The article in the url below presents an interesting challenge to addressing climate change – US car size meets urban parking space. The article opens by describing the way architects determine how big they should make parking spaces when designing a building or parking lot – an allowance that is termed a "design vehicle":
"The design vehicle is a statistical composite of a car, compiled by the Parking Consultants Council, a professional association of parking lot designers. Every five years or so, the Parking Consultants Council analyzes the U.S.'s car sales data. It then calculates the 85th percentile car size. … The design vehicle Schneeman and his industry colleagues use is six feet seven inches wide and 16 feet 10 inches long; incidentally the exact width of a Ford's F-150, the U.S.'s most popular vehicle and a symbol of the country's appetite for larger cars."
The problem is that this method, which has served "the parking industry" well in the past ("ensuring space sizes accommodate the vast majority of American cars and leaving about 20 inches of space for people to open their doors and maneuver on either side"), is running into a problem. Specifically, there are no longer enough spaces and they are not big enough. The problem is particularly noticeable, of course, in older buildings or parking lots, where the size of the space was determined based on average car sizes from previous generations:
"Increasingly, cars are too big for parking spaces, especially in parking garages and other paid parking lots where developers pay close attention to space size. Like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pot of water, our cars have gotten ever-so-gradually bigger with each passing year, but the parking space standards have barely budged. Now, in the third decade of the growing car size trend, people are starting to notice."
It seems that people put a lot of thought into parking spaces, and they want them bigger – that is until they realize the associated cost:
"When Warren Vander Helm, a partner at Parking Design Group, first meets with a client on a new project, one of the first things they will say is they want the spots to be big. But once Vander Helm walks them through the local zoning regulations that require a certain number of parking spaces, how much more surface area big spots will require to meet that minimum, and how much more that will cost, the enthusiasm for big spots wanes. 'For a surface lot, you're looking at $7,000, $7,500 just to build one parking space,' Vander Helm said. 'For an underground garage, in a city, it can be $200,000 per space, easy. Structured parking above ground is $40,000, $45,000 per space.'"
And, when multiplied by a large number of spaces in a building, "even a few inches can be the difference between profit and loss." And, today, car consumers in the U.S. want a different kind of car (SUV instead of sedans) and they want them bigger:
"Consider someone who switched from a Honda Civic to a Honda CR-V. This added about three inches in width. A CR-V to a Pilot, a large SUV, would add five more inches in width. This may not sound like much, but repeat for half the cars in a parking lot and it adds up. For example, in a 700-space garage, if each car is four inches wider than its predecessor, that is 233 additional feet in car width—from the goal line to the opponent's 23 yard line on a football field—that needs to be accommodated."
How are these trends compatible with addressing climate change? Even if all cars become electric (which has massive implications for our electricity generation system that is still driven largely by fossil fuels and, at current capacity, falls well short of what is required), a car-based society is not what we should be aiming for, as anyone who has spent any time living in a European city with functioning public transport can report. We have developed an effective way of allocating scare and valuable resources (in this case, valuable real estate) – the pricing mechanism. In short, if something is in high demand but limited supply, the price should rise to help determine how much of that good any one person should have:
"Essentially, parking lot owners will have two choices: Either make spaces bigger and charge more for them or make some spaces bigger, charge vehicles that park there more, and keep the prices lower for smaller vehicles. Oversized vehicle fees have become popular in dense urban parking lots, especially in New York City, but are rare in the rest of the country. It's easy to imagine the backlash that may ensue from any effort to charge people with large vehicles more for parking, even though the suggestion that people who use more of something should pay more than people who use less is one of the most basic tenets of economic theory and the basis of capitalism. But now, everything with a hint of stifling Traditional American Values is part of the culture wars. And, somehow, big cars have become part of that worldview. But there is nothing traditional about huge cars."
Take care
David
David Chandler
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American Cars Are Getting Too Big For Parking Spaces
By Aaron Gordon
February 8, 2023
Vice
