https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/20/opinion-broadway-upzoning-parking-chicago/
“If the city becomes more dense, where will people put their car?!!” he asks.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/20/opinion-broadway-upzoning-parking-chicago/
“If the city becomes more dense, where will people put their car?!!” he asks.
“Not providing parking causes the housing development to remain vacant” is a lie, not an “obvious conclusion.” If you think I’m wrong, prove it by citing an example of a housing development that couldn’t find tenants or buyers because of lack of parking.
The part about causing parking problems elsewhere is not why the comment was removed.
Look, I think you are going off topic a bit. I understood the comment to have said that if we don’t expand transit infrastructure we should not expand housing. They then made an a priori case that doing so is just straining already over used infrastructure. Which makes sense and don’t see why the citation is needed.
Said infrastructure includes parking lots and connection to public transit. If you don’t hook up the new construction to public options, then people will drive. And when there isn’t extra parking they will just park where ever. That means other business they are not visiting. Parks they are not visiting. Blocking parking for neighborhoods they don’t live in. That is how I understood that comment. It seems I am not alone in this reading the rest of the comments either. It is a conclusion that does not need a study. Worst of all it does not mean people will ask for more public options it just re-enforces the trend that we will want more parking.
Quite frankly you should get over your hubris and having someone else read the comment to see if you walked away with a mis-read. I think you are good natures, but you are doubling down on an L take that no one was making.
The comment was not even a pro-car talking point the way you are making it out to be. Just saying we need to be prudent with our city planing. Ironically what strong towns is about. Please don’t miss the forest because of the trees.
E: Commented this on the wrong side of the thread lol
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken
The notion that you have to have transit beforehand (or at least simultaneously) in order to justify density is that kind of answer. It’s intuitive, but it’s wrong. Short of master-planning an entire new community from the top-down, like they do in China maybe, density always — always — comes before transit. This is because if you don’t already have density-induced traffic problems demonstrating the need for transit, The Powers That Be use it as an excuse to never build it! That’s just how city planning and transit planning in America work, and it’s not going to change no matter how ass-backwards any of us might think it is.
In reality, there are three options when planning new development:
Only one of those three options (edit: option #3, if it isn’t blindingly obvious from context) is good urbanism; the other two perpetuate car-dependency (either because of sprawl or because you’ve created urban canyons of car sewers lined by parking decks, respectively).
“Option #4, build mass transit along with the development” is not and never will be on that list. Insisting on it is equivalent to picking option #1. Mass Transit only becomes a possibility after the area has a well-established pattern of picking #3, and even then it takes years or decades after that.
If you’ve been around as long as I have, having spent decades not just online but especially IRL in planning meetings, listening to people arguing for mythical option #4 even though you know (because they’ve also been at the meetings for years) they understand the above perfectly well and are absolutely NIMBY concern trolls whose actual preference is #1, you’d become more skeptical of the argument.
But even then, it wasn’t just that general misconception / ‘comment difficult to distinguish from trolling’ that caused me to remove the comment. It was the addition of the much more concrete, specific, and easily provable (if it had been true) claim that development without parking causes vacancy – not traffic/parking problems for the surrounding area, vacancy for the development itself, specifically – and then refusal to prove it after I gave him the opportunity, that pushed it over the edge.
Pretty much what the removed comment said (really just don’t build if its going to exacerbate problems). Do you love to talk past people that are agreeing with the premise and making the movement look bad or what are you on about?
And really if you are in car centrist place (like i am) and parking sucks you won’t buy a house or condo there either.
But again. I and others are telling you that we interpreted the removed comment to having made its case rather well and you are talking some fat Ls on discourse here. Please go back and read what the original comment was, what people have said about it, and that you are now de-railing it being too immature when called out.
Again, I am disputing that premise of “just don’t build if its going to exacerbate problems” and saying that everyone repeating it is wrong. The problems of car-dependency need to be exacerbated in order to force a break from the car-dependent status quo.
It’s not a great analogy, but creating good urbanism is kinda like exercise: similarly to how you have to work the muscle hard enough to break it down in order for it to build back stronger, you have to deliberately build things anticipating walkability etc., even knowing that it will make traffic worse, in order to get the infrastructure supporting other modes of transportation to actually happen. No pain, no gain.
Edit: it suddenly occurs to me that when I wrote “only one of those options is good,” you might have misread it as “only option #1 is good.” That is not what I meant; option #3 is the only good one.