https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3321579,-122.0298439,567m/da...
I get the total area to be 131351 m2 and the area inside the "Infinite loop" road to be 58029 m2, i.e. only 44% of the total area.
So cars waste half of the area. https://www.daftlogic.com/projects-google-maps-area-calculat...
Just look at Houston: https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7561945,-95.3646105,681m/dat...
Half the city is parking
Why is there no incentive to stack the cars can stack in 10 layers on one lot instead of taking up 10 lots with surface parking?
Slap some paint on the ground, put up a booth and a sign, and you’re good?
Whereas an elevated garage is probably a years-long project?
I also think most of these parking lots are probably owned by small time chumps, not consolidated mega parking companies.
Is there really no demand for new downtown developments?
But even without, it’s crazy that you can afford the mortgage with the parking fees.
Let's say on an average workday your lot is like 60% full. You charge like $8/day for normal workdays or something. 252 spaces * 8/day ~$10k/wk. Lets say 50 of these normal weeks in a year, that's $504k in parking for the normal workdays.
Normal workday and baseball games gives you ~$1.35M in revenue for something you need to repave every decade and paint every couple of years.
In arglinton, Texas, often called one of the least walkable cities on Earth, there's a requirement that each building has a parking lot proportional to it's occupancy. So if you build a 200 person building, you need a parking lot to handle 200 people. I can't remember the exact ratio, I doubt it was 1:1 like that.
So the parking lots are there by force, not convenience or cost.
Developers effectively can't 'outsource' parking. If you want to build anything, you get to build parking. For a long time, building a parking garage cost more than just buying a bigger plot to develop. Now that's not the case, but the rules haven't changed, so it would take a developer with deep pockets to build a parking garage, and it would have to be associated with a massive development project.
As someone who lived in Houston for a long time, there are lots of parking garages.
https://downtownhouston.org/navigate/parking/garages
But there are still lots of incentives to have a surface level parking lot. $$ per spot, it is stupid cheap for a surface lot in construction costs. Why pay $25 to park in a garage for the day when the surface lot around the corner costs $5?
Along a similar vein, I'd be interested in the correlation between car use and economic growth is between similarly developed territories is. I know that the US and EU were roughly equal in economic size when I was in school and now it's more like a 3:2 ratio. China has also aggressively adopted cars over the past 3 decades while passing many other countries in per capita GDP.