Today’s cities are filled with vast concrete parking spaces, turned into grids by car park line painting machines to house the millions of empty cars we use every day. For most American cities, parking space takes up anywhere between 25% and 40% of a cities available land, and it is estimated that cars cruising for a parking space create 30% of downtown urban congestion in most cities.
Along with all of this, most cars will remain vacant and stationary for 95% of the time, and in Europe, 20% of their CO2 emissions come from road transportation. From the space they take up, to the time they waste and the greenhouse gasses they produce, the way we use our cars is clearly not sustainable for the future.
Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to cars and where to park them – no secret space we can store them easily while we go about our day. With urban populations set to increase to 6.6 billion people by 2050, we need to change the way we use transportation – and fairly quickly.
With over a billion parking spaces in America alone – that is four parking spaces for each car in America – it is estimated that parking space and roadways take up to 60% of most cities’ real estate. This is land that could instead be used for housing or other properties, reducing the insane housing rates most American cities are now experiencing.
So what are the solutions? Well, almost every solution includes the primary goal of less cars on the road, but there are a variety of ways that this can be achieved.
Public Transport
The era of most Americans owning a personal vehicle is coming to a close, with a report from the Rocky Mountain Institute suggesting that private car ownership will reach its peak within the decade, and slowly begin to decline therefater.
To replace the nation’s personal vehicles, an element of public transport must step in. Buses, subways, and trains are the future of travel both within and outside America’s cities. As of a 2012 report, public transport accounts for less than 8% of travel in America – a number that is set to increase significantly within the next decade. In fact, public transport has been steadily increasing since the 1990s, with ridership growing by 37.2% from 1995 to 2013 – outgrowing America’s general population growth.
Public transport is more cost effective for the average family in the nation, with every $1 invested yielding $5 in economic benefits. It also reduces CO2 emissions, saves space in our cities, with one large bus carrying around fifty passengers, which would equate to anywhere between 10 and 50 less cars on the road.
Taxi Services
While Taxis have existed practically as long as cars have, new ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft are revolutionizing transportation, making movement without a personal vehicle easier and simper for the average citizen. Though an increased use of taxi services wouldn’t necessarily reduce congestion on the roads, it would massively affect the parking space required to house the endless number of privately-owned vehicles by a city’s populace.
A report from the city of San Francisco demonstrates the drastic effects of simple shifts from private vehicles to a mix of public transport and on-demand ride sharing could have the future landscapes of America’s cities.
The study shows that a switch to ride-sharing using services such as taxis, Lyft and Uber can greatly reduce the number of vehicles on the road. If this were combined with typical public transport, general traffic in most of America’s large cities could be reduced from multi-lane traffic to essentially single lane. This would not only greatly reduce the world’s greenhouse effect, but also free up substantial amounts of highly sought-after real estate space in the world’s largest cities.
Other plans such as encouraging ride-sharing services to move towards larger vehicles (vans or other vehicles with higher capacity), subsidizing ride-sharing, or creating a specific ride-sharing lane, have all been suggested as possible solutions to reduce the number of vehicles on the road.
The most effective solution seems to be a combined system, in which a city’s transportation system is centralized, with each mode of transport – from cars to buses and trains – being part of one big system. This will greatly reduce the cost of operations, and thus the cost of travel for the average citizen will be brought down, making travelling across the city easier, quicker, and cheaper.
In fact, San Francisco is already applying for a federal grant to fund pilot programs around interconnectivity, including “connected carpool lanes, smart traffic signals, autonomous shuttles, dynamic carpool pick-up curbs, connected Vision Zero corridor, and Congestion Toll System.” With connection comes the opportunity to optimize, and optimization brings efficiency.
New Technology
In the past few years there has been a lot of hype and discussion over the possibility of self-driving cars, and although we do not yet have such technology, every year brings new advancements and better versions of automated driving.
A recent study into AVs (autonomous vehicles) has suggested that the introduction of self-driving cars could greatly reduce both the required parking space in the City of London, as well as congestion and cars on the road.
The core idea is that future AVs would constantly be on the road, stopping only to recharge (AVs will likely be fully electric if they ever become realized), thus greatly reducing the amount of space required for parking private vehicles. If AVs in the future are smart enough to be legally allowed to drive fully independently, they will likely be much better judges of distance. This would allow cars to squeeze together on the packed roads of London (or any other major city in the world) without risk of hitting other vehicles.
At the upper limit of what is possible, the research suggests that anywhere between 15% to 20% of the area of London could be reclaimed. The researchers claim that “of the estimated 8,000 hectares of central London land occupied by parked cars today, it is reasonable to assume that 50-70% — potentially more than 5,000 hectares — could be released once AVs are commonly in use.”
This level of saved space could be crucial for the developing urban hubs of the world, providing more space for housing and less busy streets. What is crucial is to remember that no solution alone is enough, and that to best solve the problem of our overcrowded roads we should aim to implement as many ideas as possible, as quickly as possible, before our streets are filled with more cars than people.
