Parking lot, parking lot! There is never enough, crowded streets, busy places, annoying search. We can experience this on the streets of Budapest, but the United States is also suffering. Almost everyone goes around looking for a place, and seeing the full parking lots, the question arises: why don’t they build more?
The example of the United States shows that the problem is not the number of parking lots, the problem is more nuanced than that!
Americans probably have about 800 million parking spaces at their disposal, yet many can’t find a spot, but why?
The answer is simple: because of distribution.
Most of the parking spaces are located where they are least needed, such as in the suburbs. If you live in a big city, this is an annoying fact of life. But the oversupply of parking spaces causes more problems than simple frustration. Parking is a significant and often hidden cost of driving, and according to a study that estimated the number of parking spaces, it contributes significantly to the carbon footprint of cars.
Parking lots of this size were built in America as early as the 1940s (Photo: Hirz/Getty Images)
The alarm bells have been ringing for a long time
A group of engineers from the University of Berkeley compiled a virtual dossier of parking spaces in the United States back in 2010. They relied on data from a commercial parking company, policy reports, government databases and public opinion polls, as well as the old urban planners’ rule of eight parking spaces per car. According to the authors, the number of parking spaces can range from 105 million to 2 billion, and the golden mean is roughly 800 million parking spaces, which most media consider to be correct.
In total, the road surfaces and parking lots of the United States cover an area the size of the state of West Virginia – about 62,000 square kilometers. It is a larger area than the whole of Slovakia, Denmark, Switzerland or Croatia. Think about it, if they were brought together in one place, we would cross the Hungarian border and reach the beach in a continuous concrete basin.
The area of the countries marked in red on the map is smaller than that of American parking spaces. (Brilliantmaps.com)
Roughly 280-290 million road users, including trucks and buses, can park in this number of parking spaces.
Drivers don’t like to pay
A The Wall Street Journal reports that while free street parking spaces fill up quickly, private parking garages rarely fill up completely. However, Americans are so used to not having to pay for parking that they would rather drive around the block looking for an empty spot than save time by paying for a parking spot.
In fact, they have far more parking spaces than we need, and circling adds unnecessary traffic jams. Donald Shoup, a pioneer in urban planning and parking research at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the US government does not manage the number of parking spaces.
Some would reverse the trend
The Parking Reform Network (PRN) non-profit organization would stop this trend, it writes Atlas Obscura.
In addition to drawing attention to densely populated cities with parking, the organization also touched on the fact that Americans already have a different attitude to driving. In 1996, the number of high school students with a driver’s license was 85.3 percent – this ratio decreased to 71.5 percent by 2015, and a similar trend can be expected in the future, especially if self-driving cars really become part of everyday life. .
With this in mind, PRN parking reform announced, which would prevent too many parking spaces from being created, and at the same time prioritize a fairer, more efficient and more sustainable management of the existing network, for example by introducing or expanding the payment system, as well as by developing and making public transport more attractive.
Source: www.vezess.hu
