America’s Jersey-Sized Parking Opportunity
There simply isn’t enough demand for the spaces that now exist. So what’s the potential in all that urban real estate?
Paradise lost.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
There are nearly 270 million vehicles on America’s roads. Most of them are cars or smaller trucks. And most of them, of course, are usually doing nothing: parked at home, curbside, or in dedicated city and suburban lots. Demand for parking has shaped our cities, and we have shaped our behaviors to the landscapes parking has created.
The sheer amount of parking space in the U.S. is probably a problem. A new study funded by the Mortgage Bankers Association “reveals an investment in parking that is out of balance with the current demand for parking in almost all cases.” That’s a rather dry read on the numbers; as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox sees it, parking spaces “are getting way too valuable to keep giving away to commuters for free.” Professor Richard Florida is punchier still: He says that parking “has eaten American cities.”