Parking lot
In most jurisdictions where cars are the dominant mode of transportation, parking lots are a major feature of cities and suburban areas.
Many areas today also require minimum landscaping in parking lots to provide shade and help mitigate the extent to which their paved surfaces contribute to heat islands.
The massive acreage devoted to parking is widely seen as disruptive to walkable urban fabric, maximizing convenience to each individual building but hampering foot traffic between them.
Due to a recent trend[further explanation needed] towards more livable and walkable communities, parking minimums (policies requiring each building to have a minimum number of parking spaces) have been criticized by both livable streets advocates[1] and developers alike.
For a time, the British government recommended that local councils should establish maximum parking standards to discourage car use.
[2] American cities such as Washington, DC, are now considering removing parking minimums as a way to add more housing for residents while encouraging the use of public transit.
These may include bicycle parking racks and locks, as well as more modern technologies for security and convenience.
[8] In Sweden and Denmark, there are legally two types of car parking, either on streets and roads, or on private land.
[citation needed] Another variant of payment has motorists paying an attendant on entry to the lot, with the way out guarded by a one-way spike strip that will only allow cars to exit.
[citation needed] Similar to this is the system where the parking is paid by the mobile phone by sending an SMS message which contains the license plate number.
This includes adaptive lighting, sensors, indoor positioning system (IPS) and mobile payment options.
The Santa Monica Place shopping mall in California has cameras on each stall that can help count the lot occupancy and find lost cars.
[citation needed] In indoor parking lots, one option is to record one's Wi-Fi signature (signal strengths observed for several detectable access points) to remember the location of a vehicle.
[19] Another alternative is to use smartphone applications that does inertial dead reckoning, detection of turns made by the car while driving indoor, correlations of travel time between turns, and machine learning algorithms, to infer the rough location of the parked car based on a map or floorplan.
They use real-time inventory management checking technology to display parking lots with availability, sorted by price and distance from the airport.
They are up to twice as expensive to install as normal open field solar arrays because the added material in the structure to elevate them for cars to park underneath.
To avoid flooding and unsafe driving conditions, the lots are built to channel and collect runoff.
are found in combustion byproducts of gasoline, as well as in asphalt and coal tar-based sealants used to maintain parking lots.)
[26] Some newer designs include bioretention systems, which use plants more extensively to absorb and filter pollutants.
Dark materials and the enclosed canyons created by city buildings trap more of the sun's energy.
This means that lots usually need more land area than for corresponding buildings for offices or shops if most employees and visitors arrive by car.
Some regions with especially cold winters provide electricity at most parking spots for engine block heaters, as antifreeze may be inadequate to prevent freezing.
Parking lots are responsible for many greenhouse gas emissions because they increase driving and contributing to the urban heat island due to the materials they are built from.
