Parking Lots

There are at least four things wrong with the private car as a primary mode of transportation:

• It uses enormous amounts of fossil fuels. Even an efficient car (which in the U.S. seems to be defined as 25-50 miles per gallon) will use as much as 180 gallons per year for a daily commute of 10 miles each way. Inefficient cars use a lot more. All of this based on highway driving, but
• It gets stuck in traffic jams, sometimes for an hour each way. This raises fuel usage. This in turn makes it more damaging to the environment than it might be without traffic jams. Even assuming the best-case scenario (free flowing traffic moving steadily at optimum speed), the car still has a third problem
  
• It generates enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, especially when used on a regular basis by millions of commuters. And when you arrive at your destination
• You have to put it somewhere. This is either on the street or in a garage. Or in a surface parking lot.
  

You don't always notice parking lots as you walk around a city. We are so used to them that we tune them out. But it is harder to tune out the damage that they do to the city. They break up the fabric of the street. They make the city hotter than it otherwise might be—less shade and more paving. And if there are enough of them, they create a bombed-out wasteland like downtown Houston.

As if that weren't enough, parking lots make a great deal of money for their owners, who usually pay the attendants a pittance and are taxed at a low rate because property taxes are based on the value of buildings and not land. The value of parking lots as money-spinners often leads parking lot owners to supplement the salaries of public officials in the hope of favorable treatment. This does not improve the quality of governance in cities.

The high profit margin of parking, combined with a badly designed property tax system (in most cities) removes any incentive to put buildings, even bad ones, on the parking wasteland, thus hampering development and making the city less attractive for people who might want to live there or attend events there. Of course, if you don't have ample parking, people won't come to events because they can't think of any way to get to them except by car. But if you do have ample parking, the city will be part wasteland and correspondingly unattractive. It's a wonder that cities work at all in the age of the private car and the parking lot. Some, like Houston, don't, at least not at night: there is usually nobody around the downtown. It is dead. It is eerie. It is depressing.

As if that weren't enough, parking lots do fearful damage to the environment. They encourage people to drive to work, which is bad for a start. They do more damage to water runoff than well-designed buildings or small parks. They heat up the city, as previously noted. And their entrances and exits create traffic jams, which in turn decrease the efficiency of their customers' cars and help increase the greenhouse gases that those cars generate.

Houston is an extreme example—a small number of mediocre skyscrapers surrounded by a bombed-out wasteland—but even older cities are succumbing to the ravages of parking. Another reason why our love affair with the car has become dysfunctional.