Did You Know?
Los Angeles Has 3.3 Parking Spaces for Every Car
A team of researchers at Arizona State, UCLA and Georgia Tech once did something nobody had attempted before: they counted the parking in Los Angeles County. All of it, going back to 1900.
The answer, as of 2010, was 18.6 million parking spaces. Three and a half million on the street, five and a half million residential, nine and a half million everywhere else. Against 5.6 million registered vehicles. That is 3.3 parking spaces per car.
It covers about 200 square miles — roughly 14% of the county's incorporated land. Which means Los Angeles, a city internationally famous for its freeway system, has dedicated 40% more land to cars standing still than to cars moving. The parking is bigger than the roads.
Most of it went in between 1950 and 1980, when the county added an average of 310,000 spaces a year. Every year. For thirty years.
And the average driver still loses close to ninety hours a year to traffic. Sit with the geometry: three spaces each, and nowhere to be.
The clock: here is the part that never gets mentioned. Los Angeles may be the biggest city on Earth that runs on somebody else's clock.
The Academy Awards begin in the late afternoon, Pacific time — an absurd hour for a black-tie event — so that New York can watch in prime time. Talk shows tape before dinner. Financial anchors go on air before sunrise, because the markets opened three time zones away. Live sport, awards season, breaking news: all of it scheduled backwards from the other side of the continent.
Los Angeles built the global entertainment industry, put it in the city with the best light in America, and then agreed to run the whole thing on East Coast time.
Sources
- Chester, Fraser, Matute, Flower & Pendyala (2015), "Parking Infrastructure: A Constraint on or Opportunity for Urban Redevelopment?", Journal of the American Planning Association
- ACCESS Magazine summary
- Streetsblog LA
- ASU press release