Ooo, I did one of these for my city’s downtown! It’s horribly depressing living here!
Where’s the downtown? It’s just some scattered buildings surrounded by parking moats! My city’s only marginally better. There’s about an 8 block area that’s actually like a downtown with the rest being parking and buildings that have survived being bulldozed into parking (so far, anyway).
I actually have a poster from the local museum of a map of the city, dated 1881. It had a dense, walkable downtown.
Now it’s all parking. Seas of empty asphalt. Like we have a whole ass river and only one waterfront patio because we gave that real estate to parking.
That’s so ridiculously bad.
You want to know something even worse?
I still hear people regularly moan the “lack” of parking downtown.
Maybe get unvolved in Student council or however they are called in you Uni and try to find some like minded people to change that or do some guerilla gardening, tactical urbanism etc. to get people to notice how stupid that is, i mean younger peope are usually way more open to less car dependency than the general population
I actually just graduated. I led a student advocacy group fighting for bike lanes and related things like getting rid of parking lots near the center of campus. I met with the student government dozens of times in my last year and had to explain to people almost every time how much of a waste of space parking is.
what is guerilla gardening?
Its when you plant something somewhere without having the right todo so for example in order to protest. So here they could put some plants on parts of the parking lots to fence an area off where he puts for example some benches, where people can study or something instead of cars parking there
Go Terps! I also graduated from UMD in 2014!
The sad part is that this is way better than most U.S. cities, let alone strip malls in the middle of nowhere.
Do people from your university actually come by car? That is such an expensive way to travel and in my experience very few student can afford that
In the US, most students drive if they live off campus. Even many of the ones who live on campus keep cars around.
How do you even pay for that? I struggle to have enough money for everything I need. If I had to pay for a car I would be deep in the red.
Yeap. Now you know one of the reasons it’s expensive to be poor in America. A car is practically a requirement in most places.
