> You don't need parking lots, because utilization is close to 100% and they go back to a depot when not required.
It’s just dawned on me how many cars you could fit in a carpark for self driving cars. They can park properly, park each other in and park close together. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get 4x more cars in the same place.
Only when the distances are greater than short-walk distance. Cars take up (huge amounts of) space at their destination by parking. You can only push two destinations so close together before their parking lots merge.
> What is going on with the cars on the top floor of this parking garage in Queen Anne? They seem to stay in the same spot for months at a time.
Most likely city vehicle parking. They are all painted the same because they are probably part of a fleet. Most likely they are different cars that all look the same.
You'll notice the cars in those photos are not piled haphazardly in the middle of the street, obstructing traffic; but rather in neat rows on the side in spaces designated for them.
You could arguably call a parking space a dock for a car.
> If one car only needs extremely small margins to park, it's possible for conventional cars ahead or behind to lose too much of their normally-expected larger buffer space, and be unable to (easily) leave.
Doesn't the same apply already with large low-maneuverability vehicles versus subcompacts?
If there's a Ford Excursion or Chevy Suburban overhanging a parallel parking space in to the space in front of it, there's a good chance my Fiesta still fits just fine. If I park there, that's probably going to make it harder for them to leave.
I know in a lot of the world the American city style of parallel parking with defined spaces isn't a thing, you just park along the curb wherever your vehicle fits, but still this situation already exists. Smart cars, those little one seat city runabouts, motorcycles, etc. will fill the tiniest gaps given the opportunity and people still get by.
> If I drive myself to somewhere in the centre, my car will sit there using up space while I'm doing my thing.
In the absence of terrible laws, it'll be stored somewhere that's more space-efficient (e.g. in a multistory car-park) compared to a taxi cruising around the main streets looking for fares.
>Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are?
Number of parking spaces means nothing without the number of residential units. Two lanes (one on each side) of street parking in a neighborhood that's all six apartment triple deckers is very different than two lanes of street parking in a neighborhood that's all single family homes.
Some of the most walk-able and bike-able places (at least in the US) still have street parking in their residential neighborhoods, there's just not much of it relative to the number of people so people use other options.
>the enormous amount of street space permanently reserved for car storage?
This comparison always gets made, but at least car parking is done is officially sanctioned places, as opposed to dockerless bikes where they're dumped wherever.
> The good part of this is that you can't just repark in a different space to avoid a ticket
This is weird to me. Is parking time a per day thing instead of per instance - e.g. if I park for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening, would it violate a 3-hour parking space? If not, what's the criteria for being "not parked", if getting in and driving your vehicle to another spot isn't it - would around the block count?
>That would require more parking width than travel lane width on any given segment with parking
Not sure about Houston, but that is the case in many dense US city-suburbs. They'll have two-way roads with parking on both sides, and the roads will be about three cars wide. The result is cars parked on both sides, with drivers sharing the middle lane for both directions of travel.
When you see someone driving towards you, it's a game of chicken to see who will temporarily pull off into a vacant parking spot. It seems to happen because the lots aren't big enough for 2-4 car garages and driveways.
And for our friends across the ponds, yes: US households really do demand space for at least 2-4 cars per family.
One at home, one at work, one at the grocery store, one at the cafe. Some of those are shared, but it is entirely believable that we have more paved parking than we have housing
I suppose it depends on the particular city block size, but we use angled parking and certainly get a lot more than 10 cars in a given block.
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