The idea behind the PARK (ing) project is pretty simple: once you put your money in a parking meter, nothing says you have to use that space for parking a car, right? With over 70% of downtown San Franciso’s public space devoted to the private vehicle, Rehab decided to use that 2 hour lease for a different kind of “park”-ing. They picked a site in downtown San Francisco under-served by public outdoor space and in an ideal location, sunny between the hours of noon and 2 p.m. There they installed a small, temporary public park that provided nature, seating, and shade.
“Our goal was to transform a parking spot into a PARK space, thereby temporarily expanding the public realm and improving the quality of urban human habitat, at least until the meter ran out.”
They claim to have provided San Franciscans with “an addition 24,000 square-foot-minutes of public open space” that Wednesday afternoon.
Rehab’s upcoming The Hidden Agenda sounds interesting too (although I’d prefer a different desert).
Cool. These Park(ing) spots break up the street, add green space, and make hanging out and relaxing a bit more fun because of the quirky context. Imagine getting friends together for some metered time with coffee or a picnic lunch. It also underlines the important fact that in urban environments not only is time money but space is money as well. Putting our leisure on a meter is just a way of making that fact evident.
I read your post to a friend of mine, and he said, “Great idea; however, for many cities, the thing they lack even more than green space is parking!”
I, for one, love the idea. In the tradition of Snow Chairs, perhaps those Chicagoans who will do anything for a parking space in the winter will make up for their bad karma by creating PARK-(ing) spaces in the summer.
He needs parking because he lives in a city that’s designed for cars instead of people. A car that sits unused on the side of the street the majority of the time, taking up more space than people and their houses put together, is better than a tree standing there because the car is his most effective means of getting anywhere. Imagine if we put all the money we spend on our cars into something else. Whatever that turned out to be, it would be pretty fucking cool cause that’s a lot of money. We all pitch in $300/mo. Hundreds of trillions of dollars would get us a pretty amazing transit system. If we socialized the whole damn auto industry, everyone could take cabs/transit/buses everywhere and we’d have a lot less waste, of space and resources. I guess people feel more comfortable giving their $300/mo to the whole corporate industrial complex.
I guess I’m lucky to live in a place where I can take advantage something like City Car Share or ZipCar, which helps with the parking issue. I have a reserved spot. But seems to me if we wanted to, and perhaps one day in the future we will, we could figure out a better way, one in which all the “Yea, but I still want to … with my car” needs are still met but we don’t waste a lot of extra money/resources on something that goes unused 90% of the time.
I’d happily pay $300/month for guaranteed, convenient and attractive public transit options. What should be done first? Expand and improve public transit for a population of people who presently would rather drive? Or create transit-oriented developments that discourage the use of cars? Both would be nice, but it’s difficult.
When I was working on the Wilson Yard plan, we tried to both make it a transit-oriented development (it’s adjacent to a crumbling El station and 4 bus routes) and capture the 10,000+ people that already drive by the site each day.
On the transit side, the CTA is designing a new station, and there are tentative plans to tie it directly into the development. I-Go car sharing will have spaces nearby. Buses will stop there. Great.
But what about those drivers? They’re the key to the plan’s economic success. There are currently zero public parking lots or garages in the area – only street parking. Existing businesses say they are suffering because of it. The Target, grocery store, movie theater and housing that will be part of this new development all have their own corporate-dictated parking requirements. And neither the City’s Plan Commission nor area residents would have approved a development that didn’t provide “adequate” parking.
So we’ve ended up with a plan that includes 900+ parking spaces, some dedicated, some public. Hardly an incentive to take the train. But if those spaces weren’t included, there would be no development. And without the development, who knows how long the CTA would take to improve the station? And without improvements to our public transit system, how will we get more of the public to use it?
This reminds me a bit of some of my books on interaction design where it refers to not letting the user design the software. Users are not software designers. Here’s an example. If a computer user tells the software designer:
User:
“I want a button here that does this.”
Generally the worst thing you can do is put a button there that does that. People are not accustom to thinking about their goals in a larger context. It’s just not how the human mind works. We can’t be thinking about our plan for retirement all the time or we’ll trip over the pothole in the sidewalk. It’s the designers job to ask,
Designer:
“Why do you want that button?”
