New Study Reveals the Hidden Environmental Cost of Parking

[marmar]

from the Infrastructurist:






The price of free parking keeps going up. One cost is painful urban congestion, which is made worse by drastically under-priced street parking. Another is a relative cost to the environment, which occurs when the near-certain prospect of free (or cheap) parking entices people into their cars and away from alternative forms of transportation. Recently a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, writing in a recent issue of Environmental Research Letters, described a previously unknown cost — energy and emissions that come from building America’s vast parking infrastructure:

The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure.

To estimate just how great this toll is, the researchers first had to estimate exactly how many parking spots exist in the United States. Turns out that’s no easy task; in fact, according to the authors, no such “nationwide inventory” has ever been done. “It’s kind of like dark matter in the universe,” Donald Shoup, the so-called “prophet of parking” (and not part of the study), told Inside Science. “We know it’s there, but we don’t have any idea how much there is.” When the Berkeley researchers crunched the numbers, they came up with five scenarios of available U.S. parking that ranged from 105 million spots to 2 billion. Give or take, I guess. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.infrastructurist.com/2011/01/12/new-study-reveals-the-hidden-environmental-cost-of-parking/

[XemaSab]

1. It's also terrible for watersheds

It creates localized flash-flooding of polluted water. :(

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Parking in high school was much less environmentally degrading and a whole

lot more interesting if I remember correctly.