It is a fact, population growing in cities is a current - disturbing situation for humankind, one that carries endless issues that the city responsible has to attend, from food supplies, water, cleaning the disposals of people, transportation and even fiddling a house has turned problematic given that virtually we are running out of space, in cities that are geographically enclosed, those cities that are not, suffer a little be less from this matter, but it is just a matter of time.
I am a resident at Nutwood Apartments, in general, it is a very nice community in my opinion it is a very easy going area with kind people and the houses are very much just what you paid for, it is fine by me, but shortly after I moved I noticed that I missed something, parking space.
Each apartment in the community has a parking spot as it was intended time ago, when it was designed, the idea was that everybody will have a principal parking spot nearby, and if they have a second card or visit came by, they could park around the block, which is not too far so it could represent a considerable problem. The community has grown an families in each apartment has too; new residences have been built near, some office buildings and markets as well, this has made that the car population increased significantly, and the parking spots are the same as there were in the beginning, in some areas fewer since new bus stops are placed in the area or similar situations.
Given the cleaning schedule, bus stops, rush hour traffic and other matters brought as conscience that none of the streets around the apartments allows twenty four hour parking, this is a major problem for most of the people living here; each block has a specific parking hour and those that don´t move their car at the end of the period will get a parking ticket and often cars are towed, I don´t thing there is anything more annoying that when this happens. The problems extend to the point that having friends or family over to visit is very difficult given that they won’t have any place to park their cars, if they find a place, they will have to move the car every couple hours; this is a very uncomfortable issue for everyone, I no longer invite people over and I am thinking to move as soon as possible, and this is problem covers the 90% of the reasons that lead me to this decision.
A Study “Calculates that a new parking space in the United States cost 17 percent more than a new car, and that, in most cases, parking spaces cost more than the cars parked in them, in part because cars depreciate faster than parking spaces do” . As you can see there is a strong reason why developing more parking spots in a crowded are is not so simple a convenient to constructors and the city, it is expensive, and the solution carries with it planning, lot of resources, engineering and use technology to find out the best solution for the problem for a certain area also thinking that population won’t stop growing and by the time there are spots, let’s say for everyone today, maybe 30% more are needed by then.
The Age average of the community is between 20 – 30 years and most of then attends to the university that is close to the community; around 60 % of the students are people that are foreign therefore they all have their own car intended to be used to make the travel home, but they it to school every day even when they don’t need it and created this parking jam in the area close to the university, most people have resign to never park close to their house given that there always students cars parked in their spots and there is no one that controls this situation.
In those apartments that are rent to students at the moment live 2 or three students, now if each of them has a car, the car spots available are less than required and this cause part of the parking situation. Usually on weekends students have parties at their apartment and then the parking problem is worst there are 15 to 25 cars more, people that live in the community find cars parked in their exclusive parking spot and there is no way to know who parked there, as a result inquilines have to parked 4 to 5 blocks away to their building which is annoying.
Surrounding the apartments are many restaurants, fast food restaurants most of them, these restaurants are very popular among the university students and by nights their parking spaces is not enough for all the people that comes, people at some point started to park in the apartments area and walk to the restaurants and this has made the problem worse.
Additionally to all the situations presented, not far from the community runs a very crowed high way, with the time traffic that goes through it has increased, increasing the traffic in the community streets as well, parking schedules have established so the streets are to channels roods rush during hours, in order to avoid major jams in the area.
All streets have different parking schedules and they changed through the week, it is really difficult to learn the schedules given that you never know where you will find a parking spot. If any car reminds parked at the end of the established time frame it will be tow. The cost if the car is tow goes up to 200 $ and there is a ticked of 60 $ additional. Around 70 % of the people of the community have been towed at least once and this has made that a lot of people decided to move to other place and avoid this problem every day.
Regularly community reunions are done to attend different problematic, people usually present solutions to the topics covered, in the last years a recurrent topic has been the parking issue. Before I went to the first reunion I used to think that it was a problem to me, but there are people with a complete family living here that got it worse than me, for example, people with babies that had to park four or five block from their houses and then walk all the distance with the babe and usually also carrying groceries, if you think about it is not that far, but think a little be more, what if it is raining or in a situation of emergency those five blocks will impact.
Different solutions have been presented in order to solve this problem that is affecting all the community some of them are a little extreme and lack of practicality, I will discuss the solutions that in my opinion are worth to implement.
