The private car has for a century been the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption and an engine of ecocidal capitalist development. The wasteful and resource-intensive development of the sprawling suburban economies in Québec and the rest of North America, marked by big-box stores and shopping centers, are only made possible by the mass-production and consumption of the car, and the normalization of car dependency through state investments in car-centric infrastructure and land-use designations.

Electric vehicles will only accelerate and exacerbate this logic of resource-intensive land-use and urban sprawl by further entrenching car dependency, acting as a state handout to the capitalist markets that thrive on the consumption of cars, car-related consumer goods, and the real estate valuation of ever-sprawling tracts of peri-urban land. Private car travel continues to grow, with the number of cars in Québec increasing by 2.5 million between 2011 and 2021. With a population of 8.6 million, there are now almost 7 million cars in Québec– almost one private vehicle per Quebecer of driving age.

A critical aspect of car culture that is often overlooked is the horrific impact of parking lots and parking spaces on natural ecosystems, climate change, walkability, and quality of life.

Parking spaces, much like other kinds of road infrastructure, are designed to be able to accommodate usership during peak periods. This means that each private vehicle generates the necessity for roughly 4 parking spaces in an urban environment– one at home, one at work, and two more in peripheral locations like shopping centers and other locales. 

There are an estimated 2.8 million parking spaces in the greater Montréal region, with about 1.2 million on the island itself, according to a report by the ministry of transportation.1 Street parking takes up 27% of Montréal’s roadways, which is 12 times more space than lanes reserved for buses and cycling– not to mention the vast percentage of the island of Montréal that is reserved for off-street parking lots. The surface area that each private car demands in the form of parking, access lanes, driveways, and landscaping is estimated to 32.5 square meters.2 With an estimated total of 25 square kilometers3 of urban space devoted to parking, a little over 5% of the island of Montréal is currently devoted to these dead, paved spaces– roughly 9 times the acreage of Mount Royal park!

All that parking is space taken away from ecosystems. Let's look at how parkings transform water management and sunlight energy absorption while fracturing ecosystems. First, parking lots are not permeable, which means that water needs to be drained away, usually around or under the parking lot. This is a direct cause of urban flash flooding: rather than being absorbed by soil and plants, water accumulates on paved surfaces, eventually flowing directly from pavement to river. Of course, the more impermeable our cities become, the more stress is put on these drainage systems, all while climate change increases the frequency of intense precipitation. Stormwater runoff along these vast tracts of paved parking spaces increases the urban runoff of dangerous pollutants, excess nutrients and sediments, which are washed into the riverways and watersheds that we depend on for the necessities of life.

The management of solar energy by parking lots is also detrimental to the function of the ecosystem. Rather than the absorption of light for photosynthesis, the sun's heat is absorbed and emanated by paved surfaces, creating glaring heat islands, disproportionately located in the poorest neighborhoods of the city. Finally, large parking lots create dead zones that repel wildlife, and prevent the interactions of multiple urban species, ranging from marmots to squirrels. These urban speces increasingly live in pavement-divided enclaves that make them susceptible to inbreeding. 

Another huge problem is that parking lots are a threats to human beings themselves, with one study reporting that 7% of all yearly car crashes happen in parking lots. The larger the surface area devoted to parking and car infrastructure, the less walkable and bikable our neighbourhoods become– one must contend with vast tracts of dangerous and visually monotonous concrete, just in order to manage the basic necessities of life like grocery shopping, getting to work, or visiting a friend. The sprawling concrete space devoted to car parking lots becomes a physical, psychological, and accessibility barrier to active transportation, perversely feeding back to increase car usage.

Lastly, parking is just another hidden way of taxing poor people. On Montréal island, 91% of onstreet parking spaces is free,4 while the rest of the spaces are only charged at a fraction of their true "cost," were such costs to include land value, snow clearing and maintenance.  Costs are estimated at 1250$ per parking space,5 while the Plateau recently parking prices for SUVs to 488$. All in all, hundred of millions of municipal dollars are invested each year to maintain on-street parking spots. 33% of Montréalers do not own a car, meaning many of us are effectively paying out-of-pocket to destroy green spaces while maintaining others' parking spots.

Parking is dead, wasteful space that has no place in a climate change-ravaged world. If vegetation returned to even just 50% of the parking lot surfaces in North America, the land would be able to capture billions of cubic meters of stormwater runoff, not to mention millions tons of CO2 each year; all while providing us the opportunity to rebuild livable, walkable, and breathable communities, and re-establish relationships of reciprocity with the land. People aren't driving because they hate nature, but because there is no other better way of getting around. Fighting for transportation for all-- free, accessible and extended transit-- is the best way to reduce car usage and reverse the ecocidal pavement sprawl emanating from our urban centres.

Notes

  • We calculated the percentage of off-street parking at 32.5m2/space and everything else at 14m2, the lowest estimate available for street parking, so this is an underestimation.

 

 

How do you get groceries if you don't own a car?


Parking creates a lifestyle that is reliant on cars for transportation, making people think that life without a car is impossible. For example, in a lot of neighborhoods in Montreal, from Parc-Extension to Rosemont and Villeray, numerous markets have no parking lots, and are visited mostly by locals. At the other end of the spectrum, Costco and Maxi aim at the needs of the people who can only afford to do one trip per week to the grocery store. Indeed, needing 10-15 minutes to park your car downtown doesn’t lead you to go to the bakery on Tuesday on your way to work, and go to the market on Wednesday on your way back from the gym. Instead, you go to one place with a huge selection of shelf stable transformed foods.

Those chains of grocery stores are really problematic as they are the main vector of globalization of food markets. When you’re selling shelf-stable transformed food by the hundred of pallets each week, you tend to delocalize production to countries where production costs are a lot lower, let’s just mention the pickles that are made in India. For urban types, cucumbers grows really well in Québec and pickling was a way of preserving vegetables for the winter. Transportation changes not only the way we move, but what we eat, just think of drive-throughs...