The ugliness of parking decks is not the problem that I hope to solve, honestly. Treating parking as a primarily aesthetic problem misses the point entirely.
The real problem is:
- The crushing traffic that will inevitably result if our entire downtown is redeveloped with this level of density, with this sort of parking ratio and the continued assumption that 1 person = 1 car.
- The extra cost of construction (and the friction it creates against densification and urbanization), when the “market” supposedly demands insane parking ratios and expects roughly 1 sqft of parking deck floor area per 1sqft of office space
- The amount of carbon that all those cars spew into the atmosphere, the dust and rubber pellets that get washed down the drain, into rivers, and on into the ocean
- The space that those cars take up on the street, at the expense of cyclists and pedestrians
- The noise that cars make
- The cyclists pedestrians that get maimed or killed because some driver wasn’t careful enough, or because some traffic engineer followed a paint-by-numbers playbook to design a road, and will get killed and maimed at a higher rate as traffic increases
I keep hoping that at some point we can turn this around, and developers will start recognizing all this parking as excess - and new buildings will be built with less or none, and the developers of the original buildings with too much parking, can start leasing out their excess spaces to people who will drive to the new parking-free and parking-light developements.