Something You Should Know
Why Parking is Such a Problem & How Microbes Influence Our Lives - SYSK Choice
03 May 2025
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Yeah, you know, I find it personally not my favorite type of architecture. And what's funny is I think a lot of Americans share this sense that we don't build things the way we used to, that there's this kind of sense that like both for residential and commercial architecture, that there was this golden era in American history where we built things we liked and we stopped doing that.
And I would suggest to you that one of the main reasons we stopped doing that was that we imposed the obligation to provide parking. And providing parking just creates unattractive buildings. It creates buildings that are separated from the street by a huge parking lot. It makes it basically impossible
to renovate any historic structures because you have to provide a certain number of parking spaces. So you basically have to demolish the building next door. And if you've looked at like a new office building or condo tower in an American downtown, look at the bottom like six to eight floors. I almost guarantee you they are used for parking.
And in fact, there are some buildings that like by the number of floors are more than half parking. So what you're really building is a parking garage with a little bit of apartment or a little bit of office on top. So I find it surprising that parking is the number one land use in many communities. What else about parking would I find surprising?
Well, I think one of the ones that always grabs me right away is that there are between four and nine parking spaces per vehicle in this country. So that means that the national parking stock is only 25% full at its fullest moment. And of course, some of those cars are in motion.
So when you think about how full parking is, how hard it is to find a parking spot, there is just an unbelievable quantity of parking in this country.
And so I think that that's one of the things that grabs people right away is, you know, we could pave a small state with the amount of land we have dedicated for parking, which suggests that perhaps building more parking is not the solution to making it easier to find a parking spot.
Wait a minute. How can that be? Because that is not people's experience frequently that there's all this abundant parking. It's often very difficult to find a parking spot. So reconcile that.
Yeah, it's this crazy paradox, right? So much land for parking, and yet when I need a parking spot, it's so hard to find one. I think there's three reasons that this happens. The first one is that parking is not shared, right? So we talked about how every apartment building, every office, every courthouse, every movie theater has to provide their own parking spaces. Well, in most cities by law,
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