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Tear up unused parking heaps, plant timber – Dan Rodricks

Tear up unused parking heaps, plant timber – Dan Rodricks

2024-01-30 13:13:01

The picture to the appropriate is of the Staples parking zone behind the York Highway retailer in Baltimore, a traditional instance of a spot that must be turned again to city forest — or developed right into a much-needed one thing else. I can’t consider a time when, throughout pretty frequent journeys to this retailer, I noticed greater than a dozen automobiles within the lengthy, giant lot. And, should you hold it top-of-mind as you journey, you see this type of factor in lots of city and suburban locations. As I simply instructed in my Sun column, Baltimore and the encompassing counties ought to conduct a “ineffective parking zone stock” to establish all impervious surfaces, public or non-public, which can be both now not wanted or too giant for his or her present use. Retail purchasing facilities in decline, deserted industrial buildings — take away the pointless asphalt and plant some timber. Or do one thing constructive with this unused, paved house — new housing, a photo voltaic power area.

A part of it is a results of poor planning and ordinance-making that way back overcompensated for the huge use of cars. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a e book revealed final 12 months, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a nationwide stage, definitely, there’s way more parking than we want,” Grabar mentioned in an interview. “There are at the very least four parking spaces for every car, which means that the parking inventory is not more than 25 % full at any given time. And a few of these automobiles are shifting at any given time, so parking could also be a very good deal emptier than that.”

I don’t know that anybody in addition to Grabar is even fascinated about this, as a result of parking heaps are so deeply embedded within the American psyche, within the setting we take as a right. However sure modifications to how we dwell and work — the demise of malls and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail, the advance of telecommuting within the wake of the pandemic — will need to have diminished the necessity for all that asphalt. And all that asphalt results each human health and the health of the planet.

Revealed by Dan Rodricks

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Dan Rodricks is a long-time columnist for The Baltimore Solar, winner of quite a few nationwide and regional journalism awards, a radio and TV character, podcaster and fly angler. His narrative memoir, “Father’s Day Creek,” was revealed in Could 2019 by Apprentice Home at Loyola College Maryland.
View all posts by Dan Rodricks

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