alt Hacker NewsThe main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots in American downtowns and stopping the development and expansion of highways through the same. If you did nothing else that would have a significant positive impact. For almost all communities those surface parking lots are economic extracts from the community. They're woefully underpriced for tax purposes too.
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Maybe the parking lots, but if you know anything about the major Japanese cities with satisfyingly good train systems then you'll also know they have a lot of expressways running through them.
> The main low-hanging fruit is just removing surface parking lots
You're pre-supposing that transit is _better_ than cars. It's not. ESPECIALLY the Japanese transit.
I certainly don't want to suffer through this bullshit every day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Xg7ui5mLA
The removed parking needs to be replaced by transit options people actually want to use.
I live just outside a fairly large city. Getting downtown sucks. Driving is the only real option, but parking is annoying and expensive. Even if it was free, it would still be annoying. I almost exclusively take an Uber because of it. Those can add up and be a mixed bag as well.
There is bus service, but it’s infrequent and quadruples the time. In some cases, the transit directions say 1h 20 minutes, where 47 minutes of that is walking. Meanwhile, a car is under 20 minutes.
I used to live outside of Chicago. The Metra could get me downtown faster than a car (during rush hour) for just a few bucks. The train became the pragmatic choice and dictated where I chose to live.
Removing parking doesn’t build a train, it just raises parking rates, keeping people from even bothering to go downtown.
I agree that surface lots are terrible, but they have to be replaced by something.