Celebrating Park(ing) Day
Today, we’re thrilled to join hundreds of cities around the globe to celebrate Park(ing) Day. Since 2005, Park(ing) Day has encouraged urban dwellers to transform parking spaces into temporary public spaces. Groups use their reclaimed space for picnics, art, meditation and places to play.
Park(ing) Day is important because it gives us all a chance to envision a city that’s more liveable and vibrant. Parking is ugly, it’s expensive to build, and it takes up an incredible amount of valuable urban space. Some estimate there may be as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States, more than 6 times the number of people living there. And since the average car spends 95% of its life parked, it’s no surprise we’ve found ourselves devoting up to a third of our cities to parking.
While parking has made large swaths of our cities unwalkable and simply unpleasant, parking has also driven up the costs of apartments for developers and residents, harmed the environment, and diverted public dollars that could have gone to uses like public transit, parks, and bike lanes. As parking expert Donald Shoup puts it, ‘There’s no such thing as a free parking space.’
Cities around the globe are taking steps to reclaim their urban land, eliminating requirements that developers add minimum numbers of parking spaces for specific types of development. Many cities are also working to tackle the underlying problem — the overwhelming reliance on the personal car.
At Uber, we’re committed to moving people out of their personal cars and into more efficient modes — bikes, shared Uber POOL rides, carshare, and public transit. We know that in order to convince people to ditch their car, we need to provide a service that matches the convenience and reliability. That’s why we’re committed to building multiple modes of transportation right in our app — rideshare, JUMP bikes, carshare by Getaround, and very soon, public transit via our partnership with Masabi, the global leader in public transit mobile ticketing.
Today the Uber and JUMP teams are proud to participate in Park(ing) Day in the very city where the movement got its start — San Francisco. We’re excited to join local residents and people around the world to imagine the possibilities of a future of less parking and more city. A future where there’s more space for people — for new homes, apartments, schools, playgrounds, bike lanes, and parks. Because that’s a future we can all get excited about.
