Too much parking? Depends on who you ask

A nation divided

Though the 2012 election season riled up America’s citizenry with various hot-button issues — abortion, gay marriage, healthcare — parking policy was not among them. Yet this subject is in some ways as politically controversial as any, pitting urban against suburban, carpoolers against solo drivers. The question any debate on parking begs is: does this country have too much parking? Or way too little?

The answer depends on whom you ask. For people living in America’s most densely populated cities (a diverse list whose top 50 include New York and San Francisco, as well as Sweetwater, FL and Huntington Park, CA), parking is a scarce resource. Getting a spot near home is iffy, and snagging one downtown a mere pipedream. For this four percent of America’s population, the surety that parking will cost time and money — and the alternative of using public transportation — influences where they go, when, and how they’ll get there.

“When deciding how to get into Manhattan, the likelihood of finding parking is by far my most important consideration,” says Brooklyn-based Eric Herman, a 30-year-old musician who, unlike many New Yorkers, owns a car. “During the week, it’s a no-brainer to take the subway, while on Sundays I prefer the car, because there’s actually parking in Manhattan then.”

Cleia Noia, of Sao Paulo, Brazil, notes that in her native city, where she drove to work daily, traffic and safety were her main considerations in choosing whether to drive. In New York, however, where she currently resides, Noia does not have a car — a circumstance she prefers. “Here, the difficulty in finding street parking and the expense of garages” are real deterrents. “For me, access to reliable, fast public transportation trumps access to a car most of the time.”

For the rest of the U.S., where public transportation is minimal and cars are generally a necessity, parking plays a different role in society. People drive everywhere, and they expect a place to put their vehicle when they get there. They’ve gotten their wish. It is estimated that there are at least three and possibly as many as eight parking spaces per car on the road:[1] one at home, another at work, and still more waiting for drivers when they visit the mall or eat at a restaurant.

While drivers appreciate the ease of parking, “The fact is that parking is oversupplied,” says Zhan Guo, a professor of urban planning at New York University who specializes in parking policy. “This is just common knowledge in the urban planning community.”

The oversupply is visibly evident in car-centric suburban areas, which are home to roughly 50 percent of the U.S. population[2] (some 150 million people). From shopping malls surrounded by double- and triple-digit acres of pavement to downtowns that have more surface lots than office buildings, America’s suburban periphery contains far more parking than it needs.

Much of this excess supply is due to municipal parking minimums, which require developers to include certain amount of parking with every new building. Guo’s research indicates that the U.S. parking supply would drop by up to 40 percent if minimums were eliminated, allowing parking to be supplied according to public demand, and priced using that demand as a guide. Yet despite ample evidence that parking is underpriced and oversupplied in the suburbs and exurbs, municipalities “don’t dare” try to charge drivers for parking, says Guo — it is too politically controversial.

Too much parking for too few cars

How much is too much? Eran Ben-Joseph, an M.I.T. professor whose 2012 book examines parking lot design, estimates that the United States has about 500 million surface spaces. That breaks down to 1.6 spaces for each person in the country, including such non-drivers as babies and the car-free. 80 to 90 percent of that demand is served by surface lots — that is, paved parking areas.

The other 10 to 20 percent of parking spaces is found in municipal garages and curbside (i.e., public street parking).[3] If all of America’s average 18-by-9-foot spot (162 square feet) parking spaces were clumped together, they would take up an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined — with some estimates ranging nearly three times higher.

That’s a lot of pavement. In some cities, parking lots cover “more than a third of the land area,” writes Ben-Joseph, “becoming the most salient landscape feature of our built environment.” This phenomenon is often dubbed Pensacola Parking Syndrome , after the city that tore down buildings and built parking lots to attract people downtown to the point that the city center became a mere patchwork of empty lots, thus holding little enticement for visitors. It is a fate that befell many American downtowns in the mid-to-late 20th century.

While ample parking may attract drivers, surrounding buildings with sprawling lots have implications for the surrounding areas. Aesthetically, the implications are clear: miles of pavement lined with cars (or worse, absent cars) are not a stimulating sight. But large surface lots detract from an area’s general economic dynamism.

Shoppers or workers who drive to their destination, park their cars, walk through the lot to shop or work, and depart in their cars do all of that within the immediate environs of the mall or office. They do not pass nearby stores, restaurants, pubs, bookstores, or cafes that might draw them in were they to walk by.

The reasons behind America’s glut of parking are simple. First, Americans have a lot of cars: about one automobile for every two people, according to a 2012 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ; these millions of vehicles are parked about 95 percent of the time, calculates Ben-Joseph — at home, at work, at the grocery store, at school, and the gym, and so forth. This is why the U.S. has upwards of three parking spots for every vehicle on the road.

Americans love their cars, which brings us to the second explanation for the United States’ plethora of parking: history. Detroit pioneered the car’s mass production; cars became an integral part of American culture, something associated with freedom, independence, and style. The car shaped much of the country’s built environment. When the United States’ population exploded in the second half of the 20th century, new suburbs were designed with the car in mind — its size, its speed, the great distances it could cover, and, yes, its parking needs. Cities and towns expanded outwards, less densely; roads became wider; parking lots proliferated, and expanded.

Since the 1950s, American demographic trends have changed as the population becomes increasingly urban. Today 32 percent of the Millennial generation lives in cities, a higher proportion than prior generations at the same age, according to a 2009 Pew Research Center report. A full 88 percent of Millennials told the Wall Street Journal they would prefer to live in an urban environment.[7]

“America had a love affair with the car,” says Mark Chase, a parking consultant at New York-based Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates. “Some are still in love, but for a lot of people it’s a bad relationship. And they’re looking for new affections.”

Young Americans in particular are just not enamored of cars the way their parents were. The New York Times recently reported that 46 percent of drivers aged 18 to 24 would choose Internet access over owning a car.

Trends in car use and ownership reinforce that disinterest. The percentage of people holding drivers’ licenses, for example, has been decreasing for a decade: less than half of potential drivers age 19 or younger have licenses, compared to two-thirds in 1998.[8] In the process, America has gone from #1 among car-owning countries to a middling number 25, just below oil-rich Bahrain and above Ireland, according to the Carnegie Report[9].

Finally, the kind of cars Americans drive has changed. Fading are the days of gas-guzzlers and tank-like SUVs. Instead, more and more people choose compact, fuel-efficient vehicles such as hybrids, Mini Coopers, or Vespa scooters. Ford and GM report high demand for new, more petite models[10] (the Focus and Sonic, respectively). And smaller cars means less space required for parking.

These changes in demography, car culture, and auto style have important implications about American identity. As author Richard Florida wrote in an Atlantic piece on why young people are rejecting cars, “The shift away from the car is part and parcel of a new way of life being embraced by young Americans, which places less emphasis on big cars or big houses as status symbols or life’s essentials.” Dubbing this phenomenon the “New Normal,” Florida writes that, “Whether it’s because they don’t want them, can’t afford them, or see them as a symbol of waste and environmental abuse, more and more people are ditching their cars and taking public transit or moving to more walkable neighborhoods where they can get by without them or by occasionally using a rental car or Zipcar.”[11]

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