A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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did not expect to be jump scared by my hometown lol
Dude, me too! I didn't see the title and thought the island looked familiar.
We could turn all that blue stuff on the map into more parking lots ya know
It's perfectly shaped for a ten lane highway.
That green thing in the middle can be a toll booth
that's not even the scariest part. Everyone drives through downtown likes it's a highway. Not worth staying near the bars and food if you're three feet from being slammed by a lifted truck going 50
My biggest complaints are the Thor/Freya on/off ramps and the Lincoln(?) offramp going west. They are way too short, and people can be idiots. Merging there sucks.
If the parking lots were eliminated, buildings would be so close to each other that you could walk and you wouldn't even need parking lots.
Lemme tell you a story.
A few years back I was on a trip to the US, I was visiting a small town, not much going on there but they had an airport.
When I checked out from the hotel the receptionist asked me if I wanted her to call me a cab, I said no because the airport was 1.5km away from the hotel and I'll just walk there. Poor woman was looking at me as if I was stabbing a baby right in front of her, a look so bevildered and confused that I actually felt sorry for her.
Then the hotel driver appeared from the office and took me to the airport... Such a weird country
Anyway, moral of the story is, good luck convincing those people to walk.
In many parts, walking is suicide simply because there are no safe ways to cross many roads and in some places it is entirely impossible. But even where walking is possible people are not even considering it as an option. I had a similar experience in a mid sized town, where we walked maybe 30 min into the centre from an inner suburb. The walk was nice, except for a scary part where we had to cross a highway with its looped exit lanes. People at our destinations looked in the exact same way, as if we were pure lunatics. This whole thing could only be explained by us being Europeans and Europeans do this kind of crazy stuff.
This looked so absurd that I had to look at the satellite view to believe it but it's true. This planet has skin cancer and it's us.
Lmaooo I love this kind of thing. How utterly you have fucked our cities
I can see there's a lot of potential for parking space development on that island in the middle there.
And most of the cars that use that parking are in use for maybe 2-3 hours per day. The rest of the time they're just taking up space.
We really need to get people to abandon personal cars. Even if everyone switched to electric cars we'd still need all this parking space. We'd also still have all the microplastic pollution from their tires.
There's a catch 22 though. A lot of people feel like they need their cars because there's no alternative. Because of that, they oppose any law that could make cities less car-centric because it makes it harder for them. But, that just means they continue to need their cars. I don't know how that can be fixed.
Where I live, most people have cars. But a) they're cars, not trucks; b) parking is highly restricted, mostly to multi-story garages. Since parking takes up less space it means that walking distances get much smaller, which means you don't need the car as much.
Thought this was that stock market chart for a second
One with roads coloured too would probably also be informative. And I feel like this could be scripted with openstreetmaps to make them for different cities and compare them...
Where's the second comparison picture that shows what it would look like with more 3 or 4 story or underground parking.
Not enough parking destroy more buildings and the there is still too much nature remaining its useless for the car industry.
Pave paradise and put up a parking lot
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn't get in the way.
...what? ALL OF THAT IS PARKING LOTS?!!?
Build a wall, across the Atlantic. Protect Europe from the American menace. They would definitely turn the entirety of Europe into one big parking lot.
The Greek hanging gardens? Parking lot. Colosseum? Colossal parking lot. Venice? Underwater parking lot. The Netherlands? Parking lot with tulips.
And so on, and so forth. What else do you think Americans would turn into a parking lot of they every carpet bombed Europe?
That's a lot of worthless space!
What's wrong with them? Not that my hometown is any better.
All suburbs in PNW are like this. "Asphalt ocean"
This is city center. The park is nice. It was the 1974 world's fair grounds, it's a bunch of bridges over waterfalls and there's been a decent amount of investment / upkeep the last few years.
The business owners in the 70s all opposed it's construction because they didn't think it would be good for downtown. Since then they've really doubled down on surface lots to charge people going to the park / mall / downtown businesses.
I wish we could just give Spokane to Idaho, they'd be a better fit over there. Honestly, I'd go as far to say everything East from Ritzville should probably just considered "Western Idaho."
I guess my point is that this kind of car-centric build-out and culture seems par for the course for more rural, conservative areas.
hi, fuck you, there are normal people out here trying to fix this shithole. western washington is not the only place that exists and fuck you for trying to burn your neighbors. none of us want to be included with those inbred psychopaths in the panhandle.
also spokane is the second biggest metropolitan area in washington state you goon, this isn't rural.
hi, fuck you too, buddy, from a fellow eastern washington resident who fucking hates it here and doesn't see much that can be done to fix it.
As another E-WA resident, I don't want to give up. Things will change. Probably going to take a while, but I want to believe in a change. Besides, I'd rather get turned into the Canadian acquisition of the west coast than become part of Super Idaho.
Always makes me sad when people start trashing rural areas and even sizeable cities like Spokane. It's like Americans are completely incapable of nuance, of understanding that at least 1/3 of the people they're trashing share their politics.
Omfg i love ritzville so much. Whenever we drive from OR to MT we always stop in ritzville and spend the afternoon singing "putting on the ritzville".
What this place needs is clearly more parking lots.
Bro fucking detroit looks better than this
Like do people realize this? Anyone in their gov??
Forget AI, the world has already been taken over by artificial life : cars !
Gosh the drugs and homeless people though!
Can we exclusively only see urban issues through that lens please?
I have friends that live over that way, when they were first trying to tell me where it was they lived they mentioned Spokane. I's like "Why would I know this random US city?" (As i'm an aushole), they said, "oh, because it appeared on the show Cops quite a lot, so has become quite well known." ..... I couldn't stop laughing... even now..
Roads should also be colored to dig it deeper
Something something pave paradise something.
Just...
😐
It's so depressing I can't describe it in words
Everytime i see my hometown mentioned it's never for anything good lol. Fuck you Spokane, glad I left ya.