Opinion by Joe Matthews : bakersfield – excerpt (also ran in SF Chronicle)
Friends, Californians, fellow drivers, stop honking your horns and lend me your ears…
California officials — all honorable — tell us that parking consumes huge amounts of property that might be used more productively for business, housing, or transit. Abundant parking encourages people to drive more. And more driving means more accidents, more injuries and deaths, and more pollution and greenhouse gases…
I know… anti-parking policies are well-intentioned. And yet, I stare into the bleak future of the California parking lot, and feel a strange sadness. Parking lots have been, for all their faults, good and true friends to our communities too…
And have not parking lots provided utility, even life-saving service under COVID? Think how many more people might have died if our state didn’t have so many large parking lots — from Petco Park-adjacent lots in San Diego to the Cal Expo and State Fair lots in Sacramento — to turn into mass testing and vaccination sites. Hospitals used their lots to set up tents for patients during COVID surges. Communities turned parking lots into tent cities to shelter the homeless safely, and temporarily, with the virus spreading…
You could even say parking lots saved democratic politics, as election rallies became drive-ins. Might our fair state still be slurred daily by President Trump, without the dedicated service of so many parking lots to Joe Biden’s campaign?…(more)
The sentiments echo mine when I heard about the plans to build on top of the visitors’ parking lot at General Hospital. My first concern was where are they going to set up emergency triage tents when they need them. This was years ago, before they did. I suppose the next step is to close down streets to set up tent or set them up in parks. There is a real need for open space around the hospitals and there is a need for parking and vehicle access during a major catastrophe.
When you read emergency evacuation plans, the first order of business is to pack your personal vehicle with all the essentials you can, and save room for people and pets. The larger the vehicle is, the higher off the ground, and the more metal it contains, and the stronger the engine is, the better your chances are of making it out under dire circumstances. A 4-wheel drive truck is not a luxury vehicle during an evacuation.