Pittsburgh is making great strides in this. They’ve been tearing down parking garages and building condos, forcing everyone to take public transportation. The light rail is even totally free, making it easy for everyone to get there.
The light rail is even totally free, making it easy for everyone to get there.
I gotta say, we could do a hell of a lot better with that.
Edit: Switched to better map
Those tiny red and blue lines is all we have for a city of 300k people, and only just to those few neighborhoods. We could easily have way more, but we just don’t.
Gotta force people to use the existing ones first, otherwise when planning more people will complain that no one will use it.
Kinda hard to force people to use it when the T only serves like 3 neighborhoods in a city of 300k, with ~40 neighborhoods.
What’s light blue?
Connection to an airport is usually a good idea, so hopefully the red Is coming soon
The light blue is a bus line, but the busses are never on time or consistent. So it’s a gamble if it gets you to your destination on time.
If the busses/train had dedicated roads for them, it’d be a different story.
Where I live, they’ve gone through to create dedicated bus lanes for the major downtown bus routes. As a sometime car driver, I really hate the extra delays when I have to drive, but as a transit user when given the choice I can see how it makes a big difference in predictability and reliability.
Actually, “funny” story …. Boston has always had inadequate transit to the airport. A decade or two back they created a new transit line for a newly redeveloped section of the city and to improve transit to the airport. However the budget compromise ended up being Bus Rapid Transit, stuck in the same tunnel traffic as all the cars. We spent however many billions of dollars building dedicated bus roads to the new hotels and convention center (yea capitalism), but “improved” airport access is to be stuck in traffic
Yeah, it always sucks because whenever there is some project in the works to fix the problem, it’s always some half step like a bus trapped on a normal road, so we’re back to square one after having blown millions of dollars.
Even worse, the city used to own a lot of riverfront area with rail infrastructure, but sold it off. That land has now since been developed into other stuff. So even if we wanted to rebuild what we used to have, we’d have to eminent domain and bulldoze a bunch of shit, making it way more expensive than it would be if the city just kept the land.
Does the light rail even make it to the Amtrak station? Last time I was in Pittsburgh I had to walk almost a mile down Grant to catch it. This map seems more aspirational than existent.
I think you’re talking about the Penn Station, to which the answer is yes, its the end of the dark blue line on the right side.
This map seems more aspirational than existent.
Yeah, it’s dog shit. Part of that is because it’s kind of a pointless task to map the rail system, because there basically is none. Google used to have a good display for it, but it looks like they took it out.
Here is a better one, though it doesn’t show the shear mass of area that isn’t covered:
I thought it was called Union Station. The closest light rail station is in Steel Plaza. Apparently there used to be a light rail station near Union Station, and the light rail station was called Penn Station, but it closed like five years ago.
I thought it was called Union Station. The closest light rail station is in Steel Plaza.
Actually, yeah you’re correct and I was wrong.
and the light rail station was called Penn Station, but it closed like five years ago.
Yeah, that figures.
Damn, kinda wish my city had free public transit. It also does not make much sense to make transit paid given most roads are free to use.
My city bought out some succesful busniesses downtown to demolish their buildings and build a new stadium with surface level parking for all the people who live outside of the city to drive to. Can we at least get a parking garage instead of surface level so we dont have to demolish businesses and homes for the benefits of suburban and rural sports fans? My city is small enough that the footprint of the stadium will be 1/4 or more of the whole downtown area, just sitting there empty for 90% of the time.
Or… a park. No not a car park… a park … with grass and trees.
It’s kinda crazy that buying up that much land is cheaper than building parking garages.
In case you didn’t know this is Dodgers Stadium in LA and opened 1962 so land was much cheaper then. Also all the land this stadium sits on was seized via eminent domain for a federally funded housing project but because of socialism the city bought the land from the federal government for pennies on the dollar then the Dodgers bought the land and built the stadium there.
Another fun fact about this stadium is it’s built over a couple ravines. They leveled the top of the surrounding hills and used that dirt to fill in the ravines. The parking lot northwest of third base has a buried elementary school under it.
How did socialism result in the city buying the land for cheap and then selling it to the Dodgers? That sounds like the opposite of socialism.
They’re joking that the welfare state housing projects were called socialism when that’s not socialism at all. We dismantle social democracy initiatives and shoot ourselves in the foot because thats what it means to be an American.
And I would guess that not all, maybe not even most of them are coming by car.
The kicker is that a vast amount of these stadiums are paid for by tax payers. We’re subsidizing billionaires to build these things that we still have to pay to use instead of investing in public spaces and transportation/infrastructure projects
I saw a concert at the Yankee stadium. It was awesome to be able to take the subway straight from my hotel to the stadium and back.
