alt Hacker NewsTo be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.
I like the approach of making downtowns walkable and having a bit of parking at the periphery of downtown, along with good public transit. Encourages people to use public transit to get to town in the first place. Downtown residents can use transit or a zipcar or equivalent when the need to get out of town, instead of devoting a ton of space downtown for storing their cars.
Not sure if that approach is really practical, but if it can be made to work it is much nicer.
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> To be fair, parking structures always look and feel pretty distopian.
What a lot of the new buildings in Austin are doing is putting an attached garage directly behind a 4 + 1 mixed use development - the street-facing facade is the apartments and shops, and the garage is directly behind (and usually attached) to the apartments. You basically never see them.
Well, in Menlo Park they're just flat surface parking lots, not even multi-story structures. The planned development is multi-story housing with parking underneath.
To be fair, I am boycotting the (similar) underground garage over at Springline because they're clearly made only for people in Range Rovers or whatever. They have those AWFUL ticket machines, set too far back (to avoid getting hit) and too high to access from a normal car.