Never thought of this before...
Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space blog has a fascinating post on the environmental cost of people circling the block looking for parking:
Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel--equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here's another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States.
4 Comments:
Any numbers on the cost of crazy subdivisions that make everyone take a circuitous route to get one block over. I suspect that navigating Vancouver streets is far more economical with their grid system (mostly), especially when one gets lost.
Every morning it takes an incredible amount of energy to just get out of the subdivision.
Any numbers on the cost of crazy subdivisions that make everyone take a circuitous route to get one block over. I suspect that navigating Vancouver streets is far more economical with their grid system (mostly), especially when one gets lost.
Every morning it takes an incredible amount of energy to just get out of the subdivision.
No big shocker there, although quantifying the effect does make it more real. I am always shocked at the people who are willing to idle and wait for a parking spot or drive around the lot 10 times, when there is ample parking at the outset of the lots.
Park far away and walk in: that's what Gordie Hogg recommends!
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