ValnaoDowntown Spokane, Washington. The red areas represent surface parking lots, while the purple ones indicate parking garages
Eager EagleThat green thing in the middle can be a toll booth
If we park all the cars there, we no longer need all the other parking lots, and we can narrow the roads to reclaim some RoW, lower speed limits.
Snot FlickermanI wish we could just give Spokane to Idaho, they’d be a better fit over there. Honestly, I’d go as far to say everything East from Ritzville should probably just considered “Western Idaho.”
I guess my point is that this kind of car-centric build-out and culture seems par for the course for more rural, conservative areas.
hi, fuck you, there are normal people out here trying to fix this shithole. western washington is not the only place that exists and fuck you for trying to burn your neighbors. none of us want to be included with those inbred psychopaths in the panhandle.
also spokane is the second biggest metropolitan area in washington state you goon, this isn’t rural.
hi, fuck you too, buddy, from a fellow eastern washington resident who fucking hates it here and doesn’t see much that can be done to fix it.
As another E-WA resident, I don’t want to give up. Things will change. Probably going to take a while, but I want to believe in a change. Besides, I’d rather get turned into the Canadian acquisition of the west coast than become part of Super Idaho.
You could be trying a little harder. We need the farmland and you need the port and tax revenue so it would be really nice if we could trust you actually are normal people but you aren’t making it easy.
Michael Bishop ☕No, you take north Idaho. Us in Boise don't want your stinking Spokane.
Maybe Montana can have both.
Dude, me too! I didn’t see the title and thought the island looked familiar.
DreamButtthat’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
My biggest complaints are the Thor/Freya on/off ramps and the Lincoln(?) offramp going west. They are way too short, and people can be idiots. Merging there sucks.
Gosh the drugs and homeless people though!
Can we exclusively only see urban issues through that lens please?
Gorgritch_Umie_KillaI have friends that live over that way, when they were first trying to tell me where it was they lived they mentioned Spokane. I’s like “Why would I know this random US city?” (As i’m an aushole), they said, “oh, because it appeared on the show Cops quite a lot, so has become quite well known.” … I couldn’t stop laughing… even now…
wow, there’s so little city in this city… where are the people supposed to be?
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)
And people struggle understanding why I would prefer a shift from 6-2. Spokane traffic is why.
AlaknárJust move literally anywhere in Europe. Fucking Bulgaria has better city planning than this insanity. And public transport!
The level of incompetence here is wild. 20 years ago Springfield MO was better than we do here.
It’s an embarrassment.
Lmaooo I love this kind of thing. How utterly you have fucked our cities
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.
The point is to illustrate how much of our cities car-centric infrastructure has destroyed.
If that’s the case no red vs purple is needed. People need to learn how to visualise data to make a point
Works perfectly well to illustrate how much of the city are is covered in parking.
There is no red vs purple, but colour vs lack there of.
There is no red vs purple, but colour vs lack there of.
altkey (he\him)Them machines own the city.
Halcyon
ebolapieSurface lots are far worse than parking structures. You can put retail at street level with parking structures. You can do a Texas donut, which is still not ideal but is way denser and prettier than surface lots.
What is a Texas donut
They asked, on the internet, when using a search engine is the same amount of work with no waiting.
Lmao you think I didn’t search, my friend? Maybe I wanted to hear from the person who wrote it, ever think of that?
Multiply that with view count.
A Texas donut is an apartment building that wraps around an attached parking structure. I’ve seen a few different variations but the nicer ones have courtyards between the units and the parking garage that I imagine is more to allow cross breeze than anything else because being inside them would be incredibly claustrophobic. Still a huge waste of space but if you really want your residents to all have cars they kind of make sense because the parking footprint is more or less the same as you would get as if you built a low rise.
You can also bury the cars instead and that works way better for somewhere like downtown Seattle, since real estate is just so mind bogglingly expensive in downtown areas of major cities, but honestly if you’re living in the city it seems like storing the car offsite would make more sense if you really feel like you have to have one that badly.
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.
Kilgore TroutIs this a quote from somewhere specific? I like it.
It is from the lyrics of Big Yellow Taxi
Counting Crows - Big Yellow Taxi ft. Vanessa Carlton
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn’t get in the way.
AceFuzzLordThat’s a lot of worthless space!
DiplomjodlerWhat this place needs is clearly more parking lots.
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.
AnUnusualRelicI can see there’s a lot of potential for parking space development on that island in the middle there.
Big Baby Thor…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?
Makes me think that we could probably, with all connected social ramifications, determine the development index of a society by the percentage of parking area.