95
did not expect to be jump scared by my hometown lol
Dude, me too! I didn't see the title and thought the island looked familiar.
We could turn all that blue stuff on the map into more parking lots ya know
It's perfectly shaped for a ten lane highway.
That green thing in the middle can be a toll booth
wow, there's so little city in this city.. where are the people supposed to be?
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".
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.
In traffic
And people struggle understanding why I would prefer a shift from 6-2. Spokane traffic is why.
Thought this was that stock market chart for a second
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-/
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.
That's a lot of worthless space!
What's wrong with them? Not that my hometown is any better.
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.
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.
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.
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn't get in the way.
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.
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.
Not enough parking destroy more buildings and the there is still too much nature remaining its useless for the car industry.
Pave paradise and put up a parking lot
Bro fucking detroit looks better than this
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.
Lmaooo I love this kind of thing. How utterly you have fucked our cities
Where's the second comparison picture that shows what it would look like with more 3 or 4 story or underground parking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Why the highlighting? Is one more terrible than the other? If so, which one?
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.
What is a Texas donut
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/
The point is to illustrate how much of our cities car-centric infrastructure has destroyed.
If that's the case no red vs purple is needed. People need to learn how to visualise data to make a point
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.
Where city
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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