~one billion
~1,000,000,000

That's how many parking spaces there are in the USA. For every car? About 4 empty spaces... just sitting there, not absorbing the rain, making flooding worse, making cities hotter as they bake in the summer sun.

Our built environment and laws bend over backwards to make driving the only viable transportation option in nearly every imaginable context.

You need to pay for healthcare, but almost never parking.

(Pointing this out makes libertarian heads explode.)

@futurebird This was a good 99% Invisible episode on the subject: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/paved-paradise/
Paved Paradise - 99% Invisible

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. In the century since

99% Invisible