NYC averages a population of 1400 people per city block with mixed use development. Pictured above in Houston they fit 126 cars per city block sized parking lot.
Houston is the world’s worst example of urban sprawl. There are no zoning laws so anyone can build anything anywhere. It is magnificent. Its freeways are eighteen lanes wide. There are multiple intersections stacked five roads high into the sky. It takes 45 minutes to drive anywhere. Tanker trucks full of hazardous chemicals on the way from the refineries in Texas City are all over the roads. It takes an hour and a half to drive across the length of the urban area at highway speeds. I think if you’re going to do something, go all the way. Don’t just be a wasteland, be the Dark Land of Mordor.
Oh, Houston has public transport, of course. It’s actually not bad if you live outside the city and work downtown. You can catch a commuter bus and they get to use the HOV lanes. But the city street buses? The city is just so huge that it takes two hours to equal a 30 minute drive.
Imagine working somewhere in there and walking 5 blocks though a barren sweltering parking lot desert to get lunch.
Wait, so if you work in one of these buildings and want to get lunch, you get in your car and drive?
imagining being a bird looking for a tree to land on
That actually just made me sad as fuck. I was thinking about getting out of your car in the middle of the Texas summer and having to walk a half mile on pavement with no shade to get where you’re going. Now I’m imagining a poor bird that just bakes to death as it desperately looks for a safe place to land :/
The sprawl is so intense it would be a bother to even nuke it all
Wait… we built our cities like this during the Cold War 😳
SECRET DEFENSE STRATEGY RIGHT UNDER OUR NOSES
I’d love a source for that because I wouldn’t be shocked but have no clue
Even if you had the political will, where tf do you even start?
I guess the first thing to add would be more public transport, light rail, busses, bike rentals. Don’t allow any new permits for these open kinds of parking lots. Build multistory en underground parking lots at outskirts of the city center close to public transport. Raise property tax on parking lots based on size, but not on height? Require any new office or residential development with more than 5 stories to have an underground parking garage.
Yeah actually having a real public transport system snd converting a lot those parking blocks into multi family housing could help a lot
Houston is 26,061 km2 and even that doesn’t include some of the outer outer suburbs coming in from the grand parkway project. Only about a 1/10 of the that is downtown i think, almost everyone commutes in from a 45 min highway drive. There was a small push to get people to move “into the inner loop” years ago but the problem is the pricing is just astronomical. I’ve been getting pushed out further snd further from the city bc the prices are insane down there.
If we had a good sized train system that’d help a lot but the best we have are park and ride busses that no one takes bc they have a stigma of being for poor people.
Yeah that’s really what I’m talking about. Infrastructure is nearby but how accessible is it to just dig up the parking lot and do the electric and water/sewage hookups.
Redevelopment would need to be in lockstep with public transport like buses, trams and light rail.
It’s no use to have public transport If there is nowhere to go.
With buses and trains. With bike lanes. With zoning laws that bans wasteful parking lots, requires denser construction and creates walkable neighbourhoods by mixing residential, commercial and light industrial construction.
