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Changing Parking Spaces into Green Spaces

If a human-powered mobility network leads to fewer cars being purchased, there won’t be a need for as many parking spaces as we currently have and the associated cost of their development and upkeep. The land used for parking spaces could instead be used for urban green spaces.

Most of the world’s established cities have been designed to support the flow of automobile traffic, and parking spaces take up massive amounts of land.34 There has never been a study comprehensively evaluating parking in America (and exposing shortages and surpluses); however, a May 2018 “Special Report” from the Research Institute for Housing America confirmed a thesis that Donald Shoup proposed in his book Parking and the City: that far too much space and far too many resources are devoted to parking spaces in American cities.35 36

The study looked at five American cities as case examples: New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle, Des Moines (Iowa), and Jackson (Wyoming). The number of parking spaces in each city was, respectively: 1.85 million, 2.2 million, 1.6 million, 1.6 million, and 100,119. The average number of parking spaces per household was .06 for New York City, 3.7 for Philadelphia, 5.2 for Seattle, 19.4 for Des Moines, and 27 for Jackson. The study also showed the financial cost of the upkeep of these spaces, measured as the cost of replacements, and the average cost per household, given the population size of each city: $20.1 billion in New York City ($6,750 per household), $17.5 billion in Philadelphia ($29,974 per household), $35.8 billion in Seattle ($117,677 per household), $6.4 billion in Des Moines ($77,165 per household), and $711 million in Jackson ($192,138 per household).37