thank you [Music] during our everyday lives we need to leave our homes to go to work to go to the store go in an event visit our friends and family and most of those times we're not able to walk and we need to take transportation and most of times that transportation is a car and before we can go about our business we need to park that car parking is a much larger part of your life than you may realize everyone who owns a car needs to park that car sometimes parking can be integral to our plans have you ever said or maybe heard your dad say we better get going we'll never find a parking spot and you leave an hour early or sometimes you don't even go to an event because of the thought of parking would be too difficult even parallel parking sometimes will deter people from going to an event or stopping at a business the automobile manufacturers have taken note of this and they have developed self-parking cars and they use it as a selling point parking is a large part of our society our parking lots are usually many times larger than our businesses we dedicate vast tracks of real estate to these parking lots the amount of land dedicated to parking lots in the state of Wisconsin Illinois Indiana and Michigan is equal to the land mass of the State of Rhode Island there's an estimated 2 billion parking spots in the United States that is as many as eight parking spots for every single car so the next time you can't find a parking spot remember there are eight of them out there just for you and even with this vast amount of parking we still spend a lot of time looking for parking the average U.S driver spends 17 hours a year just looking for a parking spot so how did we get to this point parking is not new to cars back when people rode horses they had the Hitching Post but with the invention of the automobile our demand for parking grew exponentially this initial first parking was on street parking but on-street parking has its issues it's very limited and it's expensive to enforce the most common sign in my hometown is a No Parking sign no parking in this side no parking this corner no parking after two no parking on Thursdays Fridays Wednesdays and don't even think about parking here foreign people become possessive of their parking spot in front of their homes have you ever had somebody park in front of your home only to visit the neighbor across the street and you thought hey why'd you park in front of my house and not their house [Music] some people think they've earned that spot on the street in the city of Boston after snow storms the residents have to shovel out their cars and when they leave they reserve it with a lawn chair Every Spring the curved lines are littered with these lawn chairs that have had an unfortunate meeting with the snowplow as more and more people could afford parking we quickly outgrew the available parking municipalities started developing cords to require off-street parking this spawned the term mandatory minimum parking requirements this mandatory minimum required new businesses and Facilities to have a minimum amount of parking spots off Street for example if you wanted to open a restaurant in a neighborhood for every three seeds of your restaurant you're going to need one parking spot so if you had a 90 seat restaurant in mind you're going to need 30 parking spots this made it nearly impossible to build in neighborhoods because of the requirement of purchasing and tearing down the adjoining properties so we started looking outwards to the outside outskirts of our communities since housing was already going this way this contributed to Irving sprawl this increase the need to own a car more cars more parking we kept building and building shopping malls and big box stores require huge parking lots that are designed for peak season such as Black Friday or Christmas shopping so we kept building larger and larger sometimes we've taken this building to extremes the world's largest parking lot is in Edmonton Canada at the West Edmonton Mall the main lot can hold an astounding twenty thousand cars the biggest lot in the United States is that the Seattle Tacoma Airport it has a capacity of 13 000 cars Epcot in Florida eleven thousand three hundred spaces occupying 141 acres of land that's equivalent to 106 football fields in my 30 years as the facilities and Parks manager parking has been a huge part of my job and during those years I've made a lot of observations on about parking lots and how people use them when people pull into a parking lot they become slightly more aggressive and more competitive some people just want to zip in and get that good spot next to the door so they have to walk too far other people will drive around and around and around until a spot opens up so they don't have to walk too far other people will park in the far outskirts of the lot at an angle to make sure nobody parks next to them and gives them a door ding other people will park at the edges of the lot so they can get a couple of extra steps in their foot fitbits some people plan ahead and they'll park near the exits of the lot so they have a quick exit after the event others will park near the exit of the store this gives them a short distance when they come out of the store with their cart full of goodies some people will take the time and back into their spots this planning is rewarded with a safer and quicker exit by eliminating the blind spots of the cars around you and behind you in China 88 of the people back into their parking spots in the United States it's less than six but one observation I've seen almost every day in my career is some people are inconsiderate to others when they Park some people will come in and decide I'm going to take two spots others come in and they will take three spots and yes all too often there's that one who take up four spots then there are people who can't figure out the end of the parking lot and they'll Park in the grass don't do this somebody has to fix that grass we design our parking lots in a way where we assist other people with larger spots and bigger aisles but even these bigger spots people struggle with this person missed the spot but they did find the sign yeah and sometimes parking bad parking is contagious the white car and the two cars behind them all miss their mark but one observation that I made Through The Years had led me to this conclusion we have too much parking we have paved over a Paradise and put in parking lots we vastly under utilize the existing parking that we have way too many times I see vacant parking lots for extended periods of time this comes with a huge carbon footprint and expense cities businesses and residents spend millions and millions of dollars on storm water management rainwater that once soaked into the ground and percolated into our aquifers now runs off at a high rate of speed flooding the lot flooding the streets and flooding the rivers taking along with it all the cigarette butts fast food wrappers oil residue and whatever else people dump in parking lots Retention Ponds and storm water management features can help with this but they have a voracious appetite for land and money and this cost is passed on to you and I in the form of higher cost for goods and services there is no such thing as free parking and nowhere more evident is this is in housing apartment complexes are required to put in huge parking lots with massive storm water features this initial Capital expense is passed on to the tenants even if you do not own a car you pay for that parking in the form of higher rents our homes have gone from one car to two car to three-car garages all elevating the price of a home and making housing less and less affordable so what can we do about this there are city planners that are working on this such as Seattle Minneapolis and other cities are starting to reduce the requirement of mandatory minimum in some projects such as housing by minimizing the initial Capital expense for building that place they hope to lower rents and it is working car services such as Uber and Lyft already reduce the need for cars especially in urban areas and maybe in the future maybe in the future self-driving cars will be reliable enough that we don't even need to own a car or vastly reduce it but one idea that's already taking place is the idea of sharing the existing parking lots shopping malls and outlet stores big box stores are already selling their Outlets their excess parking to other businesses smaller businesses this brings in more Commerce in the same footprint and helps share the maintenance expense of that lab this idea of shared parking lots need to be expanded upon we have to start thinking differently instead of building a facility in surrounding in parking lots for everyone why don't we build a parking lot and Surround it by different businesses that can share that lot for example you've designed a parking lot on this side you have Professional Services such as doctors lawyers dentists Bankers they can use that parking lot Monday through Friday nine to five on the other side churches mosques synagogues they can use it the weekends and the evenings multiple businesses and organizations using one lot and sharing the maintenance cause of this if we can free up parking spots we can convert some of this parking to other ideas such as pocket Parts green spaces that people can have just a few steps from their homes or offices to get outside enjoy The Great Outdoors Community Gardens is another great idea for these spots these Gardens promote the sense of community by working shoulder to shoulder with your neighbors or maybe we even have miniature amphitheaters where street performers High School bands can perform outdoors and an impromptu concert only time will tell if the future of parking will be solved but our urban planners our city governments our Architects and our developers all need to sit down and think outside the lines to help deal with this problem of access parking I'm going to leave you with a painting that I made that was inspired by Banksy the street artist it perfectly illustrates what we should be doing with our excess barking [Applause]