The United States is notoriously pedestrian-unfriendly. Public transport in major cities is constantly running without the required funding, and many other cities have no transportation services at all. Ames is one of the luckier urban centers in the United States, thanks to CyRide. However, this does not save Ames from the cancer that is parking lots.
Making cities unwalkable has been a successful effort by vehicle manufactures in the US. By making cities larger and pushing housing into suburban areas, it became a de facto requirement to own a car in the U.S. Unfortunately, cars are way less immobile than we first assume, spending the vast majority of their lifespan parked. This created a crisis in creating parking spaces across the map.
On average, 20-25% of urban space in cities with over a million people is wasted on parking spaces. Parking is unproductive open land that is often distributed around the busiest or most expensive parts of town. This is almost a quarter of all land being spent on empty lots rather than housing, which is already a problem in the US, or on businesses that benefit from ideal central-city locations.
Parking spaces are also the most inefficiently designed spaces one can find. The biggest consideration is always to make sure the lot is big enough for the busiest day of the year, usually a holiday or event. For example, stores like Walmart often have more parking space than store space. In our own Ames, the Jack Trice Stadium requires parking that is more than twice the size of the stadium itself. Although it may be wise to design for maximum capacity, the lots are usually never near full on regular days. This means that millions of dollars’ worth of land is kept entirely unoccupied for a few hours of use, perhaps for a week, throughout the entire year.
Adding on to the inefficiency, terrible city planning has resulted in venues that require the most parking spaces often being the furthest apart, with each requiring its own parking lot. By not providing viable public transport, cities have forced people to drive and park at a new location for every errand they need to run.
The 2 billion parking spaces in the US take up as much land as the states of Maryland and Delaware combined, or the entire nation of Belgium. Europe, which is almost four times as densely populated as the US, allocates less than 0.5% of its land to parking. In the US, this number is over 5% and shows no signs of slowing.
Parking lots are an environmental catastrophe as well. Often without any green cover, they significantly contribute to the lack of urban forestry, which is vital for maintaining temperatures and ecosystems. Parking lots alone act as heat reservoirs, soaking up the sun and warming the air around them, contributing to increased urban temperatures. Parking lots alone actively heat the very heart of our cities, making them hotter. Every car that remains parked there soaks up that heat too, which is why they feel significantly hotter than outside.
It is hard to upend every single parking lot and replace it with a building. Much like a cancer, they have spread too much to be ripped out. Most parking lots are on private property, and almost every American owns a car. Treatment is necessary. The most needed solution is to supplement cars with more dense, efficient modes of transport, such as buses or trains. By reducing the dependency on cars, we can also reduce the need for parking spaces, freeing up a lot of land.
A solution I am a huge fan of is covering parking lots with solar panels. If every parking lot in the United States were covered with solar panels, not only would they create shade for cars parked under them as well as cool the ground, but they would also produce enough electricity to power more than a million homes in the United States. Better yet, these solar panels can be used to charge electric vehicles, making them a much more viable option than traditional gasoline vehicles.
Parking spaces are here to stay. Removing them can cause too much upheaval, while growing them has become a necessity due to the domino effect of poor urban design. What can be done is to make them practical and more sustainable, so these parking spaces improve life rather than worsen it. Any developments would require significant investments, but they are crucial and would improve people’s lives.
