The Oil Drum

It seems that what the mall offers, is a High Street, but enclosed and with the parking problem solved. Downtowns don't offer that (any more).  The Big Box offers the 'one stop' solution.

For reasons of human nature, parking at the mall or the Big Box, doesn't seem to be an inconvenience.  not being able to park within 50 feet of a destination shop in a downtown region, is enough not to do it.

"We Americans worship the god of free-flowing traffic. We make blood sacrifice to that god in mind-boggling numbers. And woe be to the unbeliever who suggests a little slowdown, a bit of inconvenience, and a little less turf for the cars, might make us better off."

Many people deride Jim Kunstler for his pessimistic, doomsaying prognostications. But Jim is a bright guy; he's traveled widely -- to hundreds of U.S. communities large and small -- advocating walkable, mixed use neighborhoods and transit. And he's taken note of the responses. In many places, the responses are just as you report here. There's a head-in-the-sand impulse to ignore the negative impacts of auto dependent living environments. When the issue is framed as losing something (in this case, door-to-door parking), people dig in and growl out any number of justifications for maintaining the status quo, no matter how absurd or evidently self-destructive.

Better to frame the issue as gaining something: A better quality of life and a more sustainable town that will be better positioned to weather the challenges of the future. If the town adopts a "park once" strategy and redevelops as a pedestrian friendly district, it can be a win-win for the majority of residents. Sure people have to walk a little farther, but they are passing other stores on the way, and increased foot traffic means increased sales. On top of that, attractive pedestrian oriented neighborhoods become destinations in themselves, offering civic spaces, street-level vitality and municipal pride that retail strips, strip malls and power centers can't compete with.

There are many examples of towns, both old and new, that have successfully adopted strategies like these. The best method for convincing skeptical citizens is to visit the good examples in person and speak to the officials, activists, designers and developers who have implemented redevelopment plans and regulations, and who have seen demonstrated positive results.

But really this is expectations problem.  We (with limited exceptions) expect that we can continue to keep doing as we always have with perhaps cosmetic adjustments.

Like substituting ethanol for gasoline.

We EXPECT that just because we drove in the past and can drive today that we will continue to drive in the future.  Any other planning assumptions cannot reconciled with.  Even some of those that get that petro-fuel based transportation system is not sustainable cannot connect the dots so to speak into land use decision making.

I have come to the conclusion that we wont change until we literally run out of gas. Then the masses might just wake up.  

Hopefully anyway.

At the very least we wont worry about parking regulations when half the stores are closed and 90% can't afford or get gasoline.

By making the vehicles a little more sophisticated, the track can be much much cheaper... It doesn't have to be a monorail or peoplemover type thing.

People causing more traffic jams, burning more fuel at idle, as they circle around and around for others to leave.

This is the reality in many 'walkable' neighborhoods in significant cities, (I'm thinking about Santa Monica and San Diego).

With pay parking (not city parking but private) a 10 minute errand adds 5 dollars, far higher than the value of shopping there versus somewhere else.

And the higher the property price in mixed use neighborhoods the more likely people will double up on rooms (roomates/housemates) and have more cars than in the plan.  They take whatever street spaces are available.  

Squeezing parking does nothing to encourage alternate transporation if that alternate transportation is unfeasible for other reasons.

Re: Freedom of movement - i.e. driving a motor vehicle whenever, wherever, and as much as we want - is one of our most precious and fundamental rights

and

people just don't want to walk anymore

I think the mobility provided by motorized transportation satisfies a deep-seated need in human beings. It is nature at work, not culture. Pre-automobile cultures, once the motor vehicle is introduced, eagerly and quickly adapt to the new mode of living whenever possible. We witness this happening in many parts of China today. Consider this passage from Thesis #6: Humans are still Pleistocene animals.

The superpredators of Africa had created a harsh Darwinian niche for scavengers, leading to powerful packs of hyenas and flocks of vultures that could easily overpower australopithecines. Instead, australopithecines adopted a strategy of finding the kill site first, getting to it first, grabbing their meat, and retreating before other, more powerful scavengers showed up. Walking upright allowed them to see farther across the grasslands, but a kill site could be anywhere. The more ground a scavenger covers in a day, the more likely that scavenger is to stumble upon a kill site. Scavengers don't necessarily need to be fast--the dead rarely outrun them--they just need to keep moving as long as possible and cover as large a range as possible. The larger their daily range, the higher their chances of finding a kill site. That's precisely what walking allows for, and australopithecine anatomy was built for nothing quite so perfectly as walking.

We retain those traits even today, which is precisely what makes walking such an important activity. Thomas Jefferson remarked, "Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far." For more than 99% of our history, humans have been foragers--which meant, more than anything else, walking. While foragers work markedly less than we do, that work consisted almost exclusively of walking: up to four hours every day. The effects of the automobile in the 1950s not only gave us dating, it also destroyed our communities. Resources were no longer grouped together, as walking from place to place became impossible and automobiles became a requirement for existence. Face-to-face interaction died off, and so did the habit of walking--resulting in our current obesity crisis. This doesn't mean that cars and dating are bad--what it means is that we now live in a context to which we are not adapted.

"The more ground a scavenger covers in a day, the more likely that scavenger is to stumble upon a kill site. Scavengers don't necessarily need to be fast ... they just need to keep moving as long as possible and cover as large a range as possible" -- it was true for the Australopithecies, it was true for our ancestors in the genus Homo, it is true today. Similar remarks apply to hunting as opposed to scavenging. Mobility allowed hominids to survive for millions of years.

People will get out of their cars because necessity will force the issue on the downwards part of the oil production curve. But they will have to dragged from those cars kicking and screaming.