Spokane is a very sprawling city. It's the second most populous in Washington but a third the density of Seattle. Including the "metropolitan area" of both Spokane is a seventh as densely populated.
A bit of both but the root is that land is comparatively cheap. Building out is economically incentivized over building up. Municipalities can put their thumb on the scale by raising land taxes based on acreage but zoning restrictions are the actual solution (and these tend to be unpopular because the immediate effect is that development costs rise and bring rents with them)
that's not even the scariest part. Everyone drives through downtown likes it's a highway. Not worth staying near the bars and food if you're three feet from being slammed by a lifted truck going 50
My biggest complaints are the Thor/Freya on/off ramps and the Lincoln(?) offramp going west. They are way too short, and people can be idiots. Merging there sucks.
A few years back I was on a trip to the US, I was visiting a small town, not much going on there but they had an airport.
When I checked out from the hotel the receptionist asked me if I wanted her to call me a cab, I said no because the airport was 1.5km away from the hotel and I'll just walk there. Poor woman was looking at me as if I was stabbing a baby right in front of her, a look so bevildered and confused that I actually felt sorry for her.
Then the hotel driver appeared from the office and took me to the airport... Such a weird country
Anyway, moral of the story is, good luck convincing those people to walk.
In many parts, walking is suicide simply because there are no safe ways to cross many roads and in some places it is entirely impossible. But even where walking is possible people are not even considering it as an option. I had a similar experience in a mid sized town, where we walked maybe 30 min into the centre from an inner suburb. The walk was nice, except for a scary part where we had to cross a highway with its looped exit lanes. People at our destinations looked in the exact same way, as if we were pure lunatics. This whole thing could only be explained by us being Europeans and Europeans do this kind of crazy stuff.
Bonus fun: Spokane's city govt named a parking garage a historic building worthy of subsidizing for preservation. It also won an award for 'excellence in use of concrete'. Spokane's just that awesome.
And most of the cars that use that parking are in use for maybe 2-3 hours per day. The rest of the time they're just taking up space.
We really need to get people to abandon personal cars. Even if everyone switched to electric cars we'd still need all this parking space. We'd also still have all the microplastic pollution from their tires.
There's a catch 22 though. A lot of people feel like they need their cars because there's no alternative. Because of that, they oppose any law that could make cities less car-centric because it makes it harder for them. But, that just means they continue to need their cars. I don't know how that can be fixed.
Where I live, most people have cars. But a) they're cars, not trucks; b) parking is highly restricted, mostly to multi-story garages. Since parking takes up less space it means that walking distances get much smaller, which means you don't need the car as much.
Would honestly love to live in a building or neighborhood that maintains a fleet of cars to share. I can't afford to operate a truck/van as a daily driver (and I honestly hate driving them), but I often find myself wishing I had a large vehicle to move stuff around in.
One with roads coloured too would probably also be informative. And I feel like this could be scripted with openstreetmaps to make them for different cities and compare them...
Build a wall, across the Atlantic. Protect Europe from the American menace. They would definitely turn the entirety of Europe into one big parking lot.
The Greek hanging gardens? Parking lot.
Colosseum? Colossal parking lot.
Venice? Underwater parking lot.
The Netherlands? Parking lot with tulips.
And so on, and so forth. What else do you think Americans would turn into a parking lot of they every carpet bombed Europe?
This is city center. The park is nice. It was the 1974 world's fair grounds, it's a bunch of bridges over waterfalls and there's been a decent amount of investment / upkeep the last few years.
The business owners in the 70s all opposed it's construction because they didn't think it would be good for downtown. Since then they've really doubled down on surface lots to charge people going to the park / mall / downtown businesses.
I wish we could just give Spokane to Idaho, they'd be a better fit over there. Honestly, I'd go as far to say everything East from Ritzville should probably just considered "Western Idaho."
I guess my point is that this kind of car-centric build-out and culture seems par for the course for more rural, conservative areas.
hi, fuck you, there are normal people out here trying to fix this shithole. western washington is not the only place that exists and fuck you for trying to burn your neighbors. none of us want to be included with those inbred psychopaths in the panhandle.
also spokane is the second biggest metropolitan area in washington state you goon, this isn't rural.
As another E-WA resident, I don't want to give up. Things will change. Probably going to take a while, but I want to believe in a change. Besides, I'd rather get turned into the Canadian acquisition of the west coast than become part of Super Idaho.
Always makes me sad when people start trashing rural areas and even sizeable cities like Spokane. It's like Americans are completely incapable of nuance, of understanding that at least 1/3 of the people they're trashing share their politics.
You could be trying a little harder. We need the farmland and you need the port and tax revenue so it would be really nice if we could trust you actually are normal people but you aren't making it easy.
