Newcastle — It’s hardly a secret that Americans are addicted to their motorized transport.  There are about 240 million cars, passenger vans, SUV’s and light trucks in this country.  Given about 312 million people here that amounts to three vehicles for every four people.  Staggering!  There are 600 million vehicles in a world of 6.7 billion people, less that one per ten bodies.  Thus, on average, the world lags far behind us.  Sadly, however, here as in so many other areas, the world is trying hard to emulate our bad habit and catch up.  In 2008 China passed the U.S. as the number one car consumer.  A few more years and India is expected to surpass us as well, though they may run out of drivers; 135,000 Indians died in traffic accidents in 2010 (33,000 in the U.S.).

The availability and price of oil is a major concern of people and governments, and the internal combustion engine is at fault.  Transportation accounts for more than 62 percent of total petroleum use, and the number is growing.  How can we curtail this? Fuel cost is a minor disincentive.  The high cost of gas and the recession have occasioned a decrease of about ten million vehicles in the U.S. in the last year, but this is a hiccough.  There is also congressional rhetoric regarding higher mileage requirements for new cars, but we know that congress never accomplishes anything.  What about substitutes for gasoline?  Brazilian cars operate largely on alcohol produced from sugarcane.  Is this a good thing?  No.  Brazil has to grow a lot of sugarcane to keep Tin Lizzy on the road.  There goes the rainforest.  In this country we proudly tout ethanol, and never mind that this drives up the cost of food while fouling our outboard motors.  It seems the only way to be less dependent on oil is to stop driving.  This is something I practice, but few others seem to.

What to do?  How can we curtail the atrocity of our vehicle usage?  Perhaps we limit the parking spaces?  It’s true that this hasn’t worked in Europe where most cities and towns developed before the auto arrived, and hence there are no parking lots.  You’ve probably seen cars parked where the street is narrower than the car.  Drivers just use the sidewalk and block the street.  Still, limited parking deserves a look.

A recent article in the New York Times chronicles our current parking situation: “There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States.”  How’s that for a rough estimate!  Compromising on 500 million, we’ve laid aside “some 3,590 square miles, or an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined.”  If the number is 2 billion, throw in Connecticut and Vermont as well.  The article reports that Houston has 30 parking spaces per resident.  And people still complain that there is not enough parking?  Nonsense!  It’s just that the available parking is not where you want it.  There’s always parking; you might have to walk a bit, but that’s healthy.

Many cities and towns, and I believe Newcastle is among them, have zoning regulations requiring specific numbers of parking spaces per housing unit, or per size of retail space.  These rules drive up the costs of building and thereby divert monies that could be better spent elsewhere.  Beyond that, they damage the environment, destroying habitat and increasing run-off. Get rid of the regulations and get rid of the parking.

Airport parking is a particular peeve of mine.  We build (too many of) these out in the boonies with no convenient way to get there.  You have to drive.  Either you get somebody to take you, a friend (big inconvenience for him) or a hack, or you park at the airport.  You don’t want to pay $18/day to let your car sit? This is one of the reasons I am reluctant to fly (though I freely admit that the TSA is a far greater irritant).  Would I advocate eliminating airport parking?  I think “yes,” then there would have to develop some other and surely better way of getting to and from.

“The Pensacola Parking Syndrome is a term of the trade used to describe a city that tears down its old buildings to create parking spaces to entice more people downtown.”  OK, so we know that this doesn’t work, but it’s hard not to think that it might.  On a more positive note, when I first went to Minneapolis about twelve years ago the area downtown around the Humphrey Dome was a vast wasteland of asphalt catering, one supposes, to downtown shopping and attendance at sporting events (five bucks for baseball parking, thirty-five for football).  Most of the tarmac has since disappeared being replaced by trendy condominiums.  Wealthy seniors have been enticed to give up the expensive empty nest in the suburbs to move into a denser population of their friends where they can pretty much (Good Lord, No!) do without a car.  Do I approve? Yeah, but now where do I tailgate? You can’t win.