Have you ever visited an urban area? Where on earth would this "infrastructure" be placed? Next to the Best Buy and the Outback Steakhouse?

This isn't inflammatory at all... not at all...

I'm trying to be informative. May not like the way things are, but pretending "most people" don't look at the world that way isn't going to produce anything useful.

I also have the defense of truth. Other than downtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago, this is how it is. You make money off someone who drives to your business, not some homeless dude who needs to use your bathroom.

Customers come in cars. That's just how it is.

Here's one and you can google for the rest: http://kellyjclifton.com/Research/EconImpactsofBicycling/TRN...

Now I do see your point for a stereotypical neighborhood local bar where they shouldn't be driving drunk anyway, or even a small local pharmacy or convenience store/gas station.

I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?

https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@37.779165,-122.390703,3...

Here's Wrigley Field:

https://www.google.com/maps/preview/@41.949016,-87.655596,3a...

At Yankee stadium they built a parking garage and so few people use it that the garage operator is bankrupt. They are tearing them down. The stadium is served by a subway line and Metro North even has a station literally called "Yankees".

I suggest you get out of Mom's basement and see the country before holding forth on its infrastructure.

Anyway yes, I am comparing. The article is about the form of urban spaces and how it can better balance the needs of all users, in light of the fact that extant american streetscapes strongly favor the car over all other users. The claim was made that stadia require parking lots. Examples of the opposite were given.

The fact that in some places you don't have a choice simply reflects on the inadequate urban forms that are found in many suburbs in the USA.

Lots and lots of people live in the New York suburbs, millions actually. They left the city because the costs of living there are just too high. Many/most businesses did too. Many of the buildings in the manhattan skyline are mostly empty. The diversified industry and commercial businesses that made NYC such a powerhouse of economic activity in my dad's youth are long gone. (To suburban hellholes in the South)

The poor parts of town don't have much money because... they are the poor parts of town, maybe? Just maybe?

BTW, sports stadiums would probably benefit from lack of a parking lot in a reduction of the number of drunk driving accidents in the surrounding area.

http://sanfrancisco.giants.mlb.com/sf/images/ballpark/y2010/... http://chicago.cubs.mlb.com/chc/ballpark/transportation/

http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/12/mission_rock_gets_r...

The googling is taking too long for me to get numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most stadiums have enough seating capacity that, if you were to pack every single space in their actual parking lots with cars, you'd completely fail to fill it up.

> or walmart's sales would go up if they got rid of their parking lots?

Walmart is a special case in that it's built around people who have cars: you don't go to a Walmart to buy only what you can carry. You go there to buy as much as you can so that you can avoid shopping for the rest of the week.

But around here, Pike Place Market? Westlake Center? Pacific Place? Yeah. Most of their business comes from the fact that they're within walking distance from the Financial District and the Convention Center. Uwajimaya? Benefits immensely from the fact that it's located in Chinatown, where its main market is; I'm two blocks from it and I pick up something every other day on my way home from work.

(Actually, Uwajimaya is brilliant in that it has apartments on top and parking below. A lot of residents are literally walking through the store to go home.)

> Or on a small scale, I'd be more likely to go to a restaurant or small retailer if I knew for certain I couldn't get there on foot and if I drove there, I wouldn't be able to park?

No, you're reversing it. The question is about how many more customers a restaurant or small retailer would get. I didn't fully explain: it starts by recognizing that the number of customers you get is a percentage of the number of potential customers you get. If you already knew about that restaurant 50 miles out, then obviously, the only thing that matters is that you can get there. That's a transit issue: can you get to point B from point A in a reasonable amount of time, for a given understanding of reasonable. Some people cannot imagine reasonable amounts of time via public transit, so they cannot conceive of transit without cars.

That's a different problem. The problem here is that, using a "cars = customers" model, you have two facts: (a) most people don't look at the storefronts as they drive by. They're actually looking for parking. Your parking space is a loss leader in order to get them to look at what you're selling in the first place, on their way somewhere else. And (b), people don't know you exist until they see you.

If you already knew about it, then it's more akin to parking at your office. You have no need for discoverability, just availability. If you had magical public transit that was equally fast, you could use it instead and poof. No need for cars at all. The merits of cars versus other things isn't customers; it's speed.

> I've seen poor parts of downtown with empty sidewalks and boarded up storefronts. Must be the parking lots?

In short, yes. What if those parking lots were cheap housing instead? You wouldn't need a car to get there, and you could walk across the street to shop.

