“Smooth twin gods” Traffic and ample parking have turned our downtown into a place that’s easy to get to but not worth arriving at. ” These are the words of urban designer Jeff Speck. It’s hard to think of better words to describe the parking pandemic ravaging America’s urban centers. Except, perhaps, for the title of a Bloomberg article on the same subject: “Parking is eating away at America’s cities.”
The article cites a 2018 study on space and money spent on parking in five American cities. That year, Seattle and Des Moines had 1.6 million parking spaces. New York City had 1.85 million and Philadelphia 2.2 million. Tiny Jackson, Wyoming, had 100,000 parking spaces, approximately one space for every resident.
Seattle has 30 parking spaces per acre, which is about five times the number of homes. In Des Moines, the ratio of parking to housing per acre was about 20 to 1. Only New York had more housing units than parking spaces per acre. This amounts to 0.6 parking spaces per household (but again, only 45% of New York households own a car).
On average, about one-fifth of all land in city centers is dedicated to parking. But what damage are those parking spaces actually causing? First, “parking-friendly” city centers become less walkable. In other words, there is less readily available access.
Even if you don’t like walking, you might like having a roof over your head. But city governments often require new developments to have parking spaces, leaving far less space for other things and making housing in city centers scarcer and more expensive. I am.
Parking Reform Network (PRN), a non-profit educational organization[ing] “Informing the public about the impact of parking policies” and “Acceleration.”[ing] “Introducing Significant Parking Reform” found a better way to get its point across than its rather bland mission statement: maps.
PRN looked at how much land is taken up by parking lots in more than 50 urban centers in the United States. The results can be quite shocking. Let’s dive right into the depths.
You’ll have no trouble finding a parking space in the heart of Arlington, Texas. Parking spaces occupy more than 39% of the city center, so you will be hard-pressed to find anything else. Detroit was, or is, the Motor City. The center also has an automotive nickname: Parking Central. About a third of downtown Detroit is dedicated to allowing cars to do what they were never designed to do: stand still.
People visit Lubbock, Texas, for the Buddy Holly Museum, but not for the vibrant downtown. Because there’s no Buddy Holly museum. Here’s why: 35% of his land in downtown Lubbock is parking.
Look up “sprawl” in the dictionary and you might find a map of Las Vegas, so delimiting the “center” is probably less helpful here than anywhere else. For the purposes of this study, 33% of downtown Las Vegas is parking spaces. Think of all the casinos that could be built on those properties.
However, the situation is not uniformly dire. Atlanta, for example, is doing a bit better, with only 26% of its downtown area occupied by parking lots. While it may be admittedly somewhat counterintuitive, downtown Los Angeles is doing even better. Approximately 23% of the City of Angels’ downtown area is dedicated to parking spaces.
So which city will come out on top?
Only 4% of downtown Washington, DC is public parking. If you want to get rid of your car in downtown San Francisco, only 3% of the land is available.
But New York City takes the cake. Only 0.4 percent of this section of Midtown Manhattan is occupied by parking spaces. Local real estate prices are probably too high even for America’s favorite toy.
Americans’ attitudes toward driving are changing. The percentage of high school students with a driver’s license fell from 85.3% in 1996 to 71.5% in 2015. The rise of shared mobility, multimodal mobility, and (soon to come) self-driving mobility will further reduce the need for a driver’s license. Private cars, and large parking lots in the city center.
Perhaps the time has come for American cities to become denser, more livable, more walkable, and less “parkable.”
To learn more about parking spaces, the problems they cause, and solutions to those problems, visit the Parking Reform Network.
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