San Fran is giving permits to new housing developments that have no parking spaces, but bike racks. Several cities in California have taken one lane belong to cars, giving it to bikes—squeezing cars into one lane, forcing gridlock, traffic jams and angry drivers unable to get to work or the movies. Now we have the radicals trying to use empty parking lots as a reason to end ALL free parking lots and limiting the number of cars in paid parking lots. In LA and San Fran a parking lot charging $30 or more is common on the downtown areas.
“Vast parking lots and garage consume far too much space in our cities and towns. They make places unwalkable. Their impermeable surfaces generate runoff that pollutes our water. And they erode the fiscal viability of local governments by increasing infrastructure costs and weakening the tax base.
And yet, everywhere you look in America, enormous seas of parking are the norm at retail centers. The fact that many parking lots remain half-empty on Black Friday is proof that we’ve gone way too far with all this asphalt.”
You got it—these people wanted you to walk to the mall or local small business to do your Black Friday shopping. Wonder how many packages you could carry home? Is the mall in walking distance? Maybe you could take a bus with your family, including three kids to the mall—then have the items bought shipped to your home instead of taken them on the bus?
The War on Cars is a War on Freedom. Whether it is bike lanes or a lack of parking lots—or spaces at your apartment, government is trying to keep control of our movements. What do you think—do we have too many parking spaces and lots?
Don’t Forget to Expose Your City’s Parking Failures This Black Friday
by Angie Schmitt, Streetsblog, 11/24/16
If it’s half-empty on Black Friday, it will never be full.
It’s that time of year again — time to show how much space we waste on commercial parking!
Strong Towns is organizing its annual #BlackFridayParking campaign, asking readers to snap photos of half-empty parking lots on one of the biggest shopping days of the year.
Vast parking lots and garage consume far too much space in our cities and towns. They make places unwalkable. Their impermeable surfaces generate runoff that pollutes our water. And they erode the fiscal viability of local governments by increasing infrastructure costs and weakening the tax base.
And yet, everywhere you look in America, enormous seas of parking are the norm at retail centers. The fact that many parking lots remain half-empty on Black Friday is proof that we’ve gone way too far with all this asphalt.
The Strong Towns contest is a chance to step back and call attention to this problem, so get your cameras ready and remember the #BlackFridayParking hashtag.
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