What I don’t like about this, is that a stadium hardly holds people at a sort of normal density. People take up a bunch more space in their day to day lives than inside a stadium. Stadiums are literally built to facilitate this.
I’m not saying the sentiment is bad but the example is.
It’s a good image for transportation though. Pedestrians walking somewhere can absolutely get as tight as they do in a stadium.
I can get on board with that
Are you sure? It’s not just the seats. If we sum up all the entryways, access corridors, store areas, playing field, locker rooms, office spaces, lounges, rest rooms etc. how much space does each person actually have available in a stadium if distributed equally?
Sure it’s not as much as a suburban house, but it might very well be more than a small apartment.
nah, I’m sorry but stadiums are literally designed for people to be as packed as possible. especially a full stadium is incomparable especially once you take into account just how many people there are in there. in normal living (like regular size apartments or offices). If you do the math (just in terms of plain building area) for the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in Madrid, then you get to something like 4.7 m^2 per occupant (assuming staff numbers are negligible and that attendance is at capacity (which historically it’s been overshot by as much as 50%)). A 5m^2 apartment is pretty small. this is maybe the size of a small bathroom or less than half the area of a single parking space in france. (less than a 3rd of a US one). Now is this enough space for people in a dense public place? yes. Is it. is it enough space to work or live in? not really. I mean it can be done but now we’re looking at japanese microapartment sizes.
point being. this is not that great a comparison even just in how it’s perceived by an average onlooker.
Without doing any actual calculations, I think we agree that the current distribution of people is maximized to customize as many as possible in the available customer section. However, if we were to include the entire land square meters and height of a stadium, including making space on levels above the playing field, I do think it would be possible to reach a population density lower than Kowloon City. (Which again was pretty extreme).
in the US, for sure
I’ve not seen a stadium with this much parking in Europe. I almost always see people just taking the train/bus.
Often tickets to events include public transport for the event. There is usually a subway stop close to the location. Both help a lot.
Parking for vehicles doesn’t have to take up all that space. Multilevel car parks or even underground parking would take care of most of the wasted space.
So just build another second stadium-sized building next to the stadium sized building? (Or below it)
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I’m not arguing against that. I’m pointing out the fact that parking infrastructure is so expensive that even on high-value land you get the kind of thing in the picture. Building dense parking next to that particular stadium isn’t worth it.
A stadium alone isn’t enough to make a parking garage underground worth the cost of building it.
It has to already be surrounded by dense development. A train station right next to it, all that space taken up by parking instead covered in businesses, restaurants, homes, etc. Then the garage is serving way more than just the stadium and the return is massively multiplied.
Except these cities place stadiums and other points of congregation far apart from each other, specifically so there’s space for the roads for everyone to drive between them. Putting vertically dense parking next to those various points doesn’t solve the wasted space problem, it just makes everything way more expensive.
I used to live near Fenway Park in Boston, and one of the reasons I left was parking. It was a great location for transit and I used that for day to day stuff, but couldn’t entirely give up my car. However, even being willing to pay Boston prices for parking, everything I checked was “except during Fenway events”. I could pay ridiculous money to keep a car in, but would still have to move it for games
No no no. Build it ABOVE the stadium. Make it like a tower that just goes up and up and up… And the ground level is the stadium.
It would be so ugly, and it would make me laugh so hard.
Except that cars are heavy, so multi-level parking is prohibitively expensive.
That’s a good point and, in retrospect, the multilevel is almost better for the comparison as the people are also multilevel.
The Alamodome in San Antonio has a great park-and-ride system where you just park at a designated lot 10-15 mins from the stadium and a bus takes you there and back. Even a solution like that to bridge the gap while trains are built would help. It reduces congestion around the stadium area and also reduces the stress of finding parking.
Recently had an opportunity to go there, for the first time, a few days ago. After parking in the lot, it was a mile walk to the stadium. The bus from Union Station drops you off near the entrance.
That bus is free with a ticket to the game.
Need? Nah man the extra room is to tailgate
I do want to point out that stadiums in the US are built with parking because of tailgating culture, or more cynically the ability to charge for tailgating culture.
I think you have the cause and effect backwards.
I don’t think you understand how the passage of time works. Modern stadiums were built in a world where tailgating culture for sports was already well established.
How much of those parking lots do you think is dedicated to tailgating? (Hint: It’s a minor fraction of the overall surface lots).
Tailgating originates out of the lack of nearby bars, restaurants, public spaces around stadiums. That’s why there’s a trend of newly-built/in-planning stadiums in urban areas with entertainment districts attached. They’ve realized there’s money to be made, and creating walkable spaces just puuumps out the cash.
I don’t necessarily agree with this decision, but Vegas Raiders stadium has virtually zero parking.
That means Vegas doesn’t have minimum parking requirements for new construction, based
