In the beginning, parking lots were created to curb chaos on the road. But climate change has turned that dynamic on its head.<\/p>\n
Since the 1920s a little-known policy called\u00a0parking minimums<\/a>\u00a0has shaped a large facet of American life. In major cities, this meant that any type of building \u2014 apartments, banks, or shopping malls \u2014 needed to reserve a certain amount of parking spaces to accommodate anyone who might visit.\u00a0<\/p>\n But transportation makes up\u00a0almost one-third of carbon emissions in the U.S.<\/a>\u00a0and cars represent a significant portion of those emissions. As the country attempts to aggressively cut carbon emissions, reducing dependence on fossil fuels will also mean rethinking what transportation and public space look like, especially in cities.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, the city of Austin, Texas, became the latest community to\u00a0eliminate parking minimums<\/a>\u00a0and is now the largest city in the U.S. to do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf we want half of all trips to be in something other than a car, then we can\u2019t, as a city, in my opinion, mandate that every home or business have at least one parking space for each resident or customer,\u201d said Zohaib Qadri, the Austin city council member who introduced the measure.<\/p>\n Reducing dependency on cars was a huge push for the initiative in Austin, said Qadri, who hopes the measure also will lead to a more sustainable city.<\/p>\n \u201cClimate change is here,\u201d said Qadri. \u201cAnd we\u2019re only going to make it worse by clinging to these very climate unfriendly and unsustainable transportation habits of the 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n The elimination of this seemingly innocuous law could pave the way for cities to build denser housing, increase public transit options, and reduce their carbon emissions, according to Donald Shoup, an engineer and professor of urban planning at UCLA.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt isn\u2019t just the housing crisis and climate change, it\u2019s traffic congestion, it\u2019s local air pollution, it\u2019s the high price of everything \u2014 except parking,\u201d said Shoup.\u00a0<\/p>\n Climate change and air pollution are particularly costly outcomes, with both estimated to cost the U.S.\u00a0billions of<\/a>\u00a0dollars every year<\/a>. Parking spots, meanwhile, can run in the tens of thousands of dollars to construct, with one estimate putting that\u00a0figure at almost $30,000<\/a>\u00a0per spot.<\/p>\n \u201cEven if climate change were not an issue, removing parking requirements is a good idea. But in addition to being a good idea locally, it will help the entire planet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Momentum is building with cities like\u00a0Anchorage<\/a>,\u00a0Richmond<\/a>, and\u00a0Raleigh<\/a>, and states like\u00a0California<\/a>\u00a0all eliminating their parking minimums within the last few years.\u00a0<\/p>\n Paved parking lots not only take up valuable space, but also contribute to the\u00a0urban heat island effec<\/a>t, where cities often experience higher temperatures than their rural counterparts. The asphalt and concrete used to construct parking lots often absorb and re-emit heat at higher rates than the natural environment. This happened amidst\u00a0a record-breakingly hot summer<\/a>\u00a0which means that not only are parking lots contributing to the larger problem of climate change, but they also make the\u00a0outcome worse in the short-term<\/a>\u00a0as well.<\/p>\n An important caveat is that undoing parking minimums does not mean that all parking will vanish overnight, but rather that any off-street parking built will not need to adhere to any minimum standard. These standards were not only outdated but often prevented meaningful conversation about how to increase housing density \u2014\u00a0an urgent need for most parts of the U.S.<\/a>, according to Tony Jordan, president of the\u00a0Parking Reform Network<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cImagine if all the parking was still built, but we just had another 10 apartments in every building in every city for the last 50 years,\u201d said Jordan. \u201cWe\u2019d have a housing abundance, like, that\u2019s a lot of apartments that would have just been built that we basically prevented.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Read on<\/a><\/p>\n The post One solution to fight climate change? Fewer parking spaces (Grist)<\/a> appeared first on London Reconnections<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Less parking could pave the way for denser housing and more accessible public transportation. In the beginning, parking lots were created to curb chaos on the road. But climate change has turned that dynamic on its head. Since the 1920s a little-known policy called\u00a0parking minimums\u00a0has shaped a large facet of American life. In major cities, this meant that any type…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1439,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-camcab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/camcab.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}