use of concrete'. Spokane's just that awesome.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/oct/20/getting-there-spokanes-parkade-becomes-one-of-few-/
that's not even the scariest part. Everyone drives through downtown likes it's a highway. Not worth staying near the bars and food if you're three feet from being slammed by a lifted truck going 50
Forget AI, the world has already been taken over by artificial life : cars !
Thought this was that stock market chart for a second
Lmaooo I love this kind of thing. How utterly you have fucked our cities
That's a lot of worthless space!
What's wrong with them? Not that my hometown is any better.
One with roads coloured too would probably also be informative. And I feel like this could be scripted with openstreetmaps to make them for different cities and compare them...
Not enough parking destroy more buildings and the there is still too much nature remaining its useless for the car industry.
Bro fucking detroit looks better than this
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn't get in the way.