Aren’t parking spaces smaller in Europe than the US? There is value is having smaller cars.
Maybe, but if so, it’s only a marginal difference. First of all, keep in mind that you have to design spaces for the biggest cars (or at least the 90th percentile or something, excluding outliers), not the average. Second and more importantly, the big win for urbanism isn’t shaving a foot off the width of a space; it’s having fewer spaces to begin with. It’s also an issue of the proportion of people doing trips in cars vs. other modes, and things like that. If you’re building with the expectation that everybody is entitled to free and abundant parking at their destination, you’re going to destroy walkability regardless of whether they show up in Smart Cars or Suburbans.
To go farther into the 10%…
100% agreed with the whole paragraph. And that’s another reason why I think dog-piling about pickup trucks and other specific automobile makes/models/styles is unhelpful: it often gives ammunition for those special-snowflake types who really do need that kind of vehicle an excuse to claim their exception disproves the rule and dismiss us all as irrational truck-hating reactionaries instead of urbanists with legitimate concerns.
Maybe, but if so, it’s only a marginal difference. First of all, keep in mind that you have to design spaces for the biggest cars (or at least the 90th percentile or something, excluding outliers), not the average. Second and more importantly, the big win for urbanism isn’t shaving a foot off the width of a space; it’s having fewer spaces to begin with. It’s also an issue of the proportion of people doing trips in cars vs. other modes, and things like that. If you’re building with the expectation that everybody is entitled to free and abundant parking at their destination, you’re going to destroy walkability regardless of whether they show up in Smart Cars or Suburbans.
100% agreed with the whole paragraph. And that’s another reason why I think dog-piling about pickup trucks and other specific automobile makes/models/styles is unhelpful: it often gives ammunition for those special-snowflake types who really do need that kind of vehicle an excuse to claim their exception disproves the rule and dismiss us all as irrational truck-hating reactionaries instead of urbanists with legitimate concerns.