Cars sit still most of their lives, and cities pay for it in land
A typical car spends around 95 percent of its time parked. Storing all those idle vehicles swallows enormous amounts of ground: in many North American downtowns, half or more of the land goes to parking, and across the United States the total parking area is at least as big as Massachusetts.
Parking as a business began early. The first public garage for motor vehicles in the US opened in Boston on 24 May 1898, and urban livery stables were soon converted for cars; in some eastern cities, old stables with carriage lifts still work as garages. Multi-storey versions go by many names: parking ramps in the American Midwest, parkades in Canada and South Africa, parking buildings in New Zealand.
Space near the curb can be astonishingly valuable. In August 2020, a single Boston parking spot sold for just under 39,000 dollars in the West End, while in the South End the price approached 250,000. The International Parking Institute puts the industry at 25 billion dollars, with annual US revenue of 10 billion. Because drivers hate walking far, each car park enjoys a small local monopoly.
Price matters. Studies put the elasticity of parking demand at about minus 0.52 for commuting trips and minus 0.62 for other journeys, so a 10 percent price rise cuts demand by roughly 5 or 6 percent. In his 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup argued that cheap or free spaces waste land and quietly subsidise driving. His ideas led to performance parking, in which networked meters nudge prices up or down to keep about 85 to 90 percent of spaces full, so a spot is always available. Redwood City, California adopted it, and San Francisco and Los Angeles followed.
Bicycles get their own facilities too. One Tokyo bike park is fully automated, and beneath Utrecht Central station a three-storey underground garage holds 12,656 bicycles. Informal rules persist as well: in the snowy Boston winter of 2005, residents who shovelled out a roadside space claimed it with a marker, until the city removed them.
Source: Parking
