Just mandate all new builds have a parking garage under them. Seattle is my closest big city which has notoriously bad public transit, extremely steep hills, bad and wet weather most of the year, and parking 20 minutes walk for your location is very very common. I used to be disabled, used portable oxygen and the lack of parking combined with these other things essentially made the whole city off limits to me. People like to call others lazy, entitled or stupid for wanting parking but having adequate accessible parking is a real issue that impacts more than just able bodied people. Even some medical clinics don’t have on sight parking. Accessible parking is part of a socially responsible plan for inter city transportation.
Seattle has some transit problems for sure. East-West travel is a nightmare, the interstate runs straight through the heart of the city, there’s a bunch of bridges that bottleneck flow to various neighborhoods, expansion is physically bounded by the Sound and Lake Washington, and we have a loud NIMBY population that has slowed all public projects for decades. Walking sucks, cycling sucks, driving sucks, the busses only don’t suck on some routes, the Link mostly works if the thing you want to go to is near a station, and the ferries work except when they don’t.
Plus there’s the bureaucratic quagmire so bad it has a Wikipedia page.
I don’t know how much it would cost to do that but I feel like that would price smaller businesses out of building in the city as I’d imagine it’d be quite a bit more expensive to build on top of a garage than it would a plot of land. Maybe the city could subsidize the cost though.
Small businesses aren’t the people building towers, and are rarely the people renting space in said towers, but like you said there’s no reason a city can’t encourage any specific kind of business with tax breaks or subsidies
Just mandate all new builds have a parking garage under them. Seattle is my closest big city which has notoriously bad public transit, extremely steep hills, bad and wet weather most of the year, and parking 20 minutes walk for your location is very very common. I used to be disabled, used portable oxygen and the lack of parking combined with these other things essentially made the whole city off limits to me. People like to call others lazy, entitled or stupid for wanting parking but having adequate accessible parking is a real issue that impacts more than just able bodied people. Even some medical clinics don’t have on sight parking. Accessible parking is part of a socially responsible plan for inter city transportation.
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Seattle has some transit problems for sure. East-West travel is a nightmare, the interstate runs straight through the heart of the city, there’s a bunch of bridges that bottleneck flow to various neighborhoods, expansion is physically bounded by the Sound and Lake Washington, and we have a loud NIMBY population that has slowed all public projects for decades. Walking sucks, cycling sucks, driving sucks, the busses only don’t suck on some routes, the Link mostly works if the thing you want to go to is near a station, and the ferries work except when they don’t.
Plus there’s the bureaucratic quagmire so bad it has a Wikipedia page.
I don’t know how much it would cost to do that but I feel like that would price smaller businesses out of building in the city as I’d imagine it’d be quite a bit more expensive to build on top of a garage than it would a plot of land. Maybe the city could subsidize the cost though.
Small businesses aren’t the people building towers, and are rarely the people renting space in said towers, but like you said there’s no reason a city can’t encourage any specific kind of business with tax breaks or subsidies
Right the skyscrapers could afford it, what I’m talking about is like the smaller bars and shops and things like that which aren’t in towers.