I know it sounds hypocritical but hear me out. My city’s suburban streets were mostly built in the 1900s and 1910s, before cars were ubiquitous and before streets were built to accommodate them. So like 90% of the streets in the immediate suburbs (I’m talking 1 - 5 minutes from downtown) are either way too skinny to drive on or they don’t have driveways. In a select few streets it’s even both. And so you end up with streets that are littered with parked cars, and a lot of streets are two lane but end up functioning like one-ways. There have been moments where I drive on these streets because GPS told me to, and then I question my sanity because it really feels like a 1-way and yet there’s signs facing me. I mention this because I’m a pizza delivery driver and so I have to navigate these streets at least a few times a day, usually dozens of times if we’re offering coupons in those areas. And every time it becomes far more of a hassle than it has to be just because of how there are so many cars and so many people driving on them. I hate how we’ve built this city that had a downtown where people would walk to and shop around in, but now everybody drives to the superstores on the outskirts and uses the freeway to go to work. It’s like we’ve ruined the act of driving simply by forcing everybody to drive more.
I actually lived in Japan for a period, and while I wasn’t old enough to drive there, I noticed that people seemed to have a far better time driving on their ultra-narrow suburban streets, and I’m willing to hedge a bet that’s because not everything there was car-focused. Obviously once you got out into the rural regions more people drove, but in Tokyo especially people seemed to walk or take the train most of the time.
I wonder if maybe in an alternate universe where we didn’t place superstores and supermarkets and home depots a 1-hours walk away from the old suburbs, and where we didn’t develop this culture that everybody needed a car, would it be a much less irritating and frustrating experience driving around? Hell in that universe I might even be able to get my store’s drive times down a couple minutes.
In Japan, a prerequisite to owning a car is proving you have an off-street parking space for it.
In addition to the benefits while driving you mentioned, I also feel that the benefits of not seeing car storage literally everywhere you look in a city is a huge health and wellness benefit, as well as improving safety for pedestrians and cyclists.
A lot of American cities have the worst possible inversion of this sort of policy, where every residence constructed needs to have a certain minimum number of parking spots. This means that apartment buildings end up with large attached parking lots or towers, both balloon the cost of any housing construction and push buildings further away from each other so it’s less walkable. I really think it’s a negative feedback loop.
I lived in a city where they were building a residential district around light rail and built the entire area without parking spaces. I think there were a few spots for deliveries here and there, but we’re talking a dozen apartment high rises with no parking garages.
They just assumed that because there was light rail through the district, nobody would need a car there??
This is in the States, where stroads are the norm and nothing is walkable. So those people might be able to take the light rail to a small number of major employers on the other end of the light rail line… but their kids will have to be bussed to school, and their spouse will have to get a bicycle to go grocery shopping, and good luck going to the dentist across town.
What about having friends come to visit? They gotta park at the transit center and rail in?