Quote:
Originally Posted by Good Baklava
Seems like a classic case of fighting the symptoms instead of targeting the source. Cutting hospital parking doesn’t change the fact the city is still car-centric. Hospitals are the type of thing that need to be accessible for all. Cleveland isn’t proposing anything interesting, just applying oft-repeated ideas to the hospital without larger considerations. I can see how these “Happy City” types can get on people’s nerves - they annoy me. These aren’t municipal planners, they’re radicals trying to influence a profession. Don’t get me started on Richard Florida either.
Sure - retirees in the nearby luxury shannex development will have no problems walking to the hospital. How about those in a place like sunrise manor? How about those in Bedford? I would agree more hospital employees should be encouraged to use active/public transportation to get to work, I know some who do just that. Can all hospital employees afford to live close enough to do so? It’s not so much a hospital design issue - it’s a housing, transportation and equity issue.
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Agree on all points.
The reasons that it flipped a switch with me are:
1) It's a hospital, a place where it's necessary to make things like parking as convenient as possible because people are often not at their best when going there, and obviously there are often mobility concerns. Don't pick on the hospital when trying to advance an agenda.
2) There are no downsides to adding height and thus extra spaces to a parkade - the footprint stays the same but the utility expands. The mindset seems to be to take away parking spaces to make it less convenient for people who need them, to
force them to do something else. As you mention, it's better to make peoples' lives better by providing better options for them (i.e. better, more convenient transit, etc.) rather than forcing them into bad transit (or laughably in this case, bicycles) because they don't want people using their cars (the cars that people have spent their hard earned money on, to use in circumstances like these).
Anyhow, tactics of people with more extreme views like this can tend to turn off the average person, and make them see cycling advocacy, or the anti-car crowd in general, in a bad light. So be it - I'll be on site in the morning with my sign that says "More parking needed"...