How Parking Your Car Affects the Environment

Most of us need a car to get around, it could be because there are limited public transportation options in our area or because we work far from home and it would take us much too long to commute by bus. We would at least need a car to get groceries. Especially when you have kids, there's no way you could carry everything you need on a bicycle or by public transportation.

We already know that our cars have an environmental impact but few of us ponder over the environmental impact of parking. Take city parking, for example. You may be familiar with the practice of cruising - circling the block sometimes for half an hour until a parking space opens. This adds considerable time to your journey which isn't only annoying, but also environmentally damaging.

If you're a particularly concerned driver, you might want to look up resources like WhereiPark that helps with San Francisco monthly parking and other major cities. You can find and book a monthly parking spot depending on your destination, fees, security features and other criteria which you consider important. You'll save time, fuel and make our planet a little greener.

We have more parking spaces than you might think. In the US there are an estimated 3 to 8 parking spaces per car, it's just that we rarely seem to find them when we need them.

Going back to the environmental impact of parking, although parking lots are a realistic necessity, they come with their own issues. For one, they take up a lot of space. Secondly, the asphalt absorbs a lot of sunlight and generates a lot of heat, creating a "heat island" effect. This raises the temperature in the surrounding building that need to use more air conditioning to cool down.

Then there's the issue of stormwater, since the asphalt is impervious, the water has no place to go but the underground piping system which will already be overloaded, leading to flooding.

Recently, standards for building parking lots have changed, favoring features that are more environmentally sustainable. We'll come back to this in a bit.

Park(ing) Day in San Francisco

Each year, thousands of people set un temporary parks on metered parking spaces. They hang out, enjoy each other's company and, at the same time, illustrate a new concept - how an ordinary urban location can be transformed.

The goal of Park(ing) Day is to point out what on undervalued resource these parking spaces are in the urban landscape and how they can redefined into opportunities for social connection and artistic expression. 

The idea came from a design studio from San Francisco called Rebar. One day in late September 2005, they converted a parking space from a rather grey area of downtown San Francisco into a sort of mini-park. The group simply rolled out some living grass, added a bench and a potted tree. Then they went across the street to observe the effects. A man sat down and began eating his lunch, shortly followed by another person and the two started a conversation.

Since then, the idea has gained a lot of traction with 975 parks spread throughout 162 cities. In 2008, the city of San Francisco contacted Rebar with a project to design "parklets" - permanent installations similar to theirs, sponsored by local businesses. This started the city's Pavement to Parks program which has been a massive success.

This shows that the current city planning strategies are not only unsustainable, but they also don't reflect contemporary values. Which brings us to our next point...

Greener Parking Lots

In 2007, New York City introduced and ambitious and innovative amendment which aims at mitigating the environmental consequences of its numerous parking lots. New parking lots will be required to have plated areas both around the perimeters as well as inside, and the paved areas have to be graded so the storm water can make its way to these planted zones and away from the overburdened sewage system. Other requirements include bicycle parking and shade trees. 

The goal is to reduce the "heat island" effect mentioned earlier, improve storm water management and raise the quality of the air by adding greenery which will likewise make the area more visually appealing.

Parking lots are not just temporary storage for cars. They're public spaces with a significant impact on cities and suburbs, the environment and on people's daily life. Current initiatives seek to transform them into something more than a place to leave your car, into facilities that offer a wider range of public uses, with a greater consideration for aesthetics and the environment.

Park(ing) Days clearly shows that we favor a "greener" design. Another feature that's spreading is installing solar panels over parking lots which create shade and generate clean electricity. 

This is all part of the concept of "green parking lots" - redesigning parking lots to minimize environmental impact. One major change is the use of permeable or semi-permeable paving which can absorb the water and pass it through to the soil, increasing naturalized drainage. Runoff storm water has been a serious concern and now we're moving towards a solution.

Energy efficient lighting and clean energy generation in another major change, as well as adding greenery and other public uses to better integrate the space used for parking lots into the community.

Another important alteration would be reducing dimensions by making shared parking arrangements and scaling down the minimum number of required parking spaces.

Shared parking means designing parking facilities to service multiple users or destination. For example, office buildings and apartment buildings that are in close proximity to each other will need parking spaces at different hours, allowing shared use. Stores, restaurants, churches or recreation facilities are also excellent candidates. Successful implementation of this system would require connection and establishing legal agreements between these facilities.

At this point in time, many existing development codes have yet to recognize the importance of redesigning parking lots and providing better lighting control, traffic safety monitoring, pedestrian amenities, stormwater managements and greenery.

We feel that for something that occupies such a large amount of land and which is used by so many on a daily basis, parking lot design should receive more attention than it has.