From Parking Lots to Parking Garages

Last week I wrote about parking lots and my distaste for them. While parking garages are a much better use of land, they can be quite ugly.

My argument today is not an aesthetic one though. While riding the light rail the other day (where I also composed this op-ed), I passed a large parking garage, four levels high or so. Right before getting on the train I walked passed another one downtown. The downtown garage had shops and restaurants on the ground floor, a good use of space, especially in the urban center. However, it is this other garage that got me thinking.

When explorers landed on Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island), what did they think of the giant moai (see the image accompanying this post), the enormous stone statues that populated the coastline? Those vestiges are pretty much the line remnants of a once powerful civilization. Jared Diamond writes about them in Collapse, as well as an article for Discover magazine several years ago. He likens the stone statues to the massive homes built by Hollywood producers, namely the 50,000+ square foot home of Aaron Spelling (recently featured on HGTV). Diamond makes the argument that these shows of power waste resources in an attempt to mark one’s territory by showing off their wealth. The disregard for consumption inevitably led to the downfall of civilization on Rapa Nui.

I realize this is a bit of a stretch to parking garages, but will future civilizations view them similarly? Will they be seen as monuments to the car, an anachronistic structure that sucked up resources (both the garage itself and the cars they housed)? My intention is not to paint a stark picture in which people do not play a role, or in which vehicles are a relic of some bygone era. Rather, as pointed out in another recent post, the future might hold some semblance of pedestrian-centric ethos that will make parking garages the Stonehenge of the future.

[Image source]