This isn't a silver bullet "delete parking lots = magically better". It's a functional component of many other much larger, much more complex solutions. I'm telling you why the component is being included--namely the space efficiency of pedestrians equals a higher customer base--but that isn't a complete solution by any means.

I mentioned a and b earlier. There is a c.

Anytime your parking lot isn't nearly full during business hours, you have a problem.

Why? The reason that cars = customers is because cars forcibly disallow anyone else from being a customer. When you design your street for cars, you discourage pedestrians: especially the window shoppers. When you design your neighborhoods to be zoned between residential and commerce, you make it impossible to reach businesses except by car or long-distance public transit.

My grandparents live in a suburban cul-de-sac in the Bay Area. Pretty place. Very calm and peaceful. And they're lonely. My parents and uncles and aunts have to regularly drive in from across town to visit with them. Couldn't they go down to the local store, rather than asking a son or daughter-in-law to buy groceries? Nope. They're too frail to drive, and walking the massive block to the huge nearby intersection, and then walking across the vast expanse of asphalt to the nearby Lucky's is basically impossible. Hell, I hate doing it and I jog the whole thing for fun. There isn't even anything on the way to stop at. There's like... one bench for the bus stop. A Radio Shack on the other side of the 3-lane road. There are actually quite a few other options; they're just even further away.

You basically need a car to get to what is technically a block and a half away, if we count by intersection. My god-grandparents would be in a similar situation, but they're able to drive, so they can do the 20 or so blocks it takes to get to the Asian market.

It wasn't always a Lucky's. It used to be an Albertson's, I think. And it was something else before that. That parking space keeps them alive, sure. That's about it. No one goes there unless they have to.

(And if I'd spent the time googling rather than typing up these anecdotes, maybe I would have found some damn numbers.)

I hadn't realized that replies were stacked newest-to-oldest.

My bad.

Edit: this reply was the last but has ended up on the bottom. Wheee!

I still buy milk and eggs regularly and I don't have the issues you're talking about. Maybe it's because I use a reusable cloth bag that's sturdy enough to hold up even when drenched. Maybe my milk is packaged in a decent enough carton that condensation isn't really a relevant factor. Maybe the person who bags my groceries is competent? Maybe it's because I walk like a normal person?

> I didn't even touch on what it's like to be walking home from the supermarket, in the open, and getting caught in a sudden downpour.

I've experienced it. And at this point in my life, I've started to hate rain, which is ironic for Seattleite. But it's still manageable. Perhaps it's because I'm young and virile, I'm still capable of stepping up my pace for two blocks with a heavy backpack on my back (I walk to work and I carry my laptop with me both ways) and my hands filled with bags. (We still use paper bags, too; city ordinance for recycling. Seattle tends to be less humid than Hong Kong.)

I should point that out a third time to make it clear: my closest market is 2 blocks away. Because it's the Asian one, it doesn't have all the foods that I like (like Jamaican jerk sauce, mmm), so I take the light rail downtown and go to one of the markets there and bring it back.

I also do not use a delivery service. I consider it an unnecessary luxury, and am afraid of the exact hassles you describe: I have enough issues receiving the usual parcels to begin with.

> Without a vehicle to hold stuff in between stops and to get you from one stop to another faster, everything takes much, much longer to accomplish and the planning outings becomes much more than a matter of leaving the supermarket stop for last so that your ice cream won't melt.

That's certainly true. I tend to make it a point to only target a few stores per outing, because it's not reasonable to do them both on the same day. This is pretty nice, as it means I actually spend less overall and I get a bit more exercise. I need to value my targeted purchases highly enough to dedicate a trip to getting them.

Incidentally, I have family in Kowloon (both of my parents grew up there) and my aunt actually uses a car. But I also don't know about anything near her apartment; it's been a long time since I visited.

Your situation with a local market that doesn't stock everything that you need leading to you needing to sometimes have to make another trip to get a specialty item, is a small example of what I'm talking about. You make an effort to see the upside (spending less, getting exercise) of having to advance-plan your errands and restrict the number of errands that you can do in one go and I think that your positive attitude is admirable but it's akin to a person who has lost their vision comforting themselves with the thought that their sense of hearing has become much more acute to compensate somewhat for their loss of sight.

Also, a reusable cloth shopping bag is great. So long as you always carry it with you. And so long as all of your purchases fit inside of it.

Perhaps, from your point of view the reusable shopping bag's fixed size serves as an additional constraint on your grocery spending and is helping you to lead a more frugal and focused life.

