Comment by codemac
Comment by codemac a day ago
Sure, but Ohio has ~4200 bars[0]. Which is roughly 1/4 the ratio of bars to people.
[0]: https://rentechdigital.com/smartscraper/business-report-deta...
Comment by codemac a day ago
Sure, but Ohio has ~4200 bars[0]. Which is roughly 1/4 the ratio of bars to people.
[0]: https://rentechdigital.com/smartscraper/business-report-deta...
> A culture of hanging out and drinking requires walkable urbanism.
I don't think that's really true. In the UK, villages had pubs. Gradually some of the villages were joined together into larger cities, and the pubs remained. It wasn't planned as walkable urbanism.
I don't think bars in Korea have parking minimums like they do in Ohio.
The minimum number of parking that needs to be available per seat/dining area.
https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/plaincity/latest/plain...
Codes like these are the secret sauce of America's asphalt deserts, in which you'll find - by international standards - comparatively large restaurants and stores. Walkable cities tend to gravitate towards smaller equivalents, and more of them.
A minimum amount of parking spots per patron capacity. So a bar with 60 people capacity must have 15 parking spaces. [0]
Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases. Which leads to stuff like a arena having 5x the land area be parking than what is taken up by the arena itself. [1]
0: https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/harrison/latest/harris... (this is for harrison, ohio, just happened to be the first result I found. it's under commercial -> "Tavern, bar, club, lodge, and dance hall.")
>Usually parking minimums are WAY too high in required parking spaces to make sense in most cases.
That hasn't been my experience. Anytime I've wanted to go somewhere halfway popular the lot is usually full or nearly full. On the flipside, the lots are often empty during times when the business is closed, but reducing the size of the lot would exacerbate the issue of not being able to park nearby when the business is open. You aren't going to stop the US from being car centric, so you either have to dictate that businesses maintain a reasonable amount of parking or you have to have the municipality maintain several large parking structures throughout the city. Most cities would rather have the businesses that need the parking pay for the parking and most people would rather park near the businesses that they frequent.
The idea of a bar (ie a place people go to get drunk) with a dedicated parking lot strikes me as particularly bad for road safety. I'm baffled that this is not only encouraged, but mandated.
How do people do this in practice? Just drink and drive and hope they don't crash / get fined? Or does everybody bring 1 friend who sips colas the whole night?
A lot of bars in walkable cities fit about 10 or fewer people. East Asia in particular has loads of tiny bars.
Plus being able to walk or take a train home makes them far more accessible for people than needing to drive home.
This is also upper-bounded by the law; Ohio only issues one class D-5 liquor license (license to sell beer, wine, and spirits) per 2000 residents, which roughly maxes it out at ~5950 bars (in practice this looks to be rounded up on a per-town basis, making this an underestimate). An Ohio with the population of South Korea would only be allowed ~25000 bars.
82k places in Korea include any restaurant or joint or karaoke with a license to serve alcohol. Personally I would not care to call 80% of them "bar".
So in Ohio probably everything with class C and D license. How many is not public but probably many times more than 4k.
Many actual street level bona fide bars in Seoul (which has half of all the people of the entire country and the most bars by far) are tiny rooms that fit a few people each. But you always have a "bar street" with 50 of those next to each other.
Ok, that gets the numbers in line -- there are about 27,000 liquor licenses in Ohio, according to a random Google, which is about the same per capita.
South Korea apparently ranks #97 on alcohol deaths, so it's apparently not a problematic number of bars, by global standards.
Just to compare, they also have a tour for the UK https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/tsp/uk/index.html : 49,687 pubs.
They are such an urban phenomenon. A largely empty rural state, with the legacy of prohibition, where you have to drive? That's going to have way fewer drinking locations. A culture of hanging out and drinking requires walkable urbanism. Many of the UK pubs pre-date the invention of the car; "peak pub" appears to have been the late 1800s with over 100,000.
I'm impressed that Korea has more than the UK, but this is definitely going to be a matter of size and the tiny Korean bars.