Do We Really Need 2.5 Parking Spaces for Every Car?

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Four states around the Great Lakes have an average of 2.5 parking-lot spaces per car, and that doesn’t even include parking structures or spots on the street, a new study finds. Purdue University researchers who surveyed Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin found that parking lots take up an incredible 5 percent of urban land in those states.

To people who regularly waste entire weekend mornings looking for parking (like many of us in the Bay Area do), this doesn’t sound so bad. But parking lots take a toll on the environment: By contributing to the urban heat island effect, parking lots can make cities hotter. They can conduct toxic runoff into streams and lakes, leading to poor water quality. They can also raise the temperature of waterways, which is bad news for plants and animals whose survival depends on cool enough water.

Discovery News interviewed UCLA parking expert Donald Shoup about how to solve this problem:

“Parking is so heavily regulated in terms of minimum spaces,” said Shoup. Typically city or county regulations require a certain minimum number of spaces per square feet of floor space of business. The type of business matters too.

Restaurants, for instance, require more space than an accountant’s office. But it’s a minimum, not a maximum number of spaces, and there is a tendency for businesses to lean towards more spaces, since no one wants to lose a customer because of lack of parking.

As a result, cities have no way of knowing how many parking spaces there are, Shoup said.

Several things can be done, however, to keep parking lots from taking over, he said. One is to set maximums for parking spaces. Another is to allow businesses and residential areas to share parking areas, so that a bank, for instance, uses the parking during the day and a bar uses it at night.

Street parking obviously makes use of already-existing paved areas, but there’s not enough of it in most cities, and endless driving around searching for a spot wastes gas and creates carbon emissions. One solution: this phone app, which shows you the nearest available parking spaces. Any other parking-lot proliferation solutions you can think of, readers?

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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