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.
wow, there’s so little city in this city… where are the people supposed to be?
In traffic
And people struggle understanding why I would prefer a shift from 6-2. Spokane traffic is why.
Just move literally anywhere in Europe. Fucking Bulgaria has better city planning than this insanity. And public transport!
The level of incompetence here is wild. 20 years ago Springfield MO was better than we do here.
It’s an embarrassment.
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.
Are there lots of parking lots because it’s sprawling or is it sprawling because there are a lot of parking lots?
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)
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”.
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.
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.
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-/
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
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…
I can see there’s a lot of potential for parking space development on that island in the middle there.
Thought this was that stock market chart for a second
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.
Laws helped cause the parking lot issues.
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.
In many places there are car share services. Zipcar, Communauto, Flexicar, etc.
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.
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.
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”.
Goin back to Ritzville
Don’t ask why
It’s a good a place as any to go and die
Take heart that cities are capable of change, if they want to. So long as state government doesn’t get in the way.
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.
Why the highlighting? Is one more terrible than the other? If so, which one?
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
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/
Lmao you think I didn’t search, my friend? Maybe I wanted to hear from the person who wrote it, ever think of that?
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
