NO SUCH THING AS FREE PARKING?
This article is from our archives and has not been updated and integrated with our "new" site yet... Even so, it's still awesome - so keep reading!
Published on Wed, Jan 19, 2011
By: The LACar Editorial Staff
Do you ever get excited when you find an available parking spot and its turns out it is free? As city dwellers, we sure do! It turns out, however, that—even if you don't have to throw a quarter in the meter—your parking spot is still not free. Civil engineers from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted the first nationwide estimate of parking spaces in the U.S. In doing this, they estimated the environmental cost of the 800 million parking spots in the country. Parking alone evidently adds 10 percent to the CO2 emissions of our average automobile, according to the report. The report also claims that the amount of soot added to the atmosphere as a result of all our cars nearly doubles, thanks to all the asphalt and concrete and the emissions that go along with making it. And that doesn't even take into account all the miles of asphalt we have to traverse to get to our parking spot! Ailis Aaron Wolf, 40mpg.org