User:
“Well, the button would make it easier to print the report so I can give it to my manager.”
Designer:
“Why don’t we just inform your manager for you automatically?”
User:
“Even Better!”
For the large majority of urban residents, it is not their goal to be “drivers.” Their real goal is probably something like; “To be able to go anywhere whenever I want and come back whenever I want in reasonable safety and comfort.” Cars are one way to do that, but it’s easy to confuse the task with the goal. In the example above the user confuses the task of printing the report with the goal of informing the manager. The user’s proposed solution is the bandaid that’s obvious to them since they don’t have the whole picture. Definitely not the best solution. Driving a car is mostly a task you have to do to meet your larger goal of getting somewhere. People are upset because they want more parking, but parking isn’t their goal, it’s just a task they currently have to perform in order to meet their goal. As marketers know there’s a big difference between what people say they want vs. what they actually buy. But still the clues to what they will buy lie in what they say.
In the research phase of the interaction design methodology, interviews are essentially a process of asking “why” over and over again until you get to highest level of goal that can be met by a proposed solution. People’s goal to go anywhere anytime, for instance, steps from larger goals of freedom and independence which can only be partially met by a transportation system.
Centralizing storage of unused vehicles seems like a good idea to me. How many parking spots on a block, 50? Your creating 900+. Get rid of street parking and use the lane to create a bus corridor with computer-controlled synchronized auto-sensing stop lights and streamlined loading platforms. Make a bus trip that took 25 min take 10 and people will take the bus for the pleasure of not having to park once they got there. Synchronize the lights to follow the busses and 1. traffic will move faster and 2. people will be like, “Well I could be on that bus right now instead and then I wouldn’t have to try to find parking at both ends of my trip. I’m an idiot.”
I think the key to turning “drivers” into just people is helping them understand and realize their goals more effectively. If you offered residents a guaranteed spot in a garage nearby, perhaps they’d be willing to give up playing parking roulette on the streets. Ask why until you figure out a way to help them meet their goals while also helping to meet the community’s larger goal of creating someplace more livable.
Here’s the vision I have in my head.
Imagine the residential areas of Chicago. Imagine these streets, streets that they don’t really want you driving on anyway because it’s dangerous since you can’t see around corners due to all the unused cars being stored there, imagine if all that were replaced with green space. No streets, no cars, no waist-high barrier of painted metal machinery, just houses, people, green space and openness. Imagine a train-like system with automated cars that just go up and down in the same grid structure you have now for streets, kinda like at the airport, for local travel. A car comes by every few minutes and only stops if someone’s waiting or wants to get off. It runs 24/7 because it’s automated. They all connect to the larger area rapid transit system. An appropriate amount of arterial roads, pretty much the only roads people are actually “driving” on anyway, are left open for busses, cabs and cars. Alleys and access roads provide access for trash removal and deliveries.
Every neighborhood has a storage building for unused cars with car sharing that includes a wide variety of cars, trucks and vans. Car sharing becomes a vastly better option because it’s like going to the dealer every time you want to drive, and you only pay for the car you want and only for the time you want it. You can drive a Beamer to the grocery store if you want, it may cost you and extra 800%, but it doesn’t cost you $80K. You can take a van to the country on the weekend or a truck to Ikea, all for pennies on the dollar that you currently spend on your Toyota Tercel that’s just taking up space 95% of the time.
Jonathan Schwartz in a presentation at OSCON 2005 (Clip starts at 26:40) talked about the interesting new way GM is making money from cars with OnStar, a $20-80/month service that calls 911 if you have a car accident. Thinking of the cell phone business model where they give you a phone for free with when you sign a service contract, Jonathan asked how much would the equivalent OnStar service have to cost to enable them to give the car away for free? GM’s CEO quickly replied, “$220″. He replied so quickly because they had already done the math. Somewhere in the midst of that idea and car-sharing is an interesting solution waiting to happen. With some purposefulness it could also free up some space.
Perhaps I’m exposing my ignorance here. I know that’s all idealistic and perhaps a bit naive. I don’t really know much about urban planning and all the quality of life issues that go into designing a place for a community. But that’s the idea in my head and, aside from how to make it happen, it seems like we could meet all our transportation goals without suffocating ourselves in unused machinery.