That's how many parking spaces there are in the USA. For every car? About 4 empty spaces... just sitting there, not absorbing the rain, making flooding worse, making cities hotter as they bake in the summer sun.
Our built environment and laws bend over backwards to make driving the only viable transportation option in nearly every imaginable context.
You need to pay for healthcare, but almost never parking.
(Pointing this out makes libertarian heads explode.)
Ridiculous how we have to subsidize all this waste of space with public money (in two ways, one, actual public parking spaces on streets, etc, that could be used for anything else, and second, due to the increase in costs for utilities, etc caused by sprawl that we all pay).
@isaaccp@futurebird From Slate: In 2013 the lead designer of SimCity was asked what, in his team’s measurements of real-world cities, produced the biggest surprise. “Parking lots,” he responded. “We were originally just going to model real cities, but we quickly realized there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots.
@futurebird in fact people expect free parking. Recently the fact that some Las Vegas, NV casinos started charging for parking received more national press than any COVID story has in quite a while. And the outrage of the week for my local MAGAs is the local high schools charge students for parking.
According to a 2019 study by Harvard [1], the public cost of the car economy is $5,645 per person per year. (The private cost is $6,000/year per car.)
Together, the cost of maintaining the U.S. car economy is $3.5 trillion per year.
In the communities with significant bike infrastructure, the public cost is $150 per person per year. (The private cost is $500/year per bike.)
In the communities significant public transit, the operating costs are $1,230 per person per year. (The private cost of transit is $720/year per rider).
Together, the cost of a bike and transit economy in the U.S. is $0.862 trillion per year.
@futurebird That is an undercount as many drivers will park on sidewalks, parkways, front lawns, back yards, and pretty much any flat (or somewhat flat) spot they can access.
We have even had people drive across my neighbor's unpaved front yard, up a small unpaved hill to park on the unpaved hillside behind us in a neighbor's backyard.🤷 (Of course they also park in our driveway without permission as well, because they needed a spot & we weren't using it).
@aidan_ I’ve never seen them bring it up. Nor have they ever helped when we’ve worked to get such rules removed. You see I thought it’d be a good coalition issue— we even isolated it from other initiatives— the only libertarians who deigned to respond were hopping mad and opposed.
@futurebird 100% this. A good portion of what drove me from "Libertarian" back when I swung that way was most of 'em just weren't smart enough to see that what they really wanted was a continuation of the subsidies that was creating the world they lived in.
You apparently don't know the right libertarians. Or maybe you only know right libertarians, if you know what I mean.
(I, for one, oppose it. Pretty sure it's come up more than a few times in my circles where we sit around and bitch about bloody stupid top-down attempts to hammer square solutions onto round problems, too.)
Average parking spot in the US is 9 feet x 18 feet, or 162 square feet. 162,000,000,000 square feet is 5811 square miles. That's 1.25 NYC Metropolitan Area in parking spaces; 2x Atlanta proper.
@futurebird
That's one of the reasons I moved to Chicago and decided to stay. The public transportation is awesome. It's quite typical for newbies to the city to sell their car a year or two after moving.
I love having bus stops a block away and a train station 10 minutes away walking. I didn't own a car until I married someone with one, and I've never driven it.
@futurebird We should eliminate stroads. Once I watched this video and was introduced to the concept, it started making sense why our infrastructure was actively hostile and how we could make it livable.
@futurebird Yes, and the more people who realise that their 'freedom' is just a false freedom - to be chained to a form of transport that costs them and the environment more than almost every other mode of transport, the sooner the changes needed in your country (and in the many other countries who copy it) will start to be made.
@futurebird The libertarian response to this would be (I would think) is that free parking is rarely free, but rather an exchange for you to spend money at a business. Sure, parking at a mall isn’t free, but it’s expected that you spend money at the mall.
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