Housing for People, Not for Cars

One of my Twitter favorites, Angie Schmitt, said this today:

Depressing how detached garages take up a whole lot in the city. Like a whole family could live in this space.

Accompanied by this photo:


By coincidence, I spent part of Monday measuring a parking lot where I will be running an event. Part of that time was spent measuring the size of a parking spot and the space between the parking spots where the cars are driven to get to the parking spots.

Every parking spot in a parking lot is around 9 feet wide by 18 feet long, and you know what? That's significantly more square feet than the average bedroom in the houses within the city of St. Paul, not even counting the amount of space between the rows of parking spots. That additional space is 30 feet wide. So if you allocate that additional 15 feet of space to each parking spot, each car in the lot requires 9x34 feet of space or over 300 square feet... And that's still not counting the entrances/exits and approach areas within the lot, which are shared by all of the spots.

As the saying goes, Housing for People, Not for Cars. This is what it means.