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In California and Arizona, garages increase the cost of affordable housing by 27 percent.
The country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments.
every vehicle spends an estimated 95 percent of its life span parked.
In Texas, beaches are presumed to be parking lots, and local authorities can keep cars off the sand only if they provide a parking space for every fifteen feet of beach closed to traffic.
By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.
Most studies put America’s parking supply at a little under a billion spaces. Under the assumption that each space (including egress) takes up 330 square feet, if we were to lay it all flat, the asphalt would cover the entire state of Connecticut—twice.
Buildings change, but parking could be built only once, so it was always built to the maximum potential occupancy of the building. And it was built to accommodate the peak moment of demand for that maximum occupancy. And both those figures were derived in places where people already drove everywhere.
Based on the rate a wig seller paid a store owner to operate on the sidewalk in front of his shop in 1977, at the city’s economic nadir, William H. Whyte concluded that a Midtown parking space ought to go for as much as $20,000 a month. Instead they went for nickels on the hour.
By metering all the city’s parking spots at $6 a day, he reasoned, the city would raise as much as the nation’s busiest mass transit system collected in fares each year.
