Tons of steel

This project was born from a random exploration of Google Maps. Wandering around the world I noticed the presence of these large parking lots. As a challenge, I tried to count them without success. We less frequently consider how much space cars take up in world’s cities. There’s the space the cars themselves occupy. The average car, two hulking tons of steel, is 80 percent empty when it’s being driven by a single person. And most of the day, cars are totally empty, sitting unused. That, of course, requires space for parking. Plus, there are all the paved roads crisscrossing our cities. Add it up, and many downtowns devote 50 to 60 percent of their scarce real estate to vehicles. It all seems rather inefficient and wasteful. If cities could reclaim even a fraction of this land from vehicles, they could build more housing, or stores, or parks, or plazas.

This project was created through the use of Google Maps, I assembled screenshots of the 3d maps.