| Summary: | "Houston is the first major city without streets"$\sp1$
It is a city of parking space, and mostly surface parking at that.
Economic incentives and automobility dictate the ground rules by which the contemporary city is created.
It is cheaper and easier to have a surface parking lot. It is more advantageous for a developer to build farther and farther out from the city. Cars are relatively standard items. Architectural Graphic Standards will tell you the types of spaces they need. Parking designers have a codified system, Levels of Service (LOS), to dictate design. The automobile is perhaps the most convenient form of personal transit ever invented. Automobiles are becoming more accessible to more people. These same cars remain parked for 18-20 hours a day on average.
Our city is created by these rules. In order to change the city--the ground rules must be adjusted. ftn$\sp1$Ingersoll Richard, "The death of the Street; The Automobile and Houston," Chapter 14 of Roadside America: The Automobile in Design and Culture, ed. Jan Jennings copyright 1990 Iowa State University Press Ames, Iowa.
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