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Add up the roads, parking spaces, parking garages, gas stations (not to mention auto shops, drive thrus and car washes) and the total urban footprint is a gargantuan 50-60% by many calculations. That's not automatically a bad thing, especially if you are a car, but all of that space creates massive buffers separating all of the other stuff that humans want to walk to. To make it worse, those buffers are far and away the most dangerous thing in any urban environment.

On the bright side, the pandemic seems have enabled many cities to finally reclaim some of that car land for use by people. Though it's not clear how long that will last.

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When I moved to LA, I did the following calculation.

Average number of cars per person, 2/3 x Number of people in greater LA area, 16M = 10M. 10M cars x average parking spot is 7ft x 15, 105 sq ft = 1 billion sq ft. 1 billion sq ft to square miles = 36 square miles. That's a square 6 miles on a side. Just to park the cars once. There is at least 3x that number of spots in the city. A hundred square miles of parking. No kidding. Also, the city of LA maintains 5000+ miles of street parking.

The scale is mind boggling.

And the cost is astronomical. The cost of real estate is estimated at $2.7 million per acre. Those hundred square miles are worth close to $200 billion.

Speaking of real estate, does anyone have data on the impact of personal range on the ability of land owners to extract rent?

The feeling I get from sampling shopping experiences at various levels of density is that higher density means higher rent and higher prices.

Cars are enormously wasteful in a physics sense, but in an economic sense they do wonders to commoditize our complements, and I fear that getting rid of high-range infrastructure would take us out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Density and rent are definitely correlated, but I think the causation mostly works the other way: in areas with high value (high rent), people will build more densely to take advantage of the high-value location.

That's how density increases naturally due to market forces, but we are talking about enacting policy to directly spur increased density and what its effects will be.

I would expect the policy to create lots of value, but because of the way land ownership works, I would expect most, all, or more than all of that created value to accrue to the people who own the correct land. More importantly, I would expect it to bleed away from those who don't. Shops away from Main St would be screwed, while the new lovely walkable storefronts would have $5 coffee and $15 sandwiches and the apartments within walking distance would have $5000/mo rent. Those massive flows of money wouldn't go to shop owners or workers or maintaining the infrastructure (see: NY, SF), the money would go into the pocket of whoever owned the land, because our policy choices would have just gone towards ensuring that owning the correct land was all that mattered.

It just seems crazy to me how eager people are to build an economic steamroller and then throw themselves in front of it. Fight to commoditize your complement, don't fight to help your complement commoditize you!

Someone had calculated that the urban sprawl king city of Houston was 40% parking space or something

Houston leads the USA and, and I would assume the world in parking, with an estimated 30 parking spaces per resident.

Office parking lots in Houston during work hours are, on average, 30% empty.

I have to wonder how much of the city overall is used for cars -- roads, highways, and the "buffer" land surrounding them (like the land in and around a highway interchange); parking lots and their access streets; businesses dedicated to servicing cars, like gas stations...

It's probably a lot.

Something I only recently learned is that zoning rules generally require housing developments to include a certain amount of parking. This drives up the cost of housing, because of the space required (either up or out.) Many cities are reducing or eliminating these requirements in an effort to make housing more affordable. However, it does mean that parking will become harder, as there will be more competition for street spaces.

> However, it does mean that parking will become harder

In the city I'm near, using public parking lots means a 20 minute walk to your destination, with a $10 fee from all the time walking (or uber), with private parking costing around $15, and no meters in sight. This creates an isolated area that people never go to for a bite to eat, coffee, window shopping, or anything really, since it's a > $10 fee just to step on the sidewalk. Not surprisingly, there's incredible churn for the businesses down there (pre Coronavirus). The only people they have to service are the other businesses in the area and the few that live there. With coronavirus, it was all wiped out.

Your city may be similar to mine, insofar as the "residents" of the downtown area are mainly the people who work there and have already paid for parking. Not surprisingly, a lot of the restaurants do most of their business at lunch time. A city where you have to drive a car to a curated pedestrian zone is not walkable by my highfalutin sensibilities. ;-)

I get around town by bike. This is not for the faint of heart in the upper Midwest, but for a person in decent health, the obstacles are primarily psychological.

I also suspect that the cost of parking is a psychological obstacle. It's similar to how people who claim to enjoy live music are offended when asked to pay a $5 cover to see a band.

> Your city may be similar to mine, insofar as the "residents" of the downtown area are mainly the people who work there and have already paid for parking.

If massive parking requirements is the #1 urban planning disaster of the last century, the #2 surely has to be zoning regulations that prevented mixed use areas where people can live/work/play in close proximity. And this was only to… force people to buy cars to get from place to place! Look at any city area that was developed prior to the advent of cars and they are unanimously multi-use dense areas. Cars ruined everything.

You can see this in the south bay in an incredibly acute way.

