It's unclear whether their 1.9x times include time dealing with parking. In some urban neighborhoods, finding parking close to one's destination can be challenging, inefficient, and highly variable. If the closest parking you find is a ways away from your destination, then it adds time to _two_ trips.
One thing I immediately wondered after reading the article was: do you factor "search for parking space" in the time you calculate for driving to a place?
(I live in Europe and this is a significant concern in our densely populated urban centers).
It’s easy to find parking in the city if you’re in any of the areas outside of downtown, like the sunset, you just have to move every week for street cleaning
On street parking in a biggish city sounds like a nightmare to me anyways. It's really living on the edge of street cleaning, time limits, and so on...
Where I live, small shops often have 5 or 15 minute parking time limits directly outside so there's usually a space available when I want one, despite the rest of the street being full.
Sounds like your city needs to write and enforce its parking rules better.
I've heard that a surprising percentage of trip time in the downtown core is spent looking for nearby parking. Having the car drop people off and drive away to park somewhere where parking is less scarce might not actually increase time on road.
You could also greatly increase parking density in parkcades if all vehicles had autonomous parking. For example, it would be no problem to box cars in if vehicles could move on their own to let them out. I bet you could easily double parking density.
In a lot of US cities this is break-even at best or simply untrue - often if you go 3, 5, or 10 miles into more suburby there's once again ample parking. So then the person in the new suburban apartment building with big parking lots instead of the new more-central building is much easier to visit by car.
More parking can definitely be part of the solution. Above or underground automated parking cylinders can fit many cars, especially in the periphery of the city center where people can then use a short taxi ride/walk to their final destination.
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