I have friends that live over that way, when they were first trying to tell me where it was they lived they mentioned Spokane. I's like "Why would I know this random US city?" (As i'm an aushole), they said, "oh, because it appeared on the show Cops quite a lot, so has become quite well known." ..... I couldn't stop laughing... even now..
The differentiation into two categories with two colors add additional information and make it even more interesting without diminishing the actual point of the visualization.
Surface lots are far worse than parking structures. You can put retail at street level with parking structures. You can do a Texas donut, which is still not ideal but is way denser and prettier than surface lots. Surface parking is cheap. That's the only advantage it has. And when you factor in the opportunity cost of building nothing but parking on prime real estate it's not actually all that cheap.
A Texas donut is an apartment building that wraps around an attached parking structure. I've seen a few different variations but the nicer ones have courtyards between the units and the parking garage that I imagine is more to allow cross breeze than anything else because being inside them would be incredibly claustrophobic. Still a huge waste of space but if you really want your residents to all have cars they kind of make sense because the parking footprint is more or less the same as you would get as if you built a low rise, plus you hide the cars from the street view, which is nice because parking garages are usually pretty ugly. You can also bury the cars instead and that works way better for somewhere like downtown Seattle, since real estate is just so mind bogglingly expensive in downtown areas of major cities, but honestly if you're living in the city it seems like storing the car offsite would make more sense if you really feel like you have to have one that badly because underground parking is also ridiculously expensive compared to above ground parking structures, plus you have to worry about water ingress and degraded pilings and all sorts of nasty shit. That actually happened in Florida and it took the building with it when it went. Then again that's Florida, it might work better when you're not building a high rise on a sponge.
76 Comments
msmc101@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 58 pts · 156d
did not expect to be jump scared by my hometown lol
Hideakikarate@sh.itjust.works · 8 pts · 156d
Dude, me too! I didn't see the title and thought the island looked familiar.
Gork@sopuli.xyz · 47 pts · 156d
We could turn all that blue stuff on the map into more parking lots ya know
zaphod@sopuli.xyz · 22 pts · 156d
It's perfectly shaped for a ten lane highway.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 155d
That green thing in the middle can be a toll booth
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz · 1 pts · 156d
If we park all the cars there, we no longer need all the other parking lots, and we can narrow the roads to reclaim some RoW, lower speed limits.
dreugeworst@lemmy.ml · 38 pts · 156d
wow, there's so little city in this city.. where are the people supposed to be?
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip · 21 pts · 156d
The people are all expected to live at least 30 minutes away in the suburbs. This is what's commonly referred to as "The American dream".
slaacaa@lemmy.world · 14 pts · 155d
In traffic
taterthotsalad@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 155d
And people struggle understanding why I would prefer a shift from 6-2. Spokane traffic is why.
Alaknar@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 155d
Just move literally anywhere in Europe. Fucking Bulgaria has better city planning than this insanity. And public transport!
taterthotsalad@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 147d
The level of incompetence here is wild. 20 years ago Springfield MO was better than we do here.
It’s an embarrassment.
Soggy@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 155d
Spokane is a very sprawling city. It's the second most populous in Washington but a third the density of Seattle. Including the "metropolitan area" of both Spokane is a seventh as densely populated.
chunes@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 155d
Are there lots of parking lots because it's sprawling or is it sprawling because there are a lot of parking lots?
Soggy@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 155d
A bit of both but the root is that land is comparatively cheap. Building out is economically incentivized over building up. Municipalities can put their thumb on the scale by raising land taxes based on acreage but zoning restrictions are the actual solution (and these tend to be unpopular because the immediate effect is that development costs rise and bring rents with them)
tdawg@lemmy.world · 21 pts · 156d
that's not even the scariest part. Everyone drives through downtown likes it's a highway. Not worth staying near the bars and food if you're three feet from being slammed by a lifted truck going 50
Hideakikarate@sh.itjust.works · 4 pts · 156d
My biggest complaints are the Thor/Freya on/off ramps and the Lincoln(?) offramp going west. They are way too short, and people can be idiots. Merging there sucks.
Tja@programming.dev · 18 pts · 155d
If the parking lots were eliminated, buildings would be so close to each other that you could walk and you wouldn't even need parking lots.
Mvlad88@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 155d
Lemme tell you a story.
A few years back I was on a trip to the US, I was visiting a small town, not much going on there but they had an airport.
When I checked out from the hotel the receptionist asked me if I wanted her to call me a cab, I said no because the airport was 1.5km away from the hotel and I'll just walk there. Poor woman was looking at me as if I was stabbing a baby right in front of her, a look so bevildered and confused that I actually felt sorry for her.
Then the hotel driver appeared from the office and took me to the airport... Such a weird country
Anyway, moral of the story is, good luck convincing those people to walk.
