Whoever thought of this can be the city planner for hell.
central park is 843 acres, and an acre can fit about 130 parking stalls. That means 109590 parking spots, lets say they rent them out for about 50$ per day (I paid that much when I had to park in Manhattan once). that would make 5.5 million $ per day or about 2 billion per year.
According to wikipedia (the study linked is now offline), Central park has a revenue of about 656 million $.
If we paved all central park and make it into a parking lot that extra 1.4B$ could be redistributed to everyone in Manhattan, everyone would get a 1204$ cheque every year.
Which they could spend on a vacation to see trees.
“America!”
The more car friendly a place is, the less desirable to actually be there it is
How what if we built a parkade? We could charge $40 per stall but have 10 or 20 times more cars in the same land!
The sheer volume of cars would saturate the bridges and tunnels in and out of Manhattan, meaning that people would drive just to park, just to drive and queue to leave. The useless mindless illogical economic activity we would be creating would spike GDP so high! It would look great for the economy!
Which they could spend on a vacation to see trees.
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ratQlft_G5c
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lotThey took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em
Dawg don’t give them any more ideas
Welcome to Costco. We love you.
Yeah I know this place is good. I went to law school here.
Neat, but this is off scale by a factor of about two thirds. Central Park is roughly half a mile wide which means at typical spacing you should be able to fit 330 parking spaces per row. Let’s call it an even 300 to be extremely charitable with the aisle down the middle and access ways down both sides. I counted 93 or so (it’s a bit muddy) spaces in the closest row that’s not clipped by the edges of the frame.
So not only did some asshole pave over Central Park, but apparently it’s being exclusively used for monster truck parking.
That actually sounds like exactly what would happen if the confederacy gains control of New York
Don’t forget your landscape buffers every so many spaces, to account for all the impermeable surface. I don’t know the requirements for New York, but on average it’s every 10-15 spaces. Granted, they can always file for an exemption, like Wal Mart.
Is this requirement mainly due to drainage or something else? (I’m guessing “just to make things look nicer” isn’t why?)
It’s a combination of drainage and allowing some rainwater to flow into the water table. If I recall correctly, areas with limestone aquifers are going to require more permeable space.
Monster trucks? …The white house wouldn’t have it any other way
Real Cars for real Red Blooded Americans!
Fill that pond in, that’s 50,000 more dollars of wasted space!
Nah, that’s now a cooling pond for a data center.
- Build giant parking lot with AI powered variable metered pricing.
- Offer rent pricing for people who live in their cars, so they can finally have a piece of New York too.
- Build giant data center underground with pond cooling, Charge people to swim in the now heated pond as a premium feature.
- Heat from data center melts snow, so the parking spaces are always clear in the winter. Get massive tax rebate for this service.
Seriously: send it all straight into the Hudson River. Who needs “detention ponds” to “offset flood risk”?
(Also, I know this is AI slop, but what’s up with those downright columnar towers in the background? 😭)
They’re real
Oh, wow. That’s, you know,
gaudy. Thank you for the source. (Edit: Apparently “pencil tower” is the common term. Neat.)
Also, ewww! Exposed water is where mosquitoes brew!
Boston accent: “Pahk-ya-cah-at-centrah-pahk”
You fool… If the president of the USA sees that…
“That was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, a song in which Joni complains that they paved paradise to put up a parking lot, a measure which actually would have alleviated traffic congestion on the outskirts of paradise, something which Joni singularly fails to point out, perhaps because it doesn’t quite fit in with her blinkered view of the world. Nevertheless, nice song.”
Thanks, this makes me want to pogo with a shotgun up my ass and my tootsies on the trigger
What a waste! Think of all the data centres that could be put there!
There’s a vein popping in my neck right now.
A CostCo that has converted exclusively to self-checkout machines.
And the guy at the door doesn’t even say “I love you”.
No, he does, he’s just not employed by the store. It’s Central Park, remember?
Then he shows you how much he loves you.
It’d be hit enough to cook people in the summer.
This is literally what Grant Park at the north end in Chicago looked like until they built millennium Park
