Don’t shit on Colorado just because you had to look at a parking lot in Denver metro.
One of the most beautiful states in the country.
It takes my breath away
passes out from altitude sickness
While true that Colorado is beautiful, it is an absolutely car-centric state that’s far too much sprawl and not great public transportation options. Denver is also not really a pretty city - it’s covered in freeways and interstates and the traffic is always bad.
There’s finally some movement to get a train that goes from Longmont down to Denver with a few other stops by 2029, but everyone is pretty incredulous that it’ll happen.
I’d also love to see public transit to the ski resorts. Riding trains through the Rockies would be AMAZING.
It is, but the parts where the people live are midwest-style auto sprawl. Six+ lane surface highways everywhere dividing up isolated sub-developments. And they’re still building completely new highways, right now.
Ugh tell me about it. Paris, too:
Disgusting place.
Prague:
Gross, can’t believe people call it a beautiful city.
Amsterdam:
🤮 Haven’t the Dutch ever heard of a bicycle? Jesus.
🐍 because there’s so much sarcasm here /s won’t do it, it’s /sssssssssssssssss
Sprawling, car-centric Amsterdam versus the urban paradise Houston
Prague is a car-centric nightmare though:
In 2022 Luko bike-friendly cities Global City Index, Prague ranked 73rd of total 90 analyzed metropolises around the world. It was next to Detroit, Istanbul or Cairo.
Do you realize how much an old European city has to fuck up to be as unfriendly to bikes as Detroit??
That’s like going to The Lourve, taking a picture of a small garbage can in the corner, and saying “ugh this museum is filled with literal trash — this entire place is a dump”
I doubt its all like that. Just the cities.
Crazy that the space needed for ~100 cars, could accommodate 1000+ cyclists. That would be 1000 fewer cars on the road, BTW. 💁♂️
Caralado?
Didn’t like sim city 3 abandon realistically sized parking lots because they looked like shit?
Edit: I guess it was Sim 5.
Parking lots fucking suck
Never underestimate the ability of humans to uglify the beauty of nature.
Takes picture of a parking lot in a state with one of the most bike and walking trails in the country, just blocks away from an outdoor pedestrian mall that is 1.5 miles long… You’re not winning the argument here and you’re not even proving a point.
Now if you want to prove a point then you take a picture of the plans we had for a high speed rail on i70 to the mountains that we decided to kill in favor of an paid express lane. Then you have an argument.
I don’t understand why cities don’t invest more into parking structures. They seriously condenses the downtown area, drives up traffic (the good kind), reduces wasted space (you can have 2x the parking pictured in 1/5th the space), and brings in revenue on its own.
The cars still have to get to the parking structures, which means they fuck up traffic anyway by forcing the surrounding streets to be turned into car sewers.
The downtown for our little city (just under 300,000 people) has multiple parking structures and a ton of parking lots within a few minutes walking distance from everything in the area. They sit empty.
Why? Because people “NEED” on-street parking and will bitch if they don’t get it. So what should be quiet streets or roads with bike lanes just becomes rows upon rows of people parking there.
And then we gift motorists with free parking around the holidays, further clogging up public spaces.
The solutions are so easy, but either a lack of will from leadership, or the entitlement of NIMBYs, makes it very difficult to achieve an outcome that works for everyone.
The general urbanist consensus is that parking structures are a good idea sometimes.
Basically, if you are trying to revitalize your downtown, a government owned parking garage can function as a replacement for parking outside existing shops. This way, a previously walkable downtown can drastically reduce its existing parking while still accommodating a largely motorist clientele.
On the other hand, they are a less good idea in already dense and valuable urban centers. Urban parking lots are already expensive. Urban parking garages are enormously expensive. And they are counterproductive to the aim of getting people out of their cars and getting them to take transit into and around downtown. Especially in larger cities, the case for public parking garages is fairly difficult to make, since if an area is popular enough to justify a parking garage, the land for the parking garage could probably be put to better use in the form of a public park, housing, or businesses. And if a parking garage is truly needed, then a private developer could build one and turn a profit.
The problem is that probably the best place for parking garages in a city would be at a popular transit stop near the urban/suburban divide, to serve as a transition point between auto oriented and transit oriented commuters. But if you built a transit stop at the urban/suburban divide then hopefully that area will be experiencing infill quite quickly, and transit ridership will access the network via foot. Meanwhile, if you build a transit station far out… why build a parking structure, which is expensive, when you could build surface parking, which is cheap? And as a bonus, surface parking can be sold off easily to developers so they can build housing, whereas parking structures would require significant retrofitting to fit this need.
A parking structure costs about $28,000 per car. That would be in most cases one person. So the city might as well spend the money on building some apartment public housing and just have the people live in the space. The other alternative is to build some proper public transit. For $28,000 per potential user, you can built quite a bit of that. You might even built it to the outskirts of the city and built a massive conventional parking lot.
they paved paradise 😞
All the cities suck, the mt towns are fine to look at but expensive to drink in and always full of people. Same for most of the state parks, except for the drinking. The sweet spot is somewhere around grand junction where there are still good mountains but less people. I find the people in the state rude and invasive but probably just because there are so many of them anywhere within 2 hrs or so of Denver. I’m also not a Midwesterner so it could just be a cultural thing.
Calling Colorado the midwest 🤮
