It’s been a quarter of a century since the iconic urban planning video game SimCity saw the light of day. Since then, interest in cities and their design has become widespread: from new and utopian five-minute city designs to models based on sustainable mobility. In an interview conducted by The Atlantic to the main designer of the game, Stone Librande, he said that, although he worked with many urban planning books, what attracted him most was using Google Earth and Google Street View to contemplate what the cities were like. cities actually. He discovered that it was a powerful way to understand the differences in the world.
However, during his investigation, he noticed a detail that surprised him: the amount of space they took up car parks in cities. “It was a problem, because originally we wanted to model real cities, but we quickly realized that there were too many car parks in the real world and that our game would be very boring if it was proportional.” Result? The creators of SimCity they had to skip the car parks in his game because it would have become absurd to play.
What they did was imagine that they were simply underground. In fact, there are some in the game, but for this they tried to climb them in some cases: if you have a small store, they would put six or seven parking spaces next to it. And if you have a big shopping center or a football stadium, they would put some bigger ones. Still, nowhere near what they would be in a real store or stadium. “We had to do our best to make the game look attractive,” he explained.
No one knows how many parking spaces there are on the streets of the world. Estimates indicate that Western Europe has about 300 million, while the United States could have the brutal figure of two million. A single standard parking space, measuring just over six by three meters, takes up as much space as a small studio apartment in Paris, a housing unit in India, or three office cubicles.
However, even more concerning is that the parking spaces actually are not used as much. A study by the Center for Neighborhood Technology suggests that between a quarter and a third of parking spaces around buildings in the US are empty. Considering that the average car moves only 5% of the time, there is a strong argument for cities to resize the space they allocate to vehicles at rest. Just like SimsCity did.
Not only that: they cause all kinds of problems. In addition to dividing the neighborhoods, when they are grouped into parking lots create heat islands and polluted stormwater runoff sources. And they are significant generators of emissions, accounting for up to 12% of energy consumption and greenhouse gases.
Many of these spaces exist because of minimum parking regulations: they require architects to provide a certain number of spaces for each residential or office building they build, under the assumption that everyone must drive to get there. The idea behind is improve the quality of life of the inhabitants of a city, but the effect is often the opposite, consuming space where humans used to walk, live, play and do business.
In the US they have an even bigger problem since, as we have recounted in some Magnet articles, public attitudes towards pedestrians differ greatly between dense and well-connected areas and areas where it is difficult to get around without a car: walking is pointless for many Americans. Basically because most of its cities have been designed in an uncontrolled way, with infrastructures that are very separate from each other. Homes and businesses are very far from each other.
And while parking is often thought of primarily as a problem for car-centric countries like the US, it is actually a global problem. As global living standards rise and urbanization accelerates, especially in India and China, cities around the world are experiencing large increases in vehicle ownershipalong with the demand for parking.
Now cities around the world are beginning to rethink car parking. London and many other British cities have removed parking minimums and replaced them with parking maximums. Paris eliminated the minimums in the city center by enacting that are not required to build parking lots if their structures are within 500 meters of a metro stop, which is true in most of the city center.
And let’s remember that Madrid withdrew some 800 parking spaces to replace hotel terraces. European cities like Amsterdam have also thought about how to save space in vehicles. His solution is even more bizarre: transfer them to the depths of their channels. And also, as Oslo did in its day, transforming them into walkable areas or bike lanes. in Lisbonmore than 100 new kilometers of bike lanes are being created, eliminating parking spaces and installing 7,750 parking spaces for bicycles.
It is also striking how, in addition to the video game industry, the toy industry is seeing a change from car-centrism. Lego, where the automobile has also dominated for so long, changed roads for bike lanes.