One at home, one at work, one at the grocery store, one at the cafe. Some of those are shared, but it is entirely believable that we have more paved parking than we have housing
Many building/land-use codes require one parking space per expected adult occupant. So we can multiply by two.
Further, we are counting just parking at the residence, let alone the combined shared parking elsewhere. Plenty of roads has as much parking on either side as there is actual roadway
>Fire up street view and look through residential neighborhoods: notice how many street parking spots and driveways there are?
Number of parking spaces means nothing without the number of residential units. Two lanes (one on each side) of street parking in a neighborhood that's all six apartment triple deckers is very different than two lanes of street parking in a neighborhood that's all single family homes.
Some of the most walk-able and bike-able places (at least in the US) still have street parking in their residential neighborhoods, there's just not much of it relative to the number of people so people use other options.
>...Then, thinking about it a little deeper, we do need at least 3x as many spots as cars (one at home at night, one at work during the day, one to get groceries or go out to dinner in the evening....)
But you're not parked at those other places 24hrs/day. So really, it doesn't need to be 3x. It's greater than 1x (closer to 2x) but should not be near 3x. People don't all decide at a given time "Let's all go to the mall" or "Let's all go to the grocery store." A small percentage of people at any given time decide to do one of these things. On a given day, if I stay home from work, I will see cars streetside. So even home plus work does not equal 2x.
BTW, in the article I don't know if they meant "parking stalls in lots" or "parking spaces". The latter to me, would include more inventory.
I have two parking spots that are essentially dedicated to my car. At work* and at home. I don't have to worry about parking at either of those spots. Ever.
Everywhere I go out has parking. I need to pick something up at the hardware store and grocery store today. I'm not worried about the parking at either. Usually, there's plenty of empty spots at most locations I'll drive to.
The few times I can't find a parking spot is around meal times at places with already limited parking.
And I just remembered, I have a parking pass for a local stadium for games during that sport's season. That's another dedicated spot for my car. I believe right now, both stadiums have empty parking lots. I drive by a minor league baseball field every morning that has an empty lot.
It's not just about the parking at one place, it's about all the places created so you can park your car. Parking has a lot of slack built into it. Most places have more square footage dedicated to parking than to the structure itself.
*I don't have an assigned parking spot or anything like that, it's just that we have a private lot only for use of employees. So there's always going to be a spot somewhere for me.
I wonder why cars don't come up in this debate. A typical car space is 20 m². Usually the amount of parking spaces needed is greater than one (parking at several shopping locations, at work, ...). Parking often uses vertical space just once. So with a multi-storey house these 20 m² become enough for a flat housing a few people. And this still ignores public and non-public (like driveways) roads.
In my experience, every urban street in Australia is full of parked cars. It wasn't like this when I was growing up and we would ride up and down our cul-de-sac or kick a football, but now that same street would have 12-20 cars parked within a one block segment at any given time.
People can afford more cars and would rather make use of the public space for parking than fill their driveway or have to shuffle cars if they're parked behind one another.
I leave my second car parked out front because it's slightly more convenient than using my double driveway (crammed to get kids in the car when two cars are parked there), and because I have a pool table and table tennis table in my double garage. I am a part of the problem!
Obviously more than one person can occupy a housing unit (where each parking space can accomodate only one car), but this report from 2020[0] seems to indicate that LA has more than enough housing to accomodate its residents, it's just distributed unoptimally.
It seems somewhat obvious that you may need more parking spaces than cars since they move to different places throughout the day.
IIRC, a typical city has 3.5 parking spots per car. A car that can always return to it's "home" spot doesn't need more than 1 spot. And if you can assume that a certain percentage of cars are always on the road you might be able to have more cars than parking spots.
Of course the increased traffic of homing cars might turn the roads into metaphorical parking spots...
~115 parking spaces can fit on a normal 1-acre paved, marked parking lot. You can double that when cars park in long rows at the cost of having attendants.
You can unquestionably have smaller lots, but it’s hardly a massive plot of land.
Most housing units will have more than one person, and most of those people have cars. In most cities space dedicated to cars (parking and roads) covers about 50% of all land use. Housing, factories, stores, parks, churches, and the like are the other half.
Note that the above is about land area. Housing units are often stacked vertically, while car parking rarely stacked.
In the US you would normally need 2 or more parking spaces for each dwelling, depending on size, number of bedrooms, etc. and if you build semi-detached you quickly run out of palatable options for where to put the cars.
One at home, one at work, one at the grocery store, one at the cafe. Some of those are shared, but it is entirely believable that we have more paved parking than we have housing
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