Part 3
In our last write-up, we zeroed in on private car use, and estimated that we typically use cars only about 5% of the time, that is, the time driving from home to work (and back in the evening) out of the whole 24 hours we have. So, 95% of the time, cars occupy parking spaces, whether at home or work or anywhere else. That translates to a lot of unproductive space! What is the extent of the space wasted?
Let’s do some mental calisthenics before we look at some previous major findings. First, a car requires at least two parking spaces – at home and at work. But that presupposes that you only go from home to work and back and nowhere else! We all know that’s not true. We go to malls and markets, we visit other people, we go to the movies, dine, run errands, do other official activities, buy medicine, visit your girlfriend or boyfriend, and a whole lot of other activities. If you do this by car, you need a parking space. In each!
Okay, in many of these, the parking is shared – meaning, it’s for the public, for everybody, who comes and goes at different times. The parking space doesn’t have your name on it. Still, these spaces get to be provided and when they are, they’re there for 24 hours, used or not. Malls, for example have lots, but these are empty until they open at 10 a.m. And they usually don’t get full until late in the afternoon when people go there after work. Most are used only on working hours or when stores are open, empty the rest of the time. That’s why building and parking codes stipulate “minimums,” estimated to serve the possible maximum demand, but which is not needed most of the time. Meaning empty.
Parking spaces maybe categorized as on-street, home, surface, or structure, the last three required by codes. Unfortunately, I have not yet encountered any study which approximates how many parking spaces a city has – not in the Philippines. But it’s constantly growing! – every time a new building is constructed, “parking minimums” are added. Maybe our cities should start counting. They do in the US, with startling results! Using structured assumptions based on parking minimums, pay-parking and design manuals, it was estimates that there are at least 3.4 parking spaces per registered vehicle in the US, rising to 4 in cities. If all other unspecified spaces are included, this figure rises to 8 to 10, considered the upper limit. Since we have more “illegal parking” in the Philippines, we can conclude we have between 4 to 8 parking spaces per registered car.
If we have 500,000 cars, we probably have 2 million to 4 million parking spaces in Cebu. And by the looks of it, that’s not even enough because everybody’s complaining about parking! And don’t we ever forget – this problem is the concern of only less than 20% of our people, and not of the majority. Talk about democracy and equality. (To be continued)