Pondering Parking

According to a study by Arizona State University and University of California - Berkeley researchers, there are as many as 844 million parking lot and parking structure spaces in the United States, or roughly three spaces for every automobile. That amounts to paved surfaces for parking covering nearly one percent of the land in the country – an area about the size of West Virginia.  If the area used for curbside parking is added to the count, there may be as many as 2 billion parking spaces servicing our nation of commuters.

Given these statistics, one would expect parking, in general, to be quite plentiful.  Unfortunately, I don't think that this Blind Bambi regularly experiences that level of parking pleasure.  Sure, many of the retailers I routinely shop at have fairly convenient parking and that is probably one of the reasons that I patronize them.  Almost everyone has experienced, however, the hassles related to parking at special events; at popular holiday, vacation, or entertainment destinations; or in congested urban locales.  In my non-expert opinion, two factors seem key to this phenomenon.  First, parking is usually most plentiful in locations where the land costs to support it are reasonably low.  The demand for parking, however, is usually highest in locations where property values are relatively high.  Second, in many situations, the difference between the number of parking spaces required during periods of peak demand and the number of parking spaces required during periods of low or normal demand can be quite different numbers.  Hence, it might seem hard to justify the cost of accommodating worst-case parking situations when their occurrence may be acceptably infrequent.