Cars are the elements of urban life we complain about the most. In addition to clogged roads and idiot drivers, there’s either never enough parking — meaning we can’t park exactly where we like when we like — or there’s far too much, with acres of unused asphalt blighting the landscape and polluting our waterways.
Everybody has their favorite parking peeves, from the common example of bloated SUVs spilling over two spaces because of the owner’s careless inability to fit between lines, to the one that most irritates me — parking the car directly across a pedestrian sidewalk, forcing walkers, joggers and parents with strollers into the street.
I see this thoughtless behavior at least once a day in my in-town neighborhood. Often this breach of common decency is committed by visitors from Planet Suburbia, where sidewalks are an alien phenomenon and therefore outside the driver’s experience. But other times it’s the homeowner him or herself. Then it’s just plain selfish rudeness.
This trivial example is indicative of a continued decline in our understanding of public space — space that’s shared equally with others. As a nation, Americans don’t use public space very much — people spend more time in buildings and cars than walking in streets and squares. As a result, our sense of public space has atrophied due to decades of disuse. The driver who blocks the sidewalk probably doesn’t even grasp that he or she is trespassing onto something that belongs to others. The driver sees only somewhere to park.
The American architect Robert Venturi succinctly captured this nation’s loss of its public domain 30 years ago with his ironic pronouncement that “Americans don’t need piazzas; they’re at home eating pizzas.”
It’s no surprise, therefore, that meaningful public space is non-existent in most new developments. Nobody cares anymore. All we want is somewhere to park.
On a typical day, each of us uses an average of twelve parking spaces — one at home, one at the office, one at the grocery store, one at the pharmacy, one at the dry cleaner, one waiting to pick up the kids at school, and so forth. The list of venues isn’t the same for everybody, but the numbers are consistent.
Each time we park we consume 350 square feet of land, including the parking space itself and our share of driveways to get in and out. Multiply this by 12, and we require 4200 square feet of asphalt each day just to meet our personal needs for vehicle storage. One result of our much vaunted “trip-chaining,” constructing our daily lives around the “freedom” to drive from one suburban venue to the next, is an acreage of asphalt twice the size of the average home, just to park one car. Multiply that for each driver in the city, and paving paradise for the temporary storage of vehicles is the only likely outcome.
Each suburban use, be it office or retail store, demands an asphalt area twice the size of the building just for parking. Each separate building has its own separate parking lot, and this large acreage of impervious surface laid across the land results in massive changes to the patterns of natural drainage. Instead of soaking into the ground, rainwater runs off into streams, exacerbating flooding and washing chemical pollutants into our water sources.
Urban designers and planners try to minimize these oceans of asphalt by making a certain percentage of parking spaces smaller, sized for “compact cars.” It’s a lost cause. Labeling a parking space “compact car” to SUV drivers is like waving a red rag at a bull. Now they can demonstrate their superiority over more modest motorists by claiming two spaces at once!
There seems no end to our mental and physical laziness. How many times have you seen someone park outside one store, return to the car with shopping, then drive less than a hundred yards in the same parking lot and park a second time before waddling into an adjacent establishment? The mantra of “park once and walk” seems as ineffective to this obese generation as “duck and cover” was to their predecessors during the Cold War.
It’s not only the suburbs where we have a parking problem. Uptown parking also taxes our brains. Half the parking meters are permanently hooded, making it much harder for the occasional visitor to park conveniently for a business meeting. One reason given for closing down these parking opportunities was the threat of car-bombing terrorists. But doesn’t clearing the streets of parked cars just make it easier for a bomber to park wherever he or she desires?
When we see the world from behind the wheel of a car, our perspective changes. Our ego inflates to the size of our vehicle, and no parking space is ever going to be big enough, or convenient enough for our needs, even when we’ve paved over all of Mecklenburg County.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2004.
