My primary complaint is that existing public parking decks in downtown Raleigh are rarely completely full. Most people think of them as full because the first two or three floors are and they don’t want to have to drive up five or six ramps to park.
So, if we’re going to keep putting a parking deck in every new high-rise we build, we really need to start capping at like two or three floors instead of the atrocious five to eight that we keep seeing. And we certainly shouldn’t we wasting an entire block on a single parking deck (edit: unless it can be easily replaced, as @elevatoroperator mentioned, but I don’t see the existing Bloc83 deck going anywhere for at least a decade or more). That’s such terrible land use.
I respectfully disagree. I stumbled across this Wikipedia article on modal share yesterday. When you go to the first table and sort by the “Private Motor Vehicle” column from high to low, you find that the top thirty-two cities (excluding one) are either in North America or Australia.
I don’t think most Americans realize how abnormal it is that we drive everywhere all the time. Most “advanced” countries aren’t doing this. Imagine how much more space we’d have for housing in downtown if we could get even one in five people to take a mode other than a personal vehicle. You could take one floor in each building with a five-story parking deck and convert it to housing. And that’s not a very high bar.
Cars are terrible geometry. More often than not, you’re fitting one to two people in a massive metal box that then has to be stored somewhere. Other countries have figured out that they really don’t work well in urban contexts. Cities like Amsterdam and Paris were mostly driver-centric for decades and have made policy changes that make it more convenient to take other modes. We don’t have to be car-centric. We do it because it’s what we’re familiar and comfortable with. That’s all.