Where are Google, Microsoft, and a bunch of other enormous campuses located? East of the 101. Where are all of the residential areas? West of the 101. Gazillions of commuters need to cross the 101 to get from their home to their office twice a day. This means that everything is limited by a few small overpasses that are crazy expensive to expand.

What if people could build apartments over there? Too bad. Not zoned for housing.

My town, though much smaller, has its own "101" with similar bottlenecks. But there are now (at least) three bike bridges across it. While not free to build, they're doubtlessly much cheaper, especially since the bikes can use already existing neighborhood streets with minimal impact on the residents. I'm not sure there's a master plan for improving bike routes, but when they have to tear up a road for some reason, they usually design its replacement to accommodate bikes with dedicated lanes, bridges, tunnels, etc.

Bikes are great! 101 has at least one bike bridge. But I'd personally feel really unsafe in the bay area biking. Zero protected lanes. Tons of cars merging through bike lanes to enter turn lanes. Fast-moving roads that also have direct access from driveways.

I grew up on the outskirts of Chicago. Mostly built in the 1920s or 1950s. Everything you need is within a one mile walk, even Home Depot. Cinema closed down but Walmart opened up about two miles away. Plenty of street parking, alley garages, and lots of nice amenities. Only moderate rat load.

I think this is the type of neighborhood people like, when the schools are good, at least.

Lots of neighborhoods used to be like this, though usually not big box stuff. Used to be bodegas, fruit markets, small hardware shops, tailor, dry cleaners, etc.

Until the mid 80s to early 90s there were neighborhood Sears and Wiebolts as well. Wiebolts went under in 1986.

Elderly folks could give up their car and age in place as long as they could get up the porch ramps and such. Didn't need to go to home, and homes need not be far from neighborhoods. Plenty of housing options for all stripes.

Feels like one of those “better is worse” situations. Yes - “most” people prefer the selection/prices if Target over the (relatively) overpriced mom-and-pop store, but downstream effects weren’t clear, undervalued.

The solution to this is plentiful, well-placed municipal parking garages priced cheaper than street parking. Santa Monica does this where they have about 6-7 city-run garages spaced throughout the city with easily visible electronic signage indicating the amount of available spaces. Street parking is much more spare and priced higher. It's an enlightened alternative to tearing down buildings for more single-level lots. See Google Maps satellite view of Spokane, WA for how not to handle city parking - about half of downtown is gray asphalt.

The solution is better rapid mass transit between and within cities!

biking is cool too

> Spokane, WA for how not to handle city parking - about half of downtown is gray asphalt.

Downtown Spokane isn't that bad, although it used to be much better. They have parking garages downtown, but those were built during better times (when Spokane also had multi-level car dealerships across the street from the mall), it turns out downtown real estate just isn't that expensive anymore. There is a lot of gray asphalt simply because there isn't much demand for the asphalt to be anything else.

Removing parking space and giving it to less wasteful modes of transport is one of the more efficient ways to improve an area.

I wouldn’t cite SM as the model of municipal parking. Especially in conjunction with how poorly these support the expo light rail line - it’s not really feasible to drive in and get on the train to go to work for a day.

> This creates an isolated area that people never go to for a bite to eat, coffee, window shopping, or anything really, since it's a > $10 fee just to step on the sidewalk.

I take the bus into downtown Seattle with my son every weekend. He enjoys the center, the monorail, and the market, but I would never do it if I had to drive and find parking.

That sounds strange, it sounds like an area that should’ve been served by foot and public transit traffic.

Yes, there is public transportation, but this is $6 and 20 minutes to the closest light rail stop. I never tried a bus.

My point is that this area is almost only served by foot traffic, but getting your feet on the sidewalk has a pretty significant cost.

I don't think this is odd though, since it's been the experience I've had getting to any downtown area. Visiting downtown San Fransisco costs around $10 to actually get too, after all is said and done, even from within the city, unless you walk/bike/spend 20 minutes.

Lyft Line and Uber Pool were usually $4-5 around San Francisco before COVID and you can use electric bikes through the bike share for $15 for the entire month. Obviously it’s easier if you live near the walkable area, but it doesn’t need to be as expensive as you claim and SF is one of the more expensive cities.

> Lyft Line and Uber Pool were usually $4-5

Two way is $10.

> you can use electric bikes through the bike share for $15 for the entire month

That 20 minutes is back.

The thing you’re missing is that I spent much less than $100 a month in transit costs when I lived in SF. When you have a car there, you will spend probably $500-$1000 on the car, the insurance, the gas, parking meters, etc. Then you will likely need to pay for a parking spot. In the Mission the going rate before COVID was about $400+ a month. My friends who had cars and didn’t have dedicated parking would also get $75 parking or street cleaning tickets fairly often.

