One of the biggest problems for many cities is parking because there aren’t enough spots for every vehicle. People are buying more vehicles and at one point everyone will have at least one but there won’t be space for them. It has been improved over the years because we have new technologies to manage them but it isn’t applied to everyone. Smart parking is very important for the future because it affects traffic a lot.
There are many facts people don’t know about and some of them are bad for the environment. Implementing new technology like Amano Self Parking and elevator parking, we can cut down the waiting time and it can be easier to find a spot to park. By knowing some of the facts you will realize how the industry works and why it is important for the environment. Many cities are losing a lot of money because of bad organization.
Sad State of Parking
Even if a lot of money is invested in the parking industry, we have a lot of problems to solve which take time and effort. You may use your car to drive to work but almost 95% of the time the average automobile is parked. Many people that own business thinks that they profit from free parking spots which would be true if the majority of companies didn’t do the same. To increase the number of customers, you need to have a limit on how much someone can spend in one parking spot so in 1935 a parking meter was introduced in Oklahoma. Read more on this page.
A free parking spot has a time limit but between 30 to 50% of people disregard this and stay longer. In some places, it impacts the affordability of housing units so much that people can’t afford to pay an additional price for it in order to get the house. The price of having a parking spot for residential units can get up to 20% more. This has become a problem for rich people also because the higher the price of the house, the higher the price for parking and most of them have a few vehicles.
An interesting thing is that office space requires up to 250 square feet per individual. If you want a garage, an average is around 350 square feet per car. More meters mean that you are more likely to find a spot but only 2 cities in the US, Chicago and Houston are having more metered parking. New inventions help fix these issues but most of them are too expensive to be applied in every city.
Parking Meter and Parking Spaces
A long time ago when the car industry started to expand, the problem of lack of efficient parking has begun to be noticeable. This was only for the urban areas when the number of cars was increasing. Installed in July 1935 in Oklahoma, Park-O-Meter was the first parking meter that. It would cost you $0.05 per hour to park which was expensive at that time.
You can’t find an official number of parking spots in the US but there is an estimate based on multiple investigations which says that there are around 2 billion spots. The number may be surprising but even so, it is hard to find a free spot. This problem can’t be solved in five to ten years at least. The cost of making a parking spot needs to be lower in order to fix this issue.
Get more information here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90202222/heres-how-much-space-u-s-cities-waste-on-parking
The Biggest and Most Valuable
Canada has the largest car park in the world which is a part of a shopping center in Edmonton. It has around 20,000 parking spots. Additionally, another parking space next to it has 10,000 more spots. Even then, it can happen that it becomes full. By looking at it you can realize how much these shopping centers need space to work efficiently.
There are many private parking spots where they can put any price they like but when it comes to spots that the city owns, Central London has one of the most expensive. For the price of just £1015 on average, you can have a monthly public parking spot near Trafalgar Square. There are more expensive spots like this in Japan and China.
We mentioned that parking spots for your house can increase its value a lot but there are some permanent parking spots in New York that have outrageous prices. For a single car, you can buy a permanent spot for 1 million dollars at a certain location.
Parking Fine
You probably saw a really expensive car being parked inappropriately. Most of them go without a ticket because they have a connection but that isn’t a case for $20 million vintage Ferrari. This car is the most expensive one that got a parking ticket of $150. It probably wasn’t a problem to pay it. The cars are getting more expensive so there has to be one that beat this Ferrari.
When it comes to smaller numbers, there is a meter in Winters, California which only gathers around $200 per year. An interesting thing about it is that people don’t use it as regular meter they rather show it to their kids as something that has been used a long time ago.
Parking Lifts
Parking lift is actually automated parking system where vehicles with a certain size can use it as a parking spot. It minimizes the area used so it is more practical. You can compare it as parking garages that have multiple levels. These lifts are stacking vehicles on top of others so the area used is cut to the very minimum.
The problem with it is that technology you have to make. It is really expensive because it’s something new that a small number of companies make. It will be a part of the parking future but only when the technology used for it becomes cheaper. You can’t see them every one, but it is most likely to be found in countries like Japan and China.
