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No, 16 minutes in traffic is a long time.
I work in a coworking space. They just announced they’re moving the space to a block away. I was talking to the other folks about it yesterday, and one of them was complaining that the new space has no parking. She currently pays to park in the garage adjacent to the current space. I suggested just keeping that garage and she said “yeah, I guess I’m going to have to”
This in a very walkable downtown btw
Same thing in my city. People kvetch endlessly about how hard it is to park downtown. But the city parking utility studies show parking utilization nowhere near 100%, even at peak times. As a friend put it to me years ago, unless there’s a spot within line-of-sight (so even just around the corner doesn’t count) of their destination, drivers say that “there’s no parking.”
Is it so strange that people don’t want to add another 20 minutes to the commute to a place by having to walk several blocks? I have little enough free time as it is. Maybe it can enjoyable if the weather’s good and it’s a nice part of the city but it’s cold here more often than not and most places aren’t particularly scenic.
According to Google Maps, it takes 17 minutes to walk entirely across the isthmus our downtown sits on, from the Edgewater Hotel to the Monona Terrace convention center, and you have to detour around the state capitol to do so. That’s about 10 blocks, and between city, county, and private parking structures, significantly longer than the distance between any destination and nearby parking.
But then, back to the topic of the meme, drivers will willingly add another 20 minutes to their commute by perversely choosing to sit in a traffic congestion, when they could park at a free park-and-ride lot and take the BRT downtown. Last time I went with my mother to a show at the performing arts center, we spent over 20 minutes breathing exhaust fumes just waiting to get out of the parking ramp. (Like many Baby Boomers, she’s weird about public transit. She lives two blocks from a BRT station; we could’ve been home already in the time it took to exit the ramp.)
My downtown is the opposite, extremely hot and sunny. So i get wanting to park near your destination, anything else underscores the convenience of driving. However, it’s impractical and ugly for every block to have tons of parking. Which is why i believe that there should be more carless areas and make downtown a pleasure to walk through. Provide shade, chairs, etc.
not sure how large you envision blocks to be, or what exactly constitutes “several”, but even like 10 fucking blocks shouldn’t take 20 minutes.
This is so weird. People are ok to sit one hour in a traffic jam but the idea to walk half an hour to some place is jarring.
People go on big hiking trips over the weekend but the idea to cycle 45 minutes / 15 kilometers (or ten miles) as their cummute seems more frightening than to climb Mt. Everest…
is 16 minute wait for the next bus a lot? Depends on the context.
Bus that goes between cities? no.
Bus that goes inside a single city? Yes.It’s so weird, but the psychological difference of having to wait less than ten minutes for the next train vs maybe 20 minutes for the next bus is, indeed, a bit of a gulf.
I was once in Iceland and took a guided tour. The bus stopped at a beautiful waterfall that you can walk behind (no loot). You could see the waterfall from the bus but it was a 10 min walk to get to it. I shit you not, the american couple on the bus decided to stay behind because they didn’t want to walk that far. Now I get that people have medical conditions and all but this seemed mostly like an issue of them being tired because the last two stops already required 10 min walks. It’s not their fault either. They grew up in a system that stole all forms of movement from them and fed them corn syrup so now a 20 min walk is unthinkable.
Every study on depression comes to the result that physical exercise is fantastic to combat it but all too often the decisions we make reduce the amount of exercise we get. Teenagers these days zoom past on E-scooters all the time and I often feel like they’re being robbed of what we had with our regular ol’ bikes. Sure it’s harder when you have to pedal and put all the energy in yourself but it also keeps you in a much beter state.
British citizen that moved back to Canada a few years ago. I’d ask my friends to walk a certain distance and they’re utterly bewildered that I’d walk. I also don’t need to wait 5 minutes for a closer parking spot, I can park where it’s free and walk less than a minute.
I’ve changed them quite a bit and now they’ve gotten into running which is nice.
E-scooters are great for kids, they are socializing and being outside instead of on their phones
The city guides here tell the same story. The cruise terminal is 200 and change meters/yards from where the historical city tour begins. They have to hire a bus to drive the Americans from the terminal to the spot. If there’s no bus, they stay on the boat. Afterwards they’ll of course say “we could’ve walked that part.”
Cause no one has any alone time so they use their commute for that
I’d rather walk 16 minutes alone than sit 16 minutes alone in a car
Solution: Arrange any parking spaces on public ground so that it is at 10 minutes walking distance from the home. Exceptions for disabled people only.
A lot of car traffic would just evaporate.
this and other reasons like space efficiency and increased safety/comfort is why just putting all the parking in centralized areas next to the main access roads for an area is probably THE most trivial yet impactful design choice you can make.
As a bonus it means you can later just nuke the parking and build apartments or whatever.
Some Netherlands cities do exactly this.