Obviously, I disagree. I can think of better uses for my time than acting as a human pack mule and the opportunity cost is cumulatively enormous -- all of the things that I could be doing during the lost time, which does add up, and the things I'm not getting done or taking longer to get done b/c of the can-only-get-n-errands done instead of n+several-more factor due to walking time or the delay involved in hailing taxis or waiting for booked taxis to show up.

Sure. But what you're not detailing are the drawbacks of having a personal vehicle, namely the additional errands piled on from having to maintain it (and its license), the extra space required to store it, the emotional tax of being in traffic, the higher risk of injury, the consequences at a macro-scale.

It's manifestly unfair to say, "Well, choice!" when both options have drawbacks. Not having a car, for instance, makes it harder to road trip: admittedly not something you do much of in Hong Kong, but it's a quintessential American fantasy. I'd estimate 20% of Americans have lived out of their cars at some point; their experience would not have been better without a car.

> Perhaps, from your point of view the reusable shopping bag's fixed size serves as an additional constraint on your grocery spending and is helping you to lead a more frugal and focused life.

This is overthinking it, in my view. I recognize that I can always make a second trip if I need to, and given that I can literally go to the store twice a day if I actually have the need, it's meaningless to worry about buying too many items. "I'll go back tomorrow" is a reasonable thought and doesn't require justification.

It's an extra 10 minutes a day to detour through the market, pick up what I need, go through checkout, and be on my way. This is a side effect of not driving; if I drove, I'd go to the Costco in the other neighborhood, fill up my trunk with bulk purchases (because any less would fail to justify the gas I just spent), and be set for a few months since I'm living alone.

It's certainly true that I disagree with rampant consumerism and unintentional obesity. This is something like saying I disagree with providing suicidal people with loaded guns, in order to provide them with choice. The provision of choice is not a binary action: it can be provided in many ways, and you need to choose between those possible actions.

In order to argue for cars, you need to do more than argue that they provide choices unavailable to walkers and cyclists. You need to argue that the choices they provide are more important than the choices provided by what a car-less society would look like.

(4B.) The next day was uneventful. You were silently thankful that the delivery guy didn't call you while you were at work and pointlessly try to browbeat you into agreeing to an afternoon delivery. When you got home at 6PM, after changing out of your work clothes and freshening up, you began the prep work for your chili. You set your phone on the kitchen counter next to you while you de-seeded and de-ribbed the bell peppers, chopped them and the onions, and minced the garlic. When that was done, since you were already in the kitchen, you wiped down the counters and range and tidied things up. At 7:30, you phoned the supermarket and asked them where your stuff was. The manager apologized and promised to phone you back. At 7:50, he called and apologized some more. There was a mixup and your order never made it onto the delivery truck. But he assures you that they'll deliver everything tomorrow.

You'd already chopped the vegetables. And, luckily, you had eggs and cheese. You made a frittata. The next day, you went back to the supermarket and bought more onions and bell peppers. You bought more beef too, since the pack you'd bought two days earlier had passed its use-by date.

(5.) Why would you visit a grocery store? Jeez what year is it. Of course, you shopped online, at the supermarket website, paid by credit card, and everything was delivered hassle-free three days later from the supermarket chain's warehouse, located some miles away. Well, it was almost hassle-free. The delivery person did haggle over the time -- they wanted to deliver everything at 2PM and it took you a while to make them understand that there would be nobody at home until 6PM. And then, though, he had agreed to deliver between 6PM and 7PM, he didn't actually show up until 8PM.

After tipping the delivery person and cutting open the taped-shut cardboard boxes containing your purchases, you were a bit aggravated to find that they had charged you for two cartons of Brand X organic, free range eggs ... but delivered two cartons of (cheaper) Brand Y eggs. Also, some of the vegetables had seen better days. No matter. The former was an honest mistake and the latter was a small price to pay for convenience you knew that you could cut out the iffy bits of the vegetables before using them. You put the eggs in the fridge, after calling the supermarket and being shuffled from one employee to another to get them to agree that you could exchange the wrong eggs for the ones that you had paid for at your local branch the next evening, provided that you could show them the printout of your order confirmation email. Then, you briskly began the task of cutting up the now-empty cardboard boxes and folding and stacking the pieces so that you could get them into a bag or so that you could get rubber bands around them ... for the trip downstairs to the cardboard recycling bin. It was nearly nine by the time that you got back into your apartment and slipped off your sneakers to sweep up the slivers of cardboard and little bits of flotsam and jetsam (dried bits of banana-something from the banana boxes and wispy little feathers that had been inside the boxes that had held cartons of eggs before being reused by the supermarket) that ended up on your kitchen floor while you were unloading and then cutting up and packing the cardboard.

