America has paid a steep price for parking

Me, I would love to see cars disappear tomorrow, but we have issues that is feeding each other, keeping transportation in the US static.<p>Public transportation in the US is pretty much non-existent, except maybe in and around New York City. In the area where I use to live, public transportation now is rather dangerous to the people using it.<p>I rode a bicycle to work for and lite errands for more than 30 years, and am probably still alive because of that. But I have been hit by cars more times then I can count (no serious injuries). And I was in rather bicycle friendly area. I spent some time in the Detroit area 15 years ago, the area I was in, bicycling there is a form of suicide. As I said before, Montreal, to me, is a bicycle commuter paradise.<p>So what can people do in the US ?<p>I believe right now, the only way out of this automobile mess is to raise gas prices to $10 per Gallon. Then people and the Government may start changing, otherwise we are driving straight into a worldwide catastrophe.

I always wondered if it was possible for a company to just buy up a bunch of land and develop it however they wanted. If I recall, Google wanted to purchase land north of the 101 in Mountain View and put a giant bubble over the entire thing [1].<p>Not that I particularly trust Google to do a great job, but interesting thought experiment nonetheless.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizjournals.com&#x2F;sanjose&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;google-revises-mountain-view-plans-glass-bubble-is.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bizjournals.com&#x2F;sanjose&#x2F;news&#x2F;2016&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;google-r...</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghostarchive.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;sn6SX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ghostarchive.org&#x2F;archive&#x2F;sn6SX</a>

Also see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;strange-maps&#x2F;parking-lots-eat-american-cities&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bigthink.com&#x2F;strange-maps&#x2F;parking-lots-eat-american-...</a><p>HN discussion (333 comments): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35395060" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35395060</a>

99pi had a recent related episode: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;paved-paradise&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;99percentinvisible.org&#x2F;episode&#x2F;paved-paradise&#x2F;</a>.

One thing I&#x27;ve been encouraged by in the last 5-or-so years is parking lots getting covered by solar panels. All the local school parking lots in my area are covered by solar panels now. Most of the Walmarts. Most of the hospitals. And I recall Disney is&#x2F;was covering their parking lots with solar panels, too. I realize this isn&#x27;t necessarily a solution to parking lot sprawl, but I like to think it&#x27;s taking a bad situation and getting at least <i>something</i> positive from it.

&gt; More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.<p>9&#x27; by 18&#x27; (162 sq ft.) is on the large end of parking space sizes. A couple living in a 400 sq ft. tiny house doesn&#x27;t even make that true, and most houses aren&#x27;t tiny houses. For more normal 2000 sq ft. houses, you&#x27;d need an average of more than 12 people living in each one to make it true.

Parking spaces seem to be tiny these days. In the 1970s Grandmother drive a Ford Torino it was 17 feet long and over 6 feet wide. The doors were also quite big. It was actually a typical car not unusually big for the time. A Toyota Camry is about 16&#x27; x 6 feet but it seems to be so much smaller like 3 feet rather than 1 foot. I think it felt different in the 1970s because the parking spaces were bigger.

And the alternate universe version of this clickbait: &quot;America has paid a steep price <i>in time</i> for devoting too little space to storing cars,&quot; or &quot;Our transportation choices have boxed Americans into living in sardine cans. We need new personal transportation infrastructure.&quot;

I wonder if you calculated area for sidewalks, corridors in offices and public spaces, maybe public parks. How much wasted space is there dedicated to people to walk or stand in?

Starting the article with the false equivalence of housing space to parking space is ridiculous.<p>Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing&#x2F;sewer, telecom etc.<p>Parking requires either gravel or gravel with asphalt on top.<p>Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?

This seems to be like looking at a CPU die and commenting how inefficient it is to have so many on die transistors devoted to cache.<p>The truth is you need a place to put people (and data in the CPU world) while they are going about their lives and moving from place to place.<p>To move from place to place, it seems the average American prefers their car, since it generally runs on their timetable, and they do not have to share personal space with strangers.<p>And it is not just an American thing. If you look at developing countries like India and China, car ownership and usage is exploding as people grow wealthier.