FREE"DUMB"

Short of using public transportation, there is no more effective tool we, as people and our businesses have to make an impact on climate change and homelessness in the community and the world we share. Public transportation not only reduces the number of misplaced people in our community, but the astronomical number of parking spaces that accompany them. Unfortunately, cities have long promoted parking space. as a way to attract shoppers, tourists, push out the homeless, and bring parking revenue to the city, even going so far as to require high minimum number of parking spaces for all residential and office structures. Depending on the density of any given U.S. city, the number of parking spaces available per household can vary between 1.6 in New York City to 27.1 like it does in Jackson, Wyoming. Ironically, car friendly cities like Jackson, Wyoming actually do most of the damage, because all those paved surfaces, and the distances between them, only encourage more driving.  

While Wyoming has devoted 27 spaces for every car, they've only manage to house about half of their homeless population. We have only just begun to understand how nature works on a different time scale than we do and that any harm we caused to the planet, that harm will be visited back upon us, exponentially. Thus, when cities build their world around cars, and not people, it carries the very real and long term consequence of making people extinct. Climate change aside, it was cars that killed more than 40,000 people in 2017, not homeless people. Ride the bus and and encourage your leaders to eliminate parking minimums, or just do like some cities already did and ban cars altogether. For many a car is freedom, but the reality is that we all in a giant a closed door garage and a billion engines are running “free” in it. I fear that we've not only paved over paradise, but already entombed the American Dream.