ABSTRACT
The environmental impacts of parking and the driving it promotes are often borne by local populations and not the trip-takers themselves. Because abundant free parking encourages solo driving and thus discourages walking, biking, and the use of public transit, it greatly contributes to urban congestion. To determine the full social cost of parking, authors develop a range of estimates of the United States (US) parking space inventory and determine the energy use and environmental effects of constructing and maintaining this parking. The authors find that for many vehicle trips the environmental cost of the parking infrastructure sometimes equals or exceeds the environmental cost of the vehicles themselves. Evaluating life-cycle effects, including health care and environmental damage costs, we determine that emissions from parking infrastructure cost the US between $4 and $20 billion annually, or between $6 and $23 per space per year.
