9' by 18' (162 sq ft.) is on the large end of parking space sizes. A couple living in a 400 sq ft. tiny house doesn't even make that true, and most houses aren't tiny houses. For more normal 2000 sq ft. houses, you'd need an average of more than 12 people living in each one to make it true.
If you go to a place that isn't driving dependent and you'll see that the main factor for "better walkability" is namely "places are a few miles closer because you don't have to walk through 20 parking lots to get there". It's pretty eye opening.
That's not really the main factor. I would say the main factor is medium to high density, mixed use areas that have business friendly regulations and/or wealthy residents/tourists. There aren't tons of large parking lots in west Philly, but I wouldn't give it a high walkability score given all the vacancies (where are you going to walk to?) and safety concerns (both in infrastructure and crime terms).
Not being 90% empty space is a necessary condition for walkability.
For example this would include all the parking spaces at schools, offices, walmarts, etc.
... the offices, schools, stores, etc is much larger than just a house. All the heating cooling, plumbing, etc and it sits empty most of the time (and you have to walk/drive past those regardless of their parking infrastructure). I fully get the point they are making. The thing the grandparent was talking about is that the argument could just as easily apply to the building spaces themselves rather than only the parking. Given this and the host of other categorical differences in parking vs occupied structures does in my view make the comparison "absurd". In general, this article is using a lot of numbers to make arguments that are really emotionally based.
You are to your house as your car is to your driveway. You don't dig up your driveway and bring it with you every time you drive somewhere.
But they're counting the parking space at the office and not the office space there.
...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive. My "empty" house still has utility. My family could be using it. It is storing all of my possessions. It is a source of comfort for knowing I have a place to go to rest.
Anyways, the productivity footprint of shared spaces is very different from those that are exclusively mine, and spaces that are exclusively mine are very limited...essentially my home and my car. I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
You don't just need a desk. You need a desk in addition to your share of a series of hallways that go to your desk, an elevator, a staircase, conference rooms, a lunch room etc.
More to the point, even if your desk is small, it's not literally zero, but that's how it's being accounted for.
> and it has usually been an open one at that.
The building's parking lot will generally be sized according to size of the space (i.e. the number of desks), so this also means that you don't have your own parking space.
> ...If I did have a house, my driveway would not be open to others, so either you have an empty plot of driveway, or a car that is not being used in it...both of those things are not productive.
If you did have a house, it would commonly be in an area zoned to require each plot to have an acre of land. An acre is more than 40,000 square feet. Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
> I'm not arguing that everyone ditch their cars and start biking to work, American infrastructure is not there, but the time I have spent in cities that do have this infrastructure have been absolutely wonderful.
The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
The thing preventing this is the zoning de facto requiring each house in the suburbs to have 35,000 square feet of grass.
All of which are shared throughout the workday, unless someone hired me to be the only one in the building, which seems like a poor decision. The parking spot I take is mine for the day though.
> Nobody cares about 320 square feet for a parking space when it's sitting next to >35,000 square feet of grass.
It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for. Tell a person about to have diarrhea in the middle of a mall that the bathroom is out of service, and panic will surely ensue.
> The thing preventing this isn't that we have so many parking spaces. You could add a hundred million more parking spaces at strip malls and things and it would use up 0.04% of the land in the continental US and be totally irrelevant.
Ah yeah, and dumping 100 million barrels of oil off the coast of California will be totally irrelevant because the ocean is very, very big. The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic. But I love how you calculate the relevancy/irrelevancy of such massive changes in the snap of a finger. I really hope you don't ever estimate anything of actual value.
Which is why you account for your share of them, which isn't zero.
> It isn't about the size of the plot, but what its usage is for.
The size of the plot is extremely relevant to how much housing could be built on it in the alternative.
> The thing about parking spaces is that they are usually where people are, so even if you're using arable land for calculation, a parking space isn't just randomly thrown down somewhere, it is condensed into places with lots of traffic.
This is completely the opposite of where most parking spaces actually are. Millions of them are attached to suburban homes, which is about as far from a condensed place with a lot of traffic as you can get without actually being in a corn field. Many more are attached to big box stores and strip malls in low density areas. None of these matter to what happens in a city or what city-adjacent land is zoned to allow, except insofar as some of the areas are only low density because that's all they're zoned for. But if they were rezoned then they wouldn't be parking lots anymore.
But I'll do you one better. If you work from home you don't need the parking space or the office space.
For example, if I go to Chipotle for lunch, I will go and park my car, go inside, get in line, order, blah.
My car, and everyone else's car will take up 9x18 units. If it's busy, you could have a line 10 to 15 people deep. That's 1620 sq ft of parking for people who will be occupying about 360 sq ft on the inside. (Assuming 10 people all taking up a 6x6 block).
As you have pointed out it could also means "The car in your driveway has 11 theorethical empty parking spots built for it, maybe there is an overallocation of resources"
Some relevant resource might be: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... from Not Just Bikes based on research from Strongtowns
One at home, one at work, one at the grocery store, one at the cafe. Some of those are shared, but it is entirely believable that we have more paved parking than we have housing
"America has eight parking spaces for every car. Here’s how cities are rethinking that land"
Wow.
If you add more cars without adding at least 2 parking spaces per car you almost surely get less usage or cars stuck in traffic.
Car infrastructure is very expensive, see https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...
Buses need roads too, and train tracks are just as big as roads but less versatile.
Parking lots and on street parking is a tremendous waste of space (and they're ugly to boot) and forces EVERYTHING to be more spread out.
That's why I said keep 2 lanes (1 in each direction). Anything more is optional and should be counted as effect of car-centric development model.
> train tracks are just as big as roads but less versatile
1 railway track in each direction gives you more throughput than any multi-lane motorway possibly could.
And delivery vehicles, emergency vehicles, etc. We certainly had roads before we had cars.
Mind you there's some cars in the videos, but they aren't any bigger than the horse-drawn carriages that roads had been accommodating well before that.
Road that connects 3 biggest cities in Netherlands has 3 lanes in each direction: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1822053,4.5947627,3a,75y,47....
Your average road in Netherlands looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1968565,4.592548,3a,75y,58.8...
You cannot directly translate between countries with such difference in population density obviously, but if anything - the more people USA has - the bigger gains are there to be realized by switching to more efficient mode of transport.
Everywhere I go out has parking. I need to pick something up at the hardware store and grocery store today. I'm not worried about the parking at either. Usually, there's plenty of empty spots at most locations I'll drive to.
The few times I can't find a parking spot is around meal times at places with already limited parking.
And I just remembered, I have a parking pass for a local stadium for games during that sport's season. That's another dedicated spot for my car. I believe right now, both stadiums have empty parking lots. I drive by a minor league baseball field every morning that has an empty lot.
It's not just about the parking at one place, it's about all the places created so you can park your car. Parking has a lot of slack built into it. Most places have more square footage dedicated to parking than to the structure itself.
*I don't have an assigned parking spot or anything like that, it's just that we have a private lot only for use of employees. So there's always going to be a spot somewhere for me.
Although I'm not sure what the author's point is by using that comparison, aside from being an emotional hook. The resources, needs/wants, etc for these are quite different. Same thing for the statement about 3-car garages vs 1 bedroom apartments - it mostly comes down to preferences and how those manifest in the market, politics, and other aspects of life.
Further, we are counting just parking at the residence, let alone the combined shared parking elsewhere. Plenty of roads has as much parking on either side as there is actual roadway