What's the Use for all this Space?

The Journal of the American Planning Association recently published a study that visualizes how parking has taken over the urban fabric of Los Angeles. A study conducted by Chester et. al (2015) found that over a 60 year period, L.A.s parking spots grew from 6 million to 18.6 million in number. The data accounts for residential off-street spots, non-residential off-street spots, and on-street spots.

The animated image above shows just how this growth of parking space consumes the urban landscape of Los Angeles. I think this graphic portrayal of the increase over time really demonstrates just how much the American society has grown dependent on automobiles. At the start and at the end of every vehicle trip there must be a parking space, so it's no surprise that automobiles consumes so much space in our landscape. The study goes on to show that the amount of space consumed by parking is 1.4 times more area than is consumed by roads which means all this space is consumed by stationary objects. It's rather ironic that so much space is reserved for metal objects when they are of no use to us.




Over the past 60 years, parking spaces grew more rapidly in the suburbs than the core of the city, yet the downtown area still holds the highest density of parking spaces with up to 260,000 total off-street parking spaces per square mile. This high density is achieved by multi-level garages. It may prove to be difficult to move away from this car-centric culture if parking remains so abundant. LA's downtown provides high quality transit, but the constant growth of parking does little to encourage new modes of transportation.

The visual representation portrays the excess of parking spaces in an American city. Even if all these spaces were being used at one time, it's almost disgusting how much space we reserve to our automobiles. It would be interesting to see this study replicated in other cities, and even more exciting to see this process reversed as American society moves away from its car dependency (let's cross our fingers!). What would we do with all this space?

Article can be found here: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/12/parking-los-angeles-maps-study/418593/