Don’t shit on Colorado just because you had to look at a parking lot in Denver metro.
One of the most beautiful states in the country.
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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It takes my breath away
passes out from altitude sickness
passes out from car fumes
While true that Colorado is beautiful, it is an absolutely car-centric state that's far too much sprawl and not great public transportation options. Denver is also not really a pretty city - it's covered in freeways and interstates and the traffic is always bad.
There's finally some movement to get a train that goes from Longmont down to Denver with a few other stops by 2029, but everyone is pretty incredulous that it'll happen.
I'd also love to see public transit to the ski resorts. Riding trains through the Rockies would be AMAZING.
Summit County, where Breckenridge is, has free buses throughout and a free shuttle to and from the Denver airport.
Ok, that's awesome! Thanks for the info!
It is, but the parts where the people live are midwest-style auto sprawl. Six+ lane surface highways everywhere dividing up isolated sub-developments. And they're still building completely new highways, right now.
Ugh tell me about it. Paris, too:
Disgusting place.
Prague:
Gross, can't believe people call it a beautiful city.
Amsterdam:
🤮 Haven't the Dutch ever heard of a bicycle? Jesus.
🐍 because there's so much sarcasm here /s won't do it, it's /sssssssssssssssss
Sprawling, car-centric Amsterdam versus the urban paradise Houston
Prague is a car-centric nightmare though:
In 2022 Luko bike-friendly cities Global City Index, Prague ranked 73rd of total 90 analyzed metropolises around the world. It was next to Detroit, Istanbul or Cairo.
Do you realize how much an old European city has to fuck up to be as unfriendly to bikes as Detroit??
That’s like going to The Lourve, taking a picture of a small garbage can in the corner, and saying “ugh this museum is filled with literal trash — this entire place is a dump”
Caralado?
Didn't like sim city 3 abandon realistically sized parking lots because they looked like shit?
Edit: I guess it was Sim 5.
Parking lots fucking suck
America is a wasteland. Also mask-off fascist now.
Crazy that the space needed for ~100 cars, could accommodate 1000+ cyclists. That would be 1000 fewer cars on the road, BTW. 💁♂️
I doubt its all like that. Just the cities.
Notice how there are 5 separate lots in the block nearest the camera. There are walls between them. This isn't the municipal government choosing to dedicate an entire block to surface parking. These are 5 separate lots, with 5 separate owners who all decided to use the plots for surface parking. The incentive system is broken.
These are taxpayers. Modern version of the taxpayer building is a surface parking lot. You'll see them everywhere, weirdly small awkwardly proportioned paid parking lots in cities. It happens everywhere. Same incentives same result.
Speculators are parasites. Buy an urban lot, wait a decade or two for the city to grow around it and then sell to get a paycheck from the growth of the city they actively hindered.
The scheme works by paying the minimum property tax, in a cost neutral way. Most cities charge property taxes based on the value of the land plus whatever's built on it. Demolishing the building reduces the tax bill. Then they rent the vacant lot to a parking company for the cost of the taxes. To the speculator, its a zero risk scheme, to hold a lot for free until its profitable to sell.
Land value only property taxes is the solution. It breaks the scheme and makes surface parking speculation unviable. When these lots have the same tax burden as the functioning buildings around them, wasting the space as a surface lot becomes unaffordable.
/c/Georgism
Never underestimate the ability of humans to uglify the beauty of nature.
I don't understand why cities don't invest more into parking structures. They seriously condenses the downtown area, drives up traffic (the good kind), reduces wasted space (you can have 2x the parking pictured in 1/5th the space), and brings in revenue on its own.
The cars still have to get to the parking structures, which means they fuck up traffic anyway by forcing the surrounding streets to be turned into car sewers.
The downtown for our little city (just under 300,000 people) has multiple parking structures and a ton of parking lots within a few minutes walking distance from everything in the area. They sit empty.
Why? Because people "NEED" on-street parking and will bitch if they don't get it. So what should be quiet streets or roads with bike lanes just becomes rows upon rows of people parking there.
And then we gift motorists with free parking around the holidays, further clogging up public spaces.
The solutions are so easy, but either a lack of will from leadership, or the entitlement of NIMBYs, makes it very difficult to achieve an outcome that works for everyone.
The general urbanist consensus is that parking structures are a good idea sometimes.
Basically, if you are trying to revitalize your downtown, a government owned parking garage can function as a replacement for parking outside existing shops. This way, a previously walkable downtown can drastically reduce its existing parking while still accommodating a largely motorist clientele.
On the other hand, they are a less good idea in already dense and valuable urban centers. Urban parking lots are already expensive. Urban parking garages are enormously expensive. And they are counterproductive to the aim of getting people out of their cars and getting them to take transit into and around downtown. Especially in larger cities, the case for public parking garages is fairly difficult to make, since if an area is popular enough to justify a parking garage, the land for the parking garage could probably be put to better use in the form of a public park, housing, or businesses. And if a parking garage is truly needed, then a private developer could build one and turn a profit.
The problem is that probably the best place for parking garages in a city would be at a popular transit stop near the urban/suburban divide, to serve as a transition point between auto oriented and transit oriented commuters. But if you built a transit stop at the urban/suburban divide then hopefully that area will be experiencing infill quite quickly, and transit ridership will access the network via foot. Meanwhile, if you build a transit station far out... why build a parking structure, which is expensive, when you could build surface parking, which is cheap? And as a bonus, surface parking can be sold off easily to developers so they can build housing, whereas parking structures would require significant retrofitting to fit this need.
A parking structure costs about $28,000 per car. That would be in most cases one person. So the city might as well spend the money on building some apartment public housing and just have the people live in the space. The other alternative is to build some proper public transit. For $28,000 per potential user, you can built quite a bit of that. You might even built it to the outskirts of the city and built a massive conventional parking lot.
Yeah, several multi-floor parking buildings around the edges of the downtown area where people can park, then take public transit to move around.
the city didn't do this. No city would build a big parking lot with walls in the middle if it.
Denver was one of the most expansive shitholes I've ever visited. The surrounding wilderness and small towns were great, though.
All the cities suck, the mt towns are fine to look at but expensive to drink in and always full of people. Same for most of the state parks, except for the drinking. The sweet spot is somewhere around grand junction where there are still good mountains but less people. I find the people in the state rude and invasive but probably just because there are so many of them anywhere within 2 hrs or so of Denver. I'm also not a Midwesterner so it could just be a cultural thing.
Calling Colorado the midwest 🤮
they paved paradise 😞