Cities: Skylines | Power, Politics, & Planning: Episode 1: Parking

"everything is just closer together over here." It's not "just" close together like it happened. The US has made it illegal to build human-scale dense neighbourhoods for 50% years. Parking minimums, density restrictions, street width minimums, LOS (level of service) planning, etc. all combined to make the US an unwalkable, uncyclable, unenjoyable place to be a human. As a reward the US gets about 35,000 people a year killed by drivers, and many many more indirectly through lung disease, cancer, obesity, etc. as well as parents terrified to let their kids ride a bike. Lots of free parking though. This is a fantastic series illustrating the effect of urban design policy in the US ▶ this video

Addendum - this video (shared recently in another HN discussion) is a _fantastic_ illustration of the problems of parking minimums, made with Cities: Skylines ▶ this video

For those who are interested in similar discourse, I recommend these cities skylines videos from youtube user donoteat01: ▶ this video They are sarcastic tutorials on how to worsen your Skylines cities enough to qualify as a realistic North American metro area. If the mic quality bothers you, skip to the newer videos.

some readers may be interested in this video which discusses the impact of accommodating cars in cities >> ▶ this video

In the US you would normally need 2 or more parking spaces for each dwelling, depending on size, number of bedrooms, etc. and if you build semi-detached you quickly run out of palatable options for where to put the cars. An insane amount of US urban design is caused by the desire to give people free storage of private cars on public land everywhere all the time. ▶ this video

Building new buildings still displaces people, and in many cases the new buildings do not replace the existing affordable units with an equivalent number of affordable units. Even if they do keep parity, the people need to be moved out (and moved around) for years, and finding section 8 housing can be a challenge. Moving can be costly and exhausting. Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn't impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it's likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You're local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It's doing brisk business, but you can't afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods. That's not to say it's impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it's also not so easy as 'just build more on top of existing units.' The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant. There's a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it pr

It's illegal to build things without enormous parking lots and roads around them in most instances now. ▶ this video includes an illustration of how this even results in the destruction of nice, walkable places when old buildings are renovated in to apartments.