Except for permutation #1 (I haven't seen supermarkets using paper bags here, possibly because of the condensation issue), we have experienced each of these scenarios, numerous times.

I didn't even touch on what it's like to be walking home from the supermarket, in the open, and getting caught in a sudden downpour. Even if you are carrying a tiny collapsible umbrella, it's a neat trick to use it if you're carrying more than a tiny amount of stuff since holding an umbrella with one hand entails carrying everything else with the remaining hand. Fun times.

I didn't take up the question of multiple stops/errands, either. Without a vehicle to hold stuff in between stops and to get you from one stop to another faster, everything takes much, much longer to accomplish and the planning outings becomes much more than a matter of leaving the supermarket stop for last so that your ice cream won't melt. You've got to juggle your guesstimates as to the weights of the stuff you'll be picking up or dropping off at each stop, the form factors of the packages they'll be in, and (for those establishments where you'll be making purchases and which offer delivery) their delivery times and your past experiences with the reliability of their delivery personnel.

Perhaps the more general problem is having things appear in your home at more or less the instant you decide you want them. Since instant delivery is unavailable (is this the problem?), this will require you to outsource your planning to some other person, like a servant, or to some sort of AI, or the closest that Amazon or Google can do.

Imagine that you wanted to cook chili for dinner (and leftovers for lunch the next day and or chili dogs a few days on -- YUM!). Recipes differ, but let's say that you went with ground beef, canned beans, tomato sauce of some kind, fresh onions and garlic, and maybe some bell peppers. You might have bought some cheese to grate over bowls of the finished chili and sour cream to spoon onto the cheese. Assume that you already had chili powder and any other spices that you needed at home. Since you're at the supermarket, you also bought the other things that you needed: a bottle of shampoo, some toilet tissue, a lightbulb(it would be slightly cheaper to get a 6-pack of bulbs but you only need one right now and don't want to carry anything absolutely unnecessary home) like, a couple of cartons of milk, some coffee or tea, a carton or two of eggs, some chicken breasts, more vegetables, etc. At the checkout, you bagged your own purchases or had them bagged for you and began the five-to-ten-minute walk home.

(1.) Unfortunately, it was warm out and the cartons of milk sweated and the condensation soaked through that bag (the supermarket uses eco-friendly, recyclable paper bags) and the bottom tore out and everything from that bag fell onto the sidewalk. Time to set your bags on the pavement or the grass next to the sidewalk and try to distribute those items between the remaining bags. The bag holding the ground beef and chicken breasts is looking a bit iffy too, but it'll probably hold (fingers crossed!) until you get home. The milk cartons have warmed up a bit and hopefully won't sweat enough to take the bag(s) into which you've placed them before you get home.

(2.) Wait. Suppose that you opted for the (biodegradable) plastic bags. Condensation wouldn't affect them. As you were walking home, however, one of the corners of one of the milk cartons, with the help of gravity and the movements to which the bag containing the milk was subjected as you walked home, made a whole in the bottom of the bag, with the same result as if you had been using paper bags.

(3.) OK, so you wisely double-bagged (in plastic) your groceries and you made it home without any bags failing. Unfortunately, something in the bag with the carton(s) of eggs shifted while you were humping the bags home and a coupel of the eggs broke, making a bit of a mess in the bag.

(4.) No, of course you wouldn't haul all of your groceries home at once. That's sheer madness. You only took the perishable items and left the rest to be delivered. That meant an extra few minutes spent at the checkout, at the head of a long line of people, each of whom also had to spend a bit longer in line themselves, giving the store your home address and telephone number and checking with the cashier to find out when your stuff would be delivered (answer: 12PM to 8PM the next day, but the delivery person will phone you first). What's a few extra minutes here or there, right? You also aren't paranoid, so you have no problem giving the store your home address and phone number and don't care whether or not the company owning the supermarket aggregates your purchases with your name, address, and phone number and resells the information to marketers. It's a small price to pay for the convenience of not having to lug all of your stuff home yourself.

Not having all of the ingredients for chili (the cans of beans and jars of tomato sauce are amongst those purchases that were to be delivered), you had something else for dinner instead. You weren't planning to make chili that night anyway, since you took the delivery delay into account when you made your grocery list.

