Except this particular development is in Florida, where you can't go under ground, and hurricane building codes make building up more complicated and expensive.
As a Florida resident, I would love to see more parking garages, so parking takes up less ground surface area.
Going "underground" in Florida is typically prohibitively expensive, but it's possible if you're willing to fudge things a bit. Disney's Utilidoor System is a tunnel system that sits above the water table by itself being mostly at ground level, and then having the parks built a story above it. The Lagoon around Disney comes from the dirt dug up to create the effect.
I believe the concept for a underground transportation/roadway layer in the original Epcot city worked on the same idea but massively expanded, somewhat similar to a modernized/expanded Chicago Tunnel Company lines.
A photo of the Epcot "Transportation Layer" concept art can be seen here.
That's cool, I didn't know about the Epcot concept city. It reminds me of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, a "new town" built by and for a university in the early 1970's:
"the city center is built on a gigantic concrete slab, with all motorized traffic travelling underground. This allows most of the ground level of the city center to be car free. Most buildings are built on the slab (la dalle), and the pedestrian area is expanding even far from the city centre."
(I also learned about Louvain on HN last year, but I can't find the link now)
Though when you think about these layered cities really require a lot more cement, just so you can have your car in a basement. It was so much more efficient to have a dense city and a train station to go most places.
If only you knew how much I wish even some of the original Epcot city had been built in Central Florida. My life would be so much different it would be unrecognizable.
The conclusion of the article is that there needs to be less parking altogether, not just fewer surface parking lots. Livable places prioritize people, not cars.
I don’t see how you can reduce parking anywhere in the United States, unless you are also talking about building some street cars or some light rail or some train tracks.
The idea is that, if you have neighbourhoods with many things conveniently nearby, people do less "driving to places" and more "making use of neighbourhood features by walking to them."
Every one of those satisfied-demand pedestrians is one less driver out there taking up parking spots (and therefore generating demand for parking lots.)
Sure, that person might still need to own a car for some things (it's still America, some things will still be very far away); and so they'll still need somewhere near where they live to keep a car. But if they need their car for fewer of their daily-life tasks, then they can leave that car at home more. (Or get closer to a car-sharing service being viable for them; or, in a multi-adult family, get closer to downgrading from needing to own two cars, to only needing one.)
It appears likely that we are going to have to write off at least half of Florida in the next century, so any building at all seems counterproductive compared to finding better places to live.
Some purpose built ski resort towns in France are like that - they have a huge warren of underground car parks and access tunnels between the buildings - e.g. Belle Plagne.
This would waste less surface area to parking lots but would add some cost.