A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
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.
I work in municipal development, and here's the cold facts:
There's little support for the extreme cost of transitioning to 24/7 universal public transit because we have infrastructure for cars.
Without universal public transit, most people still need to own a car.
While park and rides can work for places with good public transit, their real advantage is allowing businesses to share parking lots so that you don't have to have multiple parking spaces avaiallble for the same car on a day trip (work, shopping, whatever), the owners of the cars need a convenient, secure place to store their car, and the best place to do that is where they live.
And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they're cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they're super expensive, but they usually aren't built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.
Over time, zoning changes can mandate additional requirements for future designs, but the expansion takes decades at best. You know all those sidewalks that are 60 feet long and connect to nothing? Those aren't the result of someone just being dumb - that's cities telling developers they have to build out a sidewalk network when they develop a site. But it also requires everything to redevelop, so you've got a bunch orlf orphaned sidewalks.
Then we decide mixed-use paths for bikes and pedestrians are better, so now you've gor 3ft sidewalks connecting to 12ft paths. And because of accessibility requirements, it has to be concrete, which requires more impervious cover and therefore more stormwater infrastructure, but the old sewer system is located where the upgraded stormwater needs to go....
The world isn't Sim City where things can be master-planned and executed. Cities exist across centuries, and its needs and planning theories change over that time. It's messy. And the reality is we've discovered that roads and cars are very adaptable and relatively cheap to extend.
Spoken like a true city planner, LOL. I love how even when you folks are trying to give the "cold facts" you still end up being gentle and diplomatic about it. 🥰
Here's my bottom-line conclusion to the above comment, from someone who doesn't work in municipal development and thus hasn't been required to develop that 'public official' speaking habit:
In order to get the government to pay to build transit, it has to be made painful to drive first. That means you have to build the density first even when you don't have transit to support it yet.
I know a lot of you folks even in this community don't want to hear it, but as an activist who's been on the other side of conversations with municipal development people for decades, that really is how it works.
I think it's worth noting that, while infrastructure is often initially built by developers, subsequent maintenance usually falls back on the government. That means, from a municipal development perspective, that it's super-important to go back and retrofit density to build up the tax base, before the extreme maintenance costs of building entire streets just to serve single-family houses on large lots bankrupts the city. For a long time, cities have been getting by funding maintenance of existing infrastructure using those developer impact fees in what amounts to a gigantic Ponzi scheme, but that quits working once the frontier of green-field development moves beyond the jurisdictional limits. After that, densifying becomes a financial imperative, whether the NIMBYs like it or not.
The way public infrastructure expansion works isn't a ponzi scheme.
We typically require a maintenance contract from the developer for the first few years and a special tax for the owners of the developed land that lasts between 10 and 30 years, depending on the specifics of the agreement. That tax is put into escrow, and by the time the infrastructure needs to be maintained, there's enough money in the fund to maintain that portion of the infrastructure off of interest.
The mistake many cities make is putting that revenue into the general fund. But if you put it into dedicated funds, it can't be diverted to other city expenses and used by the next Council to cut property taxes while leaving future maintenance unfunded.
That sounds less like "the way public infrastructure expansion works isn’t a ponzi scheme," and more "my city is the exception to the rule that does it right."