The next day, the delivery guy called you a few times while you were in a meeting and couldn't answer your phone. Jeez, his last message sure sounded irate. He was still annoyed with you when you phoned him back and even more annoyed when you told him that nobody would be home to take delivery until at least 6PM. The earlier he can finish his deliveries, the sooner he can get home and spend time with his own family.

When you got home, at 6 PM, he was waiting for you in the hallway outside your apartment door with your stuff packed in half a dozen repurposed cardboard boxes (from the labels printed on the boxes, you can tell that some of them had held bananas and others had held cartons of eggs) stacked on a little cart. Cardboard is better than plastic (even the biodegradable plastic used in the supermarket's bags), so that was good. Unfortunately, after you transferred the boxes inside your apartment, tipped the delivery guy, and began unpacking the items you had purchased the day before, you discovered that the shampoo had been packed upside down and half its contents had slowly leaked out. It only took a few minutes to wash the shampoo off the cans of beans. No big deal. And you can always get another bottle of shampoo when you go back to the store. Maybe you ought to tighten the top of the bottle a bit before going to the checkout next time, just in case, or carry it home. Carrying a bit more weight will just help build up the muscles in your arms and shoulders, right? As a matter of fact, your shoulders were a bit sore from carrying the perishables home yesterday. Feel the burn, baby!

[to be continued]

This isn't different from a warehouse for your inventory. You don't want it to be full; in an ideal situation, the size of your warehouse is the amount that you sell over X period of time. If you have inventory sitting there, it's not being sold. Similarly, if you have parking spaces not being used, it's not making you money.

Cars [...] actually decreases the number of customers who can get to your store.

I don't see how the comment I replied to proves/explains that statement.

Fully-packed car. That's 4 to 6 people. A parking space is about 153 square feet in size. [1] A single person takes up about 7 to 10 square feet to be comfortable. [2] (Fair cop: I'm not making any measurements here.)

That's 9 people you're failing to serve by providing a parking space. That's assuming everything is ideal for the car: that it's filled with 6 people, that every parking space is being used by a car filled with 6 people. (I would guesstimate the average car occupancy is 2.5ish.) Let's further assume my math is crap and the numbers are non-ideal and round it down to 5. (Yes, I just chopped off 50% from the size of my claim.) That's still a ~50% loss.

That's the back-of-the-napkin math. In reality, it's more complicated. It asks what you replace the parking space with. It asks what the sidewalk capacity actually is and whether or not that would change if you replaced the parking space with (blank). It asks what the layout of the entire city is and how the public transportation system is and how the city helps inform its residents of your establishment. It asks how happy a customer is when they walk in your store and whether or not that changes the tone of your business.

But these are questions that can't be addressed by "cars = customers" anyways. As I explain elsewhere on the thread, designing for cars naturally discourages other forms of traffic. That's a complicate claim and is explored across many, many books on urban design.

So we simplify. If the original claim is that a car represents a customer, then my challenge is to look at the space taken up by a car and see what you lose as a result. The easiest number to get is this: 5 customers, ideally.

[1] http://www.timhaahs.com/index.php/site/dbdetail/1_what_is_th...

[2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_square_feet_does_a_person...

When I said "fully-packed car", the implication was that the car would arrive and use up a parking lot space. The parking lot space has to be provided in order for the car to use it up. If the space is being used in order to provide a space for a car to park in it, then the same space cannot be used for something else.

I'm not sure if you're trolling or just a bit tone-deaf, but this is an incredibly US-centric way to see things. Seriously, it makes you seem a bit clueless.

Clearly, the mindset you voice here is something that city planners in the US need to take into account. The question is, where does this difference come from, and can something be done about it? After all, cars and all the infrastructure surrounding them take up an enormous amount of space, which seems wasteful in the design of efficient and compact cities. How can those inner cities be "revived" in a way that makes them livable?

Hah. What? Driving consumes a tremendous amount of most people's disposable income. I know people who spend $5-10k a year on transportation.

Can you sell more gardening products (seeds, soil, tools, fertilizer, etc.) to someone who has a yard or someone who has a balcony that could potentially accommodate a planter or two?

Will you sell more pool toys and equipment to someone who has a pool in their yard or to someone who may periodically use their building's clubhouse's pool or walk to the local municipal pool?

How much less furniture or art or carpeting or pretty much anything can you sell to someone who has 500 square feet to live in versus someone who has 1000 to 2000 square feet of space in their home? Smaller kitchens translates into less counter space, so less space for kitchen appliances or even fancy pasta storage containers.

The knock-on effects of your customers living in smaller, urban spaces vs. larger suburban-type homes are huge.