Tulsa's best walkable neighborhoods aren't downtown, which has very little residential and just in the past several years about a dozen restaurants and bars, but instead in the midtown area south and east of downtown. This area is filled with older neighborhoods and has the majority of the local, pedestrian-oriented retail and restaurants found in most downtowns. It is also the most vibrant area of the city. Downtown is changing for the better, and the transformation in some parts is pretty amazing, but there is a lot of work to still do.

Can you be more specific? I'm looking around on google maps and coming up empty.

When Streetview was taken there was an intersection in Houston that had an LRT stop with surface parking surrounding it on all four corners:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Houst...357.13,,0,7.91

Is this intersection still surface parking at the corners? I assume they built the stop there because they expected all the corners to be built up soon?

If ANYTHING develops on those corners the people who lobbied hard for the rail will claim it's TOD, and hence, assets generated by the existence of the rail. This will in turn go into the ROI of the project and justify the need to build more of them. Whether this is a fair assumption is difficult to say, but I'm fairly positive this is why cities will build rail through areas with little/no development, but a whole lot of redevelopment potential.

I know one of those lots will bite the dust soon not far from a metro station either.
http://www.bizjournals.com/houston/b...ground-on.html

Not super dense but these are walkable retail areas adjacent to nice neighborhoods:
Cherry Street (15th between Peoria and Utica)
Utica Square (21st-22nd between Utica and Yorktown)
Brookside (Peoria between 33rd & 36th)

I was on one of my 2 week curiosity adventure trips, all done without a car!

I flew into Oklahoma City (1st stop) for a couple days, then took a Greyhound bus to Tulsa (2nd stop), then to Fort Smith, Arkansas ( a better city to be car-less, staying downtown), then to Shreveport (not a bad city to be car-less) then to Houston, then to Dallas, which was the best city of them all to be car-less with their fabulous DART light rail system!

Whenever I travel I take a stack of books with me, and if I'm bored with the city I'm in, I just go back to my room and read!

If it weren't for one lone interesting neighborhood bar in downtown Tulsa (3.2 beer only!) I would have gone crazy!:uhh:

Tulsa sounds miserable and hellish with or without a car.

With the parking lots taking up such an overwhelming proportion of the business district where do all these people actually work?!?

From google maps, Tulsa looks kind of sprawling, in a weird grid-defined kind of way. Also, seems very working class, very modest homes. It probably also doesn't help to have an oil refinery or whatever that is directly across the river from downtown.

That said, the city is built on a grid, easily retrofitable for more extensive bus transit, bike lanes and streetcars. Swap the populations, and you have Portland (but with more working class homes).

Really don't think we on the east coast have any standing to mock the urbanism of Tulsa (although the downtown is pretty bad). At least they don't have McMansions strewn hapahazardly about the landscape on former farms and forests, like suburban VA or Long Island or NJ! Tulsa looks positively compact and the land use relatively efficient in comparison.

1 million people. 92 buses. 21 routes. 45 minute peak frequences. 90 minute off-peak frequencies. Wow.

Uh... yeah, somehow I doubt those parking lots are going to be redeveloped anytime soon.

They basically have the same system as Duluth, which has about one fifth the population! :haha: Buses in my city run three times more frequent and we have half as many buses and less than one tenth of their population!

Miami has a whole bunch of large surface parking blocks that aren't really suppose to exist. They have no real purpose.

Guelph is also 3 times as frequent and has double Tulsa's total ridership.

Even Flin Flon has more frequent service and it only has 1 bus. :D

I only count 18 routes:

http://tulsatransit.org/wp-content/u...m-Map-3.13.jpg

And most of the routes don't even conform to a grid pattern despite the fact that the city itself obviously does. Look at routes 203 and 210. Are those supposed to be north-south routes, or east-west routes? And why does 221 go way east, south a bit, and then back west again? Some of the other routes make more sense, running more or less north-south or east-west.

Somebody needs to send the transit agency this link:

http://www.humantransit.org/2010/02/...-of-grids.html

If Tulsa so chose, the city could institute more frequent bus serice or more bike lanes. The built environment is not fundamentally different from Portland or Denver - it's a western US city with small lots and a logical street grid. The problem with Tulsa is the attitude of its population, not the built environment.

This makes it very different from Charlotte or Atlanta, which could really never be retrofitted for transit efficiently. Even though these two cities likely have a more enlightened and urbanistally inclined population than Tulsa.

Like many small cities, their transit system completely changes after 6pm to reduce the number of buses and staff:

http://tulsatransit.org/wp-content/u...7655542763.jpg

This adds 6 routes, bringing them up to 24, not 21.

By comparison, Thunder Bay has 18 routes for an area less than one fifth the size of Tulsa and Guelph has 21 for an area slightly smaller than Thunder Bay. Sudbury has 36 routes but it has a unique geography.

Tulsans know their transit system sucks.

The idea of having a gridded transit system is that if you want to go to places that aren't directly N, S, E or W of you, you can just make a transfer... but what that means for Tulsa is if they're going to change to a grid system, they will have to increase frequencies significantly to reduce transfer times. Looking at the map though, I wonder if 251 and the bottom part of 221 could be combined as well as 203 and 218 to provide a N-S route in the Eastern part of town.

21 buses was just what it said on Wikipedia. Wikipedia also says 63 buses, but for some reason I said 92 buses. My bad.

Yeah, the system sucks, and even Tulsa Transit website says so.

Tulsa's grid is not fine-grained enough for transit though. Arterials spaced 1 mile part, and they never built any other thoroughfares in-between the existing concessions roads. How far people are willing to walk to transit? 500m? 600m?

Glancing at a map of Portland and Denver, I can see that many parts their grids are more fine-grained. In these places, the distance between arterials is half that as Tulsa, meaning more possible bus routes, and reduced walking distances.

Plus, Tulsa has to build a transit system basically from scratch, and transit ridership growth is very gradual. They have an extremely difficult task, no matter the layout of their roads.

Is this thread just for surface car parks or all central parking facilities?

If the former, they don't exist to my knowledge in Central London due to the astronomical land prices and the hassle of driving into London. That said there is a demand for secure garages; only last year, someone acquired a two-car garage behind Harrods for $805k (£525k)!

Across the rest of the UK, surface car parks are present in the regional cities (but not to the scale of their North American counterparts), and it is questionable whether they have a long lifespan considering the nationwide demand for inner city living.

Generally, surface car parks are probably most commonly found in the commuter, regional and rural towns that cover the country. For instance my home town (c. 40,000 population) was originally a market town providing livestock and crops for London; yet these days the town is a dormitory settlement for London commuters. Subsequently the former goods yard has become a station car park, whilst the former market sites are now used by weekend shoppers from the town and surrounding villages. Yet even these sites have been or are under pressure to be redeveloped to meet the satiable demand for new homes; with one of the most central redeveloped a few years back and the largest set to be redeveloped in the coming months.


On a slight tangent, one development that has picked up over the last decade in the UK is the rapid decline in the number of petrol stations (down 60% in 20 years) and led to a large number of plots across the UK being converted into other uses.

It's for surface car parks. Manhattan isn't much different from London except near the riverfront, which was industrial and some got turned to surface parking. A parking space in Manhattan could set you back $225k

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/us/12parking.html