Jiral@lemmy.org · 9 pts · 155d
In many parts, walking is suicide simply because there are no safe ways to cross many roads and in some places it is entirely impossible. But even where walking is possible people are not even considering it as an option. I had a similar experience in a mid sized town, where we walked maybe 30 min into the centre from an inner suburb. The walk was nice, except for a scary part where we had to cross a highway with its looped exit lanes. People at our destinations looked in the exact same way, as if we were pure lunatics. This whole thing could only be explained by us being Europeans and Europeans do this kind of crazy stuff.
azimir@lemmy.ml · 16 pts · 156d
Bonus fun: Spokane's city govt named a parking garage a historic building worthy of subsidizing for preservation. It also won an award for 'excellence in use of concrete'. Spokane's just that awesome.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/oct/20/getting-there-spokanes-parkade-becomes-one-of-few-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkade_Plaza
ZMoney@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 155d
This looked so absurd that I had to look at the satellite view to believe it but it's true. This planet has skin cancer and it's us.
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 156d
Lmaooo I love this kind of thing. How utterly you have fucked our cities
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 155d
I can see there's a lot of potential for parking space development on that island in the middle there.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 155d
And most of the cars that use that parking are in use for maybe 2-3 hours per day. The rest of the time they're just taking up space.
We really need to get people to abandon personal cars. Even if everyone switched to electric cars we'd still need all this parking space. We'd also still have all the microplastic pollution from their tires.
There's a catch 22 though. A lot of people feel like they need their cars because there's no alternative. Because of that, they oppose any law that could make cities less car-centric because it makes it harder for them. But, that just means they continue to need their cars. I don't know how that can be fixed.
mirshafie@europe.pub · 2 pts · 154d
Where I live, most people have cars. But a) they're cars, not trucks; b) parking is highly restricted, mostly to multi-story garages. Since parking takes up less space it means that walking distances get much smaller, which means you don't need the car as much.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 154d
Laws helped cause the parking lot issues.
https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8
ebolapie@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 155d
Would honestly love to live in a building or neighborhood that maintains a fleet of cars to share. I can't afford to operate a truck/van as a daily driver (and I honestly hate driving them), but I often find myself wishing I had a large vehicle to move stuff around in.
merc@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 154d
In many places there are car share services. Zipcar, Communauto, Flexicar, etc.
jve@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 156d
Thought this was that stock market chart for a second
donnachaidh@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 156d
One with roads coloured too would probably also be informative. And I feel like this could be scripted with openstreetmaps to make them for different cities and compare them...
exaybachae@startrek.website · 7 pts · 156d
Where's the second comparison picture that shows what it would look like with more 3 or 4 story or underground parking.
theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 156d
Not enough parking destroy more buildings and the there is still too much nature remaining its useless for the car industry.
Agent641@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 156d
Pave paradise and put up a parking lot
kilgore_trout@feddit.it · 2 pts · 155d
Is this a quote from somewhere specific? I like it.
SUSaiyan@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 155d
It is from the lyrics of Big Yellow Taxi
thorhop@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 155d
...what? ALL OF THAT IS PARKING LOTS?!!?
Build a wall, across the Atlantic. Protect Europe from the American menace. They would definitely turn the entirety of Europe into one big parking lot.
The Greek hanging gardens? Parking lot. Colosseum? Colossal parking lot. Venice? Underwater parking lot. The Netherlands? Parking lot with tulips.
And so on, and so forth. What else do you think Americans would turn into a parking lot of they every carpet bombed Europe?
tensorpudding@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 156d
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn't get in the way.
AceFuzzLord@lemmy.zip · 5 pts · 155d
That's a lot of worthless space!
What's wrong with them? Not that my hometown is any better.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 155d
What this place needs is clearly more parking lots.
ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 155d
All suburbs in PNW are like this. "Asphalt ocean"
turmacar@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 155d
This is city center. The park is nice. It was the 1974 world's fair grounds, it's a bunch of bridges over waterfalls and there's been a decent amount of investment / upkeep the last few years.
The business owners in the 70s all opposed it's construction because they didn't think it would be good for downtown. Since then they've really doubled down on surface lots to charge people going to the park / mall / downtown businesses.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 156d
I wish we could just give Spokane to Idaho, they'd be a better fit over there. Honestly, I'd go as far to say everything East from Ritzville should probably just considered "Western Idaho."
I guess my point is that this kind of car-centric build-out and culture seems par for the course for more rural, conservative areas.
msmc101@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 16 pts · 156d
hi, fuck you, there are normal people out here trying to fix this shithole. western washington is not the only place that exists and fuck you for trying to burn your neighbors. none of us want to be included with those inbred psychopaths in the panhandle.
also spokane is the second biggest metropolitan area in washington state you goon, this isn't rural.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 156d
hi, fuck you too, buddy, from a fellow eastern washington resident who fucking hates it here and doesn't see much that can be done to fix it.