One of the solutions that might help those that have two cars and have troubles finding a place where to park the car at nights, is to make an agreement with the malls, markets, schools, and all those establishments that have large parking lots, these parking spots are used mostly during day time but at nights all this space is wasted given that all are closed since stores, schools etc. are also closed.
The agreement is intended to allow people who live close to the parking lots to used them during the night, this way the space won’t be wasted, given that the intention is solve the community problem will be only the people living there that will be allow to park, the city will grant this people a card or permission so they can´t park in that place. Bus lines that cover the area could make a little modification during night, so they go through these new parking spaces, this way people who live far have a way to get there, paying a bus ticket is lot cheaper than a current garage parking.
It is a fact, that occupation of the parking spaces available during the night won´t solve all the problematic, but it is a start, for the rest of the day when parking spots are also needed regularly a solution comes from structural parking lots, this buildings are similar to regular buildings but are dedicated only for parking. There are just empty floors with room to park, no facilities within, depending on the number of floor will be the capacity of vehicles that can fit, in the past years most of the large cities have built lot of this structures looking to take advantage of the vertical space that is available. The bus lines shall cover these new structures as it was presented in the previous solution, in my opinion.
“Our statistical data for this year indicates that the median construction cost for a new parking structure is $17,533 per space and $52.51 per square foot. This represents just over a 2% increase from 2012 when the median cost of a parking structure was $17,072. Gilbane Building Company, in their Market Conditions in Construction report, predicts an upturn in non-residential spending starting in May 2013 with total 2013 construction spending increasing 7+%, but driven almost entirely by a 20% increase in residential spending. As spending continues to increase, construction cost escalation will be higher than normal labor and material cost growth and in the range of 4-6% for 2013 and 5-7% for 2014” .
Without doubts sooner or later the state will have to adopt the structural parking lots as a standard for cities, other way no long from now cities will be in chaos and having a car will represent an annoying position, parking it will be more expensive than paying for a taxi when long trips are needed.
It is my perspective that a cultural change has to occur in companionship of a public transportation upgraded, human population in cities will continue to grow and streets will collapse, let’s consider the following scenario. It is known that at the moment around 60 % of people within 18 – 25 years have their first car, let’s see a few years from now where every kid that at the moment is in elementary school, turn eighteen years and get a car to go to the school or job given the case. No modern city can support that amount of car population there is no parking lot that can fit that many cars and cities won´t grow fast enough to fit all that traffic among the streets.
The cultural change that I refer to describes a society where public transportation is enough and have all the commodities so long trips are comfortable and fast in all cities, in the country, people won´t have the necessity to have a car to go to work and school every day, the will rather use public transportation, bikes or walk if it is close. Cars now will be used mostly for recreational matters; these way streets will be clear off traffic jams and all the problems that come with it. I am clear that this type of changes is not that easy to realize but step by step we have to build this behavior.
Conclusions
In the essay previously present, a problematic was discussed; there are no parking spots to cover the car population in the community and all the problems that this brings to people. Family and friends have a bad time going to visit people in the community because, of this issue, and it is one of the reasons that brought the result that the prices of the apartments dropped in the past times.
The space problem is due the population increase of the area and it is a given fact that can be controlled, each year that passes will bring make this situation worse and it is estimated that a car over population presents in the following five years.
Different solutions were presented, the first place a middle time solution in which all the parking spots in the malls, markets, stores, schools, etc. that are empty at night are used by the community during the night this way this space is not wasted and reduces the cost of parking for people that live nearby. In the other hand and as a solution more effective for the situation presented all day long, the state shall build different structural parking lots, this will provide hundreds of parking spot that will reduce the problem in a significant measure.
Population increase becomes inevitable and 10 years from now, there is not structural parking lot that could fit the amount of cars in the big cities, cultural change must come, public transportation shall improve and people used it more than they do now and cars will have to be used for recreational matters, daily use of them by everybody won´t be possible, the cities will be all just a big traffic jam looking for a parking spot.
Works Cited
Cudney, Gary. "Parking Structure Cost Outlook for 2013." 2013. http://www.carlwalker.com/. Document. 25 February 2014.
H. Schmidt, Bill and Christopher Westley. The University-as-Monopolist: Why Parking Problems. Jacksonville, 2012.
Shoup, D.C. "Cruising For Parking." Transport Policy (2006): 479-86.