So I literally could take a $5 ride each way every time I didn’t feel like walking and I had a huge cost savings, much less hassle with parking and street cleaning at 6 AM, less environmental impact, no problems drinking and driving, etc. After a while, most people without dedicated parking end up leaving their car in the same spot as long as possible and mostly use it for weekend trips outside the city.

Driving a car around SF is generally more than 20 minutes. Most areas downtown can be reached in the same or less time by bike, and it also removes any issues with parking/waiting for a car.

This wouldn't be a bad thing if the public transportation was also effective. It should be hellishly expensive to use a car in a big city. It just shouldn't destroy your ability to get to work if you don't have a car.

In my experience, NYC is the only city in the US that has made this work. The MTA is plagued with cost overruns and other problems, but you really can get places quickly using the subway.

Strong Towns page on it: https://www.strongtowns.org/parking

LA-specific advocacy site: https://noparkinghere.com/

Back in 2019/11, LA was thinking about lifting the requirement in downtown, but that seems to have been shelved.

Not just housing developments. Virtually all development tends to be mandated to provide large amounts of car parking.

If you want an introduction into the policy side, read:

Duany, et al.’s Suburban Nation. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780865477506

Kunstler‘s Geography of Nowhere. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Geography-Of-Nowhere/...

It is extremely dismal but also theoretically fixable for future development.

Only solution i see is a brand new city built from ground up with entirely new rules and welcoming people to that kind of life. Car free, autonomous pods, grids, public transit and small footprint. If it succeeds then others will have a model to emulate. I do not know what legal changes will be needed to make something like this happen. There is no reason other than safety where existing archaic town planning rules need to be implemented everywhere.

Cities are pretty adaptable, no need to build one from scratch. Look at how Amsterdam changed, or how Paris is changing now

To illustrate, here are some historic photos of Amsterdam: https://exploring-and-observing-cities.org/2016/01/11/amster...

And here's a video, "How the Dutch got their cycle paths" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuBdf9jYj7o

You can reset your costs by renting out the car park. I make $50 AUD/week renting out my city car park to someone who works near by.

In many places outside urban cores in the US, the rules are such that the amount of parking created is far in excess of demand. You could try and rent your spot, but it would be pointless. Inside urban cores the parking is frequently underground and gated off so that it makes it hard to rent out without breaking the security rules for your building.

At the last place I lived in Vancouver, BC there was 2 levels of underground parking for 3 stories of living space. It is absolutely wild to think that a building along a major transit corridor was required to reserve 2/5 of their building for private vehicles in a city that is famously progressive with transit (for north america)

That's interesting, but I doubt it would be allowed by most apartment leases, and I think for townhomes, many people wouldn't want some rando parking in their garage.

The original purpose is literally to stop cars parking on streets.

Carsharing services are a game changer for urban people who use a car once a week or so (go to the shops, visit family, etc.) And should be substituted in any requirements at a 30:1-50:1 ratio or thereabouts. Developera still need car parking to attract many buyers however

That's great, hopefully it will make cities more walkable as a result.

a certain amount of parking and certain "setbacks", a mandated distance from the road, which also increases the lot size required.

I often joke that aliens would mistake the cars, not people, to be the dominant intelligent species of this planet.

That joke is made early in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (by Douglas Adams), and is why one of the major characters is named "Ford Prefect".

There's a great Canadian cartoon that explored that idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFaHArkYLsM

> "The National Film Board of Mars presents: WHAT ON EARTH!"

This is great, what fun!

Amazing, thanks so much for sharing!

P.S. The section on reproduction is hilarious.

That's the entire premise of classic Transformers.

i was just reading an article in my local paper this morning about a new building in town that got a zoning variance approved. it's a ten-unit visitor accomodation development, and they have ten parking stalls on the property (which is less than the minimum parking spaces code requires).

there was apparently a 45-minute debate at the council meeting where neighbours were arguing that the development should be denied because ten parking spaces wasn't enough for ten units. of visitor accomodation. because apparently people go on holidays with multiple cars.

During holidays, visitors can mean many more than two additional cars per family. Living in that building means choosing not to entertain friends and family, or irritating the crap out of your neighbors by taking up the parking. If they're lucky, they'll be communicative and work out parking custody, but more than likely it'll be a resentful petty mess.

it is visitor accomodation - like a hotel. nobody lives in it, it's just ten hotel suites.

The big challenge is having both shared urban infrastructure and personal cars that aren’t a luxury. Cities should focus on keeping cars out of the center to the maximum extent possible.

Pavement does not absorb rain water, and causes flooding. Pavement causes heating, and raises local temperatures. More pavement, the greater the additive effect. Pavement replaces vegetation and black soil. The results should be pretty obvious. Skipping the whole CO2 debate, and just look at that.

There's a great illustration by Karl Jilg that has stuck with me along the same lines... calling them buffers is very generous!

https://www.businessinsider.com/car-illustration-karl-jilg-2...

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