I'm not often surprised at how much space parking takes up. But, I just read the SFMTA 2014 Parking Census and...um...wow.
If you lined up the on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, it would be longer than *the state of California.*
If you include the publicly available off-street parking (setting aside every garage, apartment, and private lot), the line of parking would stretch...
...from San Francisco to Minneapolis.
There are neighborhoods where at there is *at least* 1 square foot of public parking for every 3 square feet of land.
Work for above tweet:
20k-35k parking spaces ~= 200-350 acres
200-350 acres / square mile (640 acre) = .31 - .55 feet parking per square foot land
Note that this doesn't mean half downtown is parking, since a great deal is structured or underground.
There are more *public parking spaces* (i.e. homes for cars) than there are housing units (i.e. homes for people) in the City of San Francisco!
Smarter people than I would have to estimate the *total* amount of parking in San Francisco, including garages and private lots (@marcelemoran have you/anyone else done this?).
I strongly suspect it would add another several hundred thousand to the above figure.
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On a zoom weminar hosted by @CalBike with renowned bike researchers John Pucher and @buehler_ralph on international international comparisons in biking!
🧵
Here is the share of trips made by bike across North America, Europe, and Japan. Huge variation across countries, with English speaking nations lagging behind.
But these differences are not because those countries are more dense! In the US, our share of bikes used for even short trips are tiny!
Whereas in the Netherlands, nearly half of all 1-2.5 mile trips are on a bike.
6,000+ miles of riding over my three years in the Bay.
All my bikers out there, what do you notice?
Super true! SPA is a huge block hole my map. 9th St and California sort of work, but have their own issues (and no fronting commercial for me to actually use!)
It's also so striking to see that we can get 2/3rds(!!) of the way there today. It's just not that far from Yerba Buena to Embarcadero, and yet it might as well be 1000 miles.
There will always be "just one more project" to do.
There's always a chokepoint that "needs" widening, a winding segment that "needs" straightening, or a freeway interchange that "needs" an additional connection.
It's the classic '10 hot dogs 8 buns' problem:
"I've got 2 extra hot dogs so I need to buy more buns. I've got 6 extra buns..."
Except it's:
"We widened this segment, we now have a chokepoint we have to fix. Oh, and now we have a chokepoint further downstream that we...."
"Reforms have to justify themselves in a way that the status quo never does." -@JohnFPfaff on The Weeds podcast
This is the best formulation I've seen of a problem that bedevils America on countless fronts:
-Criminal justice
-Clean energy
-Transportation
-Housing, etc.
"Yeah, what's happening right now is terrible, but think of how it *might* be worse if we change it."
😐
Seriously, you should listen to this episode (and read @JohnFPfaff's excellent book, "Locked In").
"The question isn't whether police reduce crime. It does, but at an extreme social cost."