Washington - Urban dwellers will find this hard to believe as they drive around the block an umpteenth time hunting for a spot to park, but a study published on Tuesday said parking spaces in the United States outnumber drivers by three to one.
Not only that, but the study conducted by researchers at Purdue University in Indiana, also found that car parks are bad for the environment, as they tend to increase water pollution and raise urban temperatures.
The Purdue researchers counted driveways and parking spaces in the sprawling car parks that are built near large shopping complexes for their study, which focused on a midsize county in the Midwest.
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They found that there were three times more parking spaces than drivers, and 11 parking spaces for every family that lives in the county.
"Even I was surprised by these numbers," Bryan Pijanowski, the associate professor of forestry and natural resources who led the study, said in a statement. "Do we need this much parking space?"
Pijanowski said the findings "typify a troubling trend: Americans are paving an increasing percentage of land each year for their cars and trucks."
Farmers could produce 250 000 bushels of corn in the same space taken up by the parking lots, he said.
Parking lots also pose environmental problems, Purdue professor Bernard Engel said.
"The problem with parking lots is that they accumulate a lot of pollutants - oil, grease, heavy metals and sediment - that cannot be absorbed by the surface," Engel said.
"Rain then flushes these contaminants into rivers and lakes."
Car parks also add to the "urban heat island effect", according to climatologist Dev Niyogi, who also worked on the study.
"Urban areas have a higher capacity to absorb radiation from the sun than surrounding areas, and these areas become warmer," Niyogi said.
The study is the first in a series aimed at assessing the automobile's impact on land-use patterns, Pijanowski said.
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