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Archive for December 15th, 2009

Park Department

Some interesting parking-related figures I came across today, in a forthcoming paper in the journal Land Use Policy, “The environmental and economic costs of sprawling parking lots in the United States,” by Amélie Y. Davis, Bryan C. Pijanowski, Kimberly Robinson and Bernard Engel:

A large proportion, over 6.5%, of the urban footprint, is allocated to parking lots in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. We estimated that this is the same size as 1075 American football fields. In our mall study area, we found that parking lots exceeded the footprint of buildings they service by 20%.

There are many more spaces than registered vehicles (1.7×), households (6.3×) or people living in the county of driving age (2.2×). This implies that if all of the vehicles in the county were removed from garages, driveways, and all of the roads and residential streets and they were parked in parking lots at the same time, there would still be 83,000 unused spaces throughout the county. Annual ecological services value of these parking area represents over $22 M if they are all replaced by wetlands.

If the percentage of parking lot area in the county (0.44%) is scaled to the area occupied by the conterminous United States, the entire states of Connecticut, and Massachusetts (12,550 + 20,305 = 32,855 km2 ) would be paved over with parking lots.

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Posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 3:47 pm by: Tom Vanderbilt
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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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