Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees

The photo to the right is of the Staples parking lot behind the York Road store in Baltimore, a classic example of a place that needs to be turned back to urban forest — or developed into a much-needed something else. I can’t think of a time when, during fairly frequent trips to this store, I saw more than a dozen vehicles in the long, large lot. And, if you keep it top-of-mind as you travel, you see this sort of thing in many urban and suburban places. As I just suggested in my Sun column, Baltimore and the surrounding counties should conduct a “useless parking lot inventory” to identify all impervious surfaces, public or private, that are either no longer needed or too large for their current use. Retail shopping centers in decline, abandoned industrial buildings — remove the unnecessary asphalt and plant some trees. Or do something constructive with this unused, paved space — new housing, a solar energy field.

Part of this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.”

I don’t know that anyone besides Grabar is even thinking about this, because parking lots are so deeply embedded in the American psyche, in the environment we take for granted. But certain changes to how we live and work — the demise of malls and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail, the advance of telecommuting in the wake of the pandemic — must have diminished the need for all that asphalt. And all that asphalt effects both human health and the health of the planet.