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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Ambivalent is still the wrong reaction to have. Surface space is valuable, so he should be happy that the space is removed, and that the underground spaces were built (else where would the cars parked on the surface go?).

The people who owned them could no longer have a car, or perhaps store it somewhere outside the city, so it's less likely to be driven around what is clearly a walkable area.

My point was that the amount of surface space taken up can be reduced, by e.g. building multilevel parking garages or double-decker freeways.

You can do those things, although they quickly become much more expensive, and still occupy a lot of space. A double-decker highway 3 lanes wide on either side still carries maybe 18,000 people per hour per direction. Because of parking requirements, apartments and offices in downtowns will often be built on top of several stories of parking, which of course makes the actual usable space more expensive

I'm still not sure what it means by "eight feeder lanes" (frontage roads?) and "six managed lanes" (I'm completely at a loss here). I wouldn't trust anything on that page without verifying with other sources.

The same source says:

  • The managed lanes carry mass transit vehicles during peak hours and are only made available to single-occupancy vehicles for a toll-fee during odd-peak hours.

Do you have a preferred source?

Because there's barely any demand for it.

Ok, but why?

I don't know what your experience is, but Google Maps does pretty well at estimating longer times if you are viewing a route during rush hour.

I'm aware that Maps indicates traffic, it just usually isn't sufficiently accurate for me to believe that it can actually tell you what's faster on a regular basis. I don't know if it holds up across countries, etc. I've definitely spent enough time in and around NYC to know for a fact that taking the train can be much faster than driving for many trips.

In any event, NJB has also made videos about how nice driving in the Netherlands is compared to other countries. Part of that is due to how many people take transit instead. These comparisons are not "favorable to driving" in the sense that you can extrapolate the results to a place where everyone drives.

My point was that if you have a standard policy to use a specific pole design everywhere, then it's a mistake to ascribe intent or knowledge to engineers that simply isn't there.

The use of "standards" just sounds like a way to prevent anyone from having to take responsibility for bad decisions. I don't think that a bunch of engineers thought, "man, fuck pedestrians, let's try to get them killed." But any of them could have realized, when they were designing a walk signal with the knowledge that it would be hit by a car. This isn't a question of doing something, without fixing all of the problems everywhere, because you have limited resources or narrow expertise. Designing infrastructure is their whole job.

The people who owned them could no longer have a car, or perhaps store it somewhere outside the city, so it's less likely to be driven around what is clearly a walkable area.

They could, but I'd imagine that it's a lot less reasonable to ask them to just do that rather than simply providing them a parking space elsewhere. I'm not well-versed in Netherlands politics but I'd imagine that the Green Party wouldn't have won the election on a platform to remove 10,000 surface parking spaces if it didn't have reasonable compromises like giving the car owners another place to park their cars.

You can do those things, although they quickly become much more expensive, and still occupy a lot of space. A double-decker highway 3 lanes wide on either side still carries maybe 18,000 people per hour per direction. Because of parking requirements, apartments and offices in downtowns will often be built on top of several stories of parking, which of course makes the actual usable space more expensive

Yes. And then you can use the freed-up space to go crazy with transit, protected bike lanes, pedestrian-only streets, removing street parking, etc. We're not just building more expensive infrastructure for no reason, we're doing it because we recognize that the opportunity cost of having the infrastructure spread out horizontally is far costlier. I agree that de facto parking minimums are dumb, though, and should be removed while letting the free market sort out the number of parking spaces.

Do you have a preferred source?

You can just look at Google Maps' satellite view and/or street view and count for yourself. If not, then look at PolitiFact, which says it's 13 lanes at its widest not counting frontage roads (which reasonably lines up with the 6 lanes per direction I see on Google Maps). It seems like the "26 lanes" myth is repeated everywhere you look when you do an internet search though, probably just one of those things that spread quickly without anyone fact-checking them.

Ok, but why?

Because the city is simply less dense. And yes, it's possible for the city to be built denser, but density has various advantages and disadvantages, and the residents should have a say in this regard.

I'm not well-versed in Netherlands politics but I'd imagine that the Green Party wouldn't have won the election on a platform to remove 10,000 surface parking spaces if it didn't have reasonable compromises like giving the car owners another place to park their cars.

Based on the NJB video, it does in fact seem like they are just net reducing the number of parking spaces in the city.

f not, then look at PolitiFact, which says it's 13 lanes at its widest not counting frontage roads (which reasonably lines up with the 6 lanes per direction I see on Google Maps

Why not count the frontage roads? I don't know your level of familiarity with them, but almost all of the frontage roads I drove on in Texas were basically highways themselves, with high speed limits and wide lanes. There were lights, but generally very apart, so if the main highway was uncongested you were better off on it, but if it were even mildly congested you could go just as fast on the frontage road. If the claim is "Houston still has congestion despite having X lanes" than the frontage roads should absolutely count towards X.

residents should have a say in this regard.

Sure! Through the free market, which gives all of them a say, rather than top-down planning, which lets a majority control everything.

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