How the hunt for cheap parking contributes to pollution, climate change
Friday, March 6th, 2009There’s a terrific post over at the blog Grush Hour, written by SkyMeter founder and chief scientist Bern Grush. A friend in Toronto was driving to downtown to visit him, so Grush documented the crazy path this person took while driving around trying to find the cheapest parking — in this case street parking. Multiply this particular example by the hundreds or thousands every day and you begin to see the larger impact on downtown congestion, smog, and a city’s carbon footprint. Grush argues that cheap street parking has got to go. “Underpriced parking carries a small, transient benefit to individuals who happen to be lucky on a particular day, but it carries a large societal detriment to all of us each day, every day,” he writes.
I encourage you to read his full post. Very interesting.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca