I haven’t done any technical calculations. On a quick glance I’d say all of this parking is about half the size of the park itself. Very little parking inside the main park boundaries, which is mostly for service vehicles (these spaces aren’t highlighted).
Just something I was curious about, it’s wild how much we accommodate, and how much space we waste, for cars.
Edit: not shown is the large lot southeast of the park. It is about three times the size of the lot to the southwest. There are other lots further outside the picture that add additional parking space not shown. Thanks to RvTV95XBeo for pointing this out.
Most of the guests are coming from outside the city/state. Unless we built a national high speed railway, I don’t see how this could be avoided.
Shuttle/train from the airport? Doesn’t seem too difficult to solve honestly.
Flying commercial has a larger carbon footprint than just driving a car.
Anyone coming from out of country is probably flying, which is a significant amount. Anyone coming from the eastern half of the continent is probably too.
You’re forgetting to account for the other parts of the vacation experience. Hotels, restaurants, and other tourist attractions. While you can probably fulfill this with various forms of public transit, a lot of this would require undoing decades of car centric city design. From the perspective of a park, parking lots are a much simpler (though unpleasant) solution.
Fair point. But I still think that would be doable. Might take some time. Odious as parking lots are, they aren’t the worst aspect of cars on cities, so I don’t mind if we wait to eliminate them until other alternatives are present.