800 million parking spaces can be wrong
A study reveals the environmental damage from storing all of those cars
Civil engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, looked into how many parking spaces have been built in the US, and the most likely estimate is 800 million. Assuming each parking space is 200 square feet (10 by 20 feet is the standard), that amounts to 160 billion square feet or 3.67 million acres of concrete and asphalt. The mind boggles.
"Estimating the environmental cost of all that parking reveals that parking alone adds 10 percent to the CO2 emissions of your average automobile," Scientific American reports. "And the amount of soot added to the atmosphere as a result of all our cars nearly doubles. That's thanks to all that asphalt and concrete and the emissions that go along with making it."
The authors of the study note: "The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure."
The Infrastructurist reports that "over the course of a car’s lifetime, emissions of sulfur dioxide and soot rise 24 percent and 89 percent, respectively, once parking is properly considered."
"Those are just part of a broad “suite of impacts” that includes previously studied costs like the “heat island effect” — the term for when dark pavement raises the temperature of a city, leading to additional energy demands for cooling. And atmospheric costs are only part of the suite. According to the paper’s lead author, Mikhail Chester, there may be a larger infrastructure for parking than for roadways. If that’s the case, there would seem to be another great cost to all this parking: the relative cost of useful space."
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Comments
That actually seems like a
That actually seems like a low count. That's only 2.6 spaces per person.
Driverless Cars
Driverless, electric, publicly owned cars could easily solve this problem by the end of the decade if we had sensible public policy, instead of corporate-controlled policy like we have now. Since over 90% of the time cars are parked somewhere, we could get rid of about 80% of the cars, and yet get the type of car we want when we want it at an overall cost that is a fraction of the cost of ownership. The price per trip would depend on supply and demand so you might opt for a bus ride when coming back from a ball game, for example. Doing this on the global scale would drastically cut greenhouse gases, help the environment, allow in-fill development and parks in all those parking spaces, and save 1.2 million lives a year.
Michael E. Arth
Re: Driverless Cars
Hi Micheal,
I'm afraid that if the solution were as easy to accomplish as you seem to suggest, that it would already have been done. As an example of what I mean, consider that 1,046,539 persons were naturalized as U.S. citizens in 2008. What do you think the consequences would have been if 1.2 million lives a year were being saved by your proposed "Driverless Cars"?
In reality we face immense systemic problems and the questions of transportation and other infrastructure, are symptoms. Treating them alone is not likely to make much difference in the quality of life in 2020 and hopefully beyond.
To be effective, the changes would need to be far more dramatic and reaching. Like eliminating the need for most transportation in the entire world.