Break our Addiction to Parking Lots

Steven Snell, writing for the Calgary Herald, looks at our addiction to parking lots. He starts out well by enumerating the negative consequences of our addiction to parking lots:

There are three non-residential parking stalls for every car in America. This has a major impact on the health of cities, though all parking lots are not equal, of course. A few stalls tucked behind a store away from a street have little impact on the quality of the city. Large swaths of asphalt, typically associated with “big box” stores and “power centres,” have numerous detriments. Their impermeable surfaces require major infrastructure to control storm water, which has a corollary impact on watershed health. Their surface absorbs ultraviolet heat creating pockets of hot microclimates which affect human and ecological health. Through inefficient land use they discourage walking and cycling and are a component in urban sprawl. They are enabling infrastructure for a single mode of transportation, which has consequences for the overall design and operation of a city.

I think he goes on a tangent here though:

What’s the next step in orienting our cities around people instead of the automobile and how might we mitigate the negative aspects of surface parking lots? A first step could be to move away from the provision of single use infrastructure – surfaces for parking – and opening them up to other intents. They could be roofed with solar panels or vegetation. During off peak hours they could be turned into a bazaar, plazas or spaces for community organizations. They could slowly be removed and replaced by additional commercial and residential units when alternate modes of transportation – and city planning – are put in place. These, however, are largely discouraged, if not made illegal by many land-use bylaws that often have parking minimums based on travel demand assumptions that are designed to theoretically alleviate parking on public streets.

These strategies sound nice but they remind me of the saying “putting lipstick on a pig”. We need a fundamental shift in how we treat cars. The first sentence above was going in the right direction with its emphasis on making cities for people rather than for cars. This is a comprehensive issue - putting solar panels over a parking lot won’t make our cities any more human. In fact, doing so might make them seem less hospitable and more alien.

I’m not saying those aren’t good ideas. I am saying that we need to do more than just dress up or give another use to our flawed infrastructure. We live in a system that was created for the good of the automobile and we need to fundamentally realign the system to be for the good of the person. Only then can we truly solve our parking lot problem.