Why Free Parking is Killing Cities

 Alexandre Maciel

Mr. Roddy

18 January 2022

IHSS

Why Free Parking is Killing Cities

    Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles believes that free parking is destroying economies, especially in big populous cities. In his book, The High Cost Against Free Parking, he underlines his concern towards the government giving away so much land towards free parking. There is an estimate of 250 million cars in the US, and over 2 billion parking spaces. That's over 1,000 square feet of parking for a car owner vs. 800 square feet of housing land for a person. Somehow, cities such as Manhattan and Brooklyn, still have incredible problems with free parking. This is because parking spaces are not distributed evenly amongst the population. Therefore, this can create crazy traffic situations, and a lot of pollution. One of Professor Shoup's studies concludes that over 60% of the pollution on Earth happens due to cars, and they are parked 95% of the time! This shows how bad free parking spots effect our world, and why meters would be a much effective way. For example, in Paris, Texas, Mayor Anne Hidalgo reduced over 140,000 free parking spots in order to create more favorable sidewalks, and bike lanes. She is helping rebuild the city, so anything is accessible within 15 of their home. Although removing cars is ultimately impossible, this is just one way that we can help prevent climate change, while also benefiting our environment. Although Professor Shoup is near the end of his life, and unable to spread his ideas, some of his students have created a Facebook group to help educate others about this problem. The group has 5,000 members, but many thousand more followers. Professor Shoup started writing his book in 1970, and only now, has his idea really ben taken in account. 

    The government has a part in this because they can decide whether they really want to charge for parking space in order to help our environment and save time for people. However, this could be a controversial decision when it reaches high leveled courts. I have a feeling that this could turn into a political decision between parties. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cultural Anthropology blog

   Nate Savarese Mr. Roddy IHSS 31 August 2021 Cultural Anthropology Blog      I read cultural anthropology blog Vol. 36 No. 2 (2021). T his blog covers many different topics. One of these topics is about things such as rural places in the world that use the labor of inmates to produce value in their economy. An example of this is rural places in new jersey where the inequalities of the inmates challenge the work that they must do to make a living. This article also has an example of when people studied ethnography in Japan. In Japan there are Buddhists that sell pet robots such as robot dogs, to people to re-define the boundaries between  life, death, amusement, and play. I have been wondering if society would accept robot dogs or cats as replacements for real ones. I think that this would offer the trade between personality and functionality. In Bolivia Juliane muller offers the thought of large corporate companies attempting to bestow a ne...
Read more

What Did Medieval Peasants Know?

  Jayla Balderas  Mr. Roddy  IHSS  16 May 2022                                                   What Did Medieval Peasants Know? A comment often thrown around is how much easier life was in medieval times. What sparked this specific article was a tweet made by a woman named Azie Dungey she said, “We give a lot more labor to increase someone else’s wealth than in times past. We generally work much longer hours. We have far fewer holidays and times of community festivity,” (Dungey).  This sparked a controversy, and brought up the question, what were things really like during the medieval times? It was stated everyone has a different variety of what they believed this era looked like in their head because it's ...
Read more

John D Rockefeller - Eli

John Davison Rockefeller was born on July 8, 1839, in Richford, New York. And In 1864, Rockefeller married Laura Celestia. Laura Celestia was an Ohio native and had a very successful father. Her father was active in helping the underground railroad and was an abolitionist. together Rockefeller and Celestia went on to have five children, 4 of them girls and one boy. however one of the girls, Alice Rockefeller died when she was only 13 months old. Later, In 1865 Rockefeller took out a loan to buy out his partner's oil refineries. He quickly formed more partners and expanded his oil business. he soon made the standard oil company of Ohio along with his younger brother and other young men. John Rockefeller became the president and biggest shareholder of the company. He began to make a monopoly in the Oil industry by buying out his competitors. he started selling his oil globally and eventually made up 90 percent of the nation's oil.  the gilded age is an era where we see a gr...
Read more