Hideakikarate@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 156d
As another E-WA resident, I don't want to give up. Things will change. Probably going to take a while, but I want to believe in a change. Besides, I'd rather get turned into the Canadian acquisition of the west coast than become part of Super Idaho.
chunes@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 155d
Always makes me sad when people start trashing rural areas and even sizeable cities like Spokane. It's like Americans are completely incapable of nuance, of understanding that at least 1/3 of the people they're trashing share their politics.
Soggy@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 155d
You could be trying a little harder. We need the farmland and you need the port and tax revenue so it would be really nice if we could trust you actually are normal people but you aren't making it easy.
Hegar@fedia.io · 3 pts · 156d
Omfg i love ritzville so much. Whenever we drive from OR to MT we always stop in ritzville and spend the afternoon singing "putting on the ritzville".
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 156d
Goin back to Ritzville
Don't ask why
It's a good a place as any to go and die
MichaelBishop@mastodon.world · -2 pts · 156d
@SnotFlickerman @Valnao
No, you take north Idaho. Us in Boise don't want your stinking Spokane.
SparroHawc@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 156d
Maybe Montana can have both.
azimir@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 156d
I made a similar map to this for Spokane a few years back. I focused on downtown and it was bad.
Then I did one for North of the river. Holy moly it's a sea of asphalt there.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 155d
Roads should also be colored to dig it deeper
dan69@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 156d
Like do people realize this? Anyone in their gov??
arcine@jlai.lu · 3 pts · 155d
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 156d
Gosh the drugs and homeless people though!
Can we exclusively only see urban issues through that lens please?
Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone · 3 pts · 155d
I have friends that live over that way, when they were first trying to tell me where it was they lived they mentioned Spokane. I's like "Why would I know this random US city?" (As i'm an aushole), they said, "oh, because it appeared on the show Cops quite a lot, so has become quite well known." ..... I couldn't stop laughing... even now..
quips@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 155d
Bro fucking detroit looks better than this
caboose2006@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 154d
Everytime i see my hometown mentioned it's never for anything good lol. Fuck you Spokane, glad I left ya.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 155d
Just...
😐
It's so depressing I can't describe it in words
AccoSpoot1@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 155d
Something something pave paradise something.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 155d
Tja@programming.dev · 2 pts · 155d
Yeah, try that with Tokio, Seoul or London...
jeffep@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 156d
Why the highlighting? Is one more terrible than the other? If so, which one?
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz · 6 pts · 156d
The point is to illustrate how much of our cities car-centric infrastructure has destroyed.
jeffep@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 156d
If that's the case no red vs purple is needed. People need to learn how to visualise data to make a point
filcuk@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 156d
Works perfectly well to illustrate how much of the city area* is covered in parking.
There is no red vs purple, but colour vs lack there of.
altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 155d
Them machines own the city.
Halcyon@discuss.tchncs.de · 0 pts · 155d
The differentiation into two categories with two colors add additional information and make it even more interesting without diminishing the actual point of the visualization.
ebolapie@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 156d
Surface lots are far worse than parking structures. You can put retail at street level with parking structures. You can do a Texas donut, which is still not ideal but is way denser and prettier than surface lots. Surface parking is cheap. That's the only advantage it has. And when you factor in the opportunity cost of building nothing but parking on prime real estate it's not actually all that cheap.
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 155d
What is a Texas donut
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 155d
The Texas Doughnut
Also that one from Quora, which looks different.
ebolapie@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 154d
A Texas donut is an apartment building that wraps around an attached parking structure. I've seen a few different variations but the nicer ones have courtyards between the units and the parking garage that I imagine is more to allow cross breeze than anything else because being inside them would be incredibly claustrophobic. Still a huge waste of space but if you really want your residents to all have cars they kind of make sense because the parking footprint is more or less the same as you would get as if you built a low rise, plus you hide the cars from the street view, which is nice because parking garages are usually pretty ugly. You can also bury the cars instead and that works way better for somewhere like downtown Seattle, since real estate is just so mind bogglingly expensive in downtown areas of major cities, but honestly if you're living in the city it seems like storing the car offsite would make more sense if you really feel like you have to have one that badly because underground parking is also ridiculously expensive compared to above ground parking structures, plus you have to worry about water ingress and degraded pilings and all sorts of nasty shit. That actually happened in Florida and it took the building with it when it went. Then again that's Florida, it might work better when you're not building a high rise on a sponge.
found it: https://apnews.com/article/surfside-tower-collapse-investigation-76a9176edbb581813b2fcc03850bd592
Soggy@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 155d
They asked, on the internet, when using a search engine is the same amount of work with no waiting.
https://ericvery.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/the-texas-doughnut/
crystalmerchant@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 155d
Lmao you think I didn't search, my friend? Maybe I wanted to hear from the person who wrote it, ever think of that?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 155d
Multiply that with view count.
And the results are mixed.
kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 155d
Where city