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All depends where you live.
Gotta say though, I’m kind of impressed at how well the cars lined up like that without any visible lane markers. A similar lot like that where I live would be a total shit show.
There is a joke here somewhere where the punchline is: “nothing toulouse”, but I’m too lazy to come up with one.
When you got nothing toulouse you got everything to gain
Okay I was going to call bullshit on the image and say that they’re clearly from two different perspectives and thus cannot be the same site, but after checking – yes they are:
- Pont Neuf Bridge
- https://www.google.com/maps/place/43°36’05.6"N+1°26’20.4"E
They are from a slightly different perspective, which exaggerates a bit how much space did the cars take up, relative to the new use of space. Though it’s possible that the car park extended beyond the frame of the first photo.
The point still stands though, human park > car park!
I do think it’s a FOV / lens thingy more than anything
I looked up/down river to see if I could make the bridge look further away whilst keeping that building on the opposite river flanked on the right, and I just wasn’t able to find any other place that wasn’t a historical building, suggesting that park was likely the only place a carpark could have been
I mean it is that place, it’s just that the carpark photo was taken from a spot closer to the river (the bridge and the other building are bigger), which right now would be in the middle of the park.
Could be a different lens/crop, but I don’t think that’s the case
I think it’s the trees making it look like less space
One of my favourite spots in Toulouse, this. Place de la Daurade There’s usually a kick about going on you can get involved in, loads of people getting drunk in the Café des Artistes overlooking the green. Nice vibe, great view. It’s a party at night too.
Parking is a nightmare though.Same with a pedestrianised street in my city, and downtown in general: People very much want to go there, because it’s a very pleasant place to be, but they complain bitterly about the lack of parking, and never seem to grasp that it’s two sides of the same coin. It’s a nice place for people because it’s not all parking lots. Places with enough parking are miserable for people, and nobody wants to hang out there.
Horrible place for a parking lot anyway. Minor flood on the river and your car’s flooded. Should’ve never been built IMO.
Probably why it was built in the first place. It’s space that’s not good for building on, but temporary car storage is just fine.
If we start today, it’d take half a century to get to the bottom pic. But we should plant trees the shades we’d never sit under nonetheless.
“We can choose again” makes it sound like they want to go back :D
There’s always the danger of that, unfortunately.
It absolutely was a necessity, without parking spaces cars would have clogged the streets.
Now, I don’t mean to defend the cars in this case, living in a European city and buying a car is and was dumb.
However we have been better att hiding parking spaces in underground or integrated building that are less bad than wasting that space for parking.
At the time the solution was needed, but times change and now there are far far better solutions.
Trains and bicycles existed in 1976. No it wasnt a necessit
You misunderstand me, it was needed to create a parking space where people lived, else people would just create their own spots all over.
I don’t disagree with you, there absolutely were alternatives to the car even back then, but people kept buying cars, and it became a problem for the city government to deal with.
So they did what was needed.
Remember, France was and still is a democracy, and they had to solve the issue with a pressure of reelection looming.
Your argument ignores human nature, and selfishness is part of that.
People do not park in pedestrian zones. They usually get towed if they do. People usually take the fastest form of transport. When you have to search for parking, they usually mentally think of that and use other forms of transport instead. Even in car brained places like the US, it is not like Central Park in New York City is a giant parking lot even though there is clearly massive demand for parking in that area.
Not really. Different cities handked that question very differently. Some tore down large parts to make soace for cars (moving and parking), others were very cobservative about it. The latter did just as fine as the former in general, shiwing that it wasn’t a necessity.
do you think cars just grow like mold? without parking spaces people wouldn’t have anywhere to park their cars, thus owning a car would be effectively impossible.
Nope, they would just park their car on sidewalks and other bad places.
Which… is illegal…
you don’t just destroy cities because people are gonna do illegal things otherwise, you prevent people from doing the illegal thing.You do understand that it costs money to police illegal things right?
The city government looked at the price tags and one was cheaper.
Look, the decision to use that park as a parking lot is more than 50 years old, at the time it was needed.
I am extremely glad that it isn’t needed any more.
No idea what the benefit is of deliberately misinterpreting such an obvious point. What caused the thing in the picture wasn’t a necessity.
Without restrictions on who could buy a car, the city government had to deal with the issue of either dealing with people parking wherever or making a parking spot people would use.
You can’t ignore human nature.
You also need to remember that in a democracy, the city government has to accommodate the populations wishes.
Little to no restrictions on who could buy, where one can drive, park a car were - and this is the last time I’m reiterating the same point because I know you just pretend not to get it - a choice. A deliberate choice made by thousands of cities around the globe, influenced by auto and oil industries. Cities were totally different before and have often been bulldozed specifically for that choice. And the other way around is perceivable too: once cities stopped deliberately choosing car-centric design, they were able to gradually stop being like that. See Paris post 2015, Amsterdam post 1980s. Both of which could not be had it been a necessity. Because it never was, it was deliberately decided to be this way.
And I know you are ignoring the reality of the day, we didn’t have the same info, the same finances.
Do you actually want to discuss reality and gain an understanding of what lead the city to build stuff like the parking lot and later to fix it, ot do you just want to bash and yell?
Reality is that in places with less room for cars and street design and/or regulations disincentivizing driving, fewer people own cars than in places that have widened roads for car traffic and turned 1/3 of land area into surface parking. Your idea that car ownership is god-given and without space, people will get them either way and stack them on top of each other is delusional. How can San Antonio have a more than 10 times higher car owner rate than Hong Kong? They both have roughly the same GDP per capita. Did Hongkongers just not get the memo? Are they stupid?! Sure, they’d have nowhere to park and the whole island would constantly be gridlocked if they had the 90% car owner rate of San Antonio but none of that matters and they should get a car either way, as nature intended.
Your idea that car ownership is god-given and without space, people will get them either way and stack them on top of each other is delusional.
That is not my idea, that was the reality of the time.
Park & ride is a very popular thing back then, people from out of town with less access to public transport can just leave their car outside the city and ride a train in, it definitely isn’t a necessity and it never was.
