Most of us decry the cost, wasted space and visual blight of city centre car parks. But they are not all bad - one company in the US is taking a long hard look at the way it uses its parking spaces. By Jeremy Torr

Miami, Florida. May 2020. According to some estimates, America has almost one car per person across the whole population. That would mean 300 million car parking spaces are needed to park them all at once. Common sense dictates they don’t even need to park at once, but one researcher Eran Ben-Joseph, has suggested that even so American car parks take up as much space as Puerto Rico (approx 9,000 km2) or maybe even more. Allied to the current trend for millennials to not even bother learning to drive, let alone own a car, that could lead to a massive amount of potentially wasted space in most major cities. And although the figures we quote are for the US, this lop-sided use of space applies to most major cities, worldwide.

“I don’t want to solve a city’s mobility issues by … banning cars from city centres or taxing them. I want to make the use of cars (and parking spaces) more efficient,” says Jaume Mayor, CEO of Spanish startup wesmartPark.com. His company uses smart tech to link car users (through an app) to specified parking spots so they don’t wander aimlessly around town looking for a park. But even so, the number of spaces is likely to soon exceed demand.

One car parking corporation, Reef Technology, has taken a pre-emptive step towards making car parks productive places, instead of dodgy places that encourage afterdark drug deals or marital transgressions.

“At Reef, we believe a parking lot should be more than a place to store your car. Rather, it can be a hub for the community, connecting people to the businesses and services,” said Ari Ojalvo. Ojalvo says this could completely transform what people, cities and businesses can expect from parking areas, “…in the same way the introduction of smartphone apps completely changed the way we think about mobile phones.” Reef asserts parking spaces can be repurposed to serve as delivery and activity buffers for high density, high traffic zones. With the explosive growth of the sharing and on-demand economy, Reef – which owns over 5,000 city centre carparks across the US -  expects that the need for parking solely to store cars will be outgrown by other needs, such as delivery hubs, social and recharging zones, distribution centres and even local food kitchens.

“It is within this environment that we have re-imagined the role of a parking facility,” it says. “Parking lots are within walking distance of where most of us live, work and entertain. They have served us very well for a century, keeping our neighborhoods livable by providing useful space in close proximity.” But times have changecd.

The company notes that given declining car ownership, increasing urban delivery capabilities, and changing online buying trends the spaces currently occupied by car parks must adapt if they are to continue to be relevant. “At Reef, we have taken on this challenge by transforming parking facilities to ecosystems that connect people to the goods and services (sustainably),” says the company.

Whilst all this is very laudable, and admirably forward-looking, what is the company actually doing? It is working to change the usage patterns of parking spaces into hubs that can offer a collection of businesses and services specific to the needs of neighborhoods – such as parcel collection hubs, mobile kitchen and food pickup spots, temporary sales outlets and electric car recharge points. All of which will benefit the locality instead of sitting like empty blights for twelve hours a day.

Delivery giant DHL has already teamed up with Reef to site electric delivery bikes on one of its newly designated park/hubs. As part of DHL’s GoGreen push to reduce its carbon footprint, the use of Reef-based e-Cargo Cycle will allow the removal of one conventional delivery van from the fleet so reducing traffic, noise and pollution while still providing fast efficient deliveries for customers. 

“We are thrilled to be leveraging the Reef ecosystem with these new environmentally-friendly vehicles not only to support our emissions-reduction efforts, but also to significantly reduce challenges associated with urban business deliveries,” says DHL Express CEO Greg Hewitt. He maintains the new localized service will improve safety, productivity and costs as well as cutting its environmental footprint and efforts to promote sustainable city living.

Another potential use is for fast, local food delivery and preparation. What it calls Reef  Kitchens, food preparation vans housed in proprietary containers, can be shipped in and dropped ready to cook in almost any carpark. Each is capable of accommodating up to five kitchens or eateries, Similar kitchens have successfully run in London, and plans are on hand to open several hundred more in North America and the U.K. Being centrally situated, they will also be perfectly placed to feed demand from the multitude of new food delivery services such as Deliveroo, DoorDash, and Grubhub, with couriers based on site so deliveries will reach customers quicker and fresher than before.

Reef has also signed provisional deals with electric bike and scooter rental companies, on-demand drone air-taxi businesses, and peer-to-peer car rentals. The company has even looked at hosting existing businesses like car detailing and maintenance at its parks. 

“Our urban mobility hub concept will future-proof our parking structures, while also addressing many of the  major obstacles all cities face: congestion, pollution, high costs for businesses to expand, and residents’ growing desire for their goods and services to be delivered quickly,” says the company.

With such a large and connected network of parking real estate, Reef says it can offer ‘Proximity as a Service’ to customers and clients, and at the same time help clean up and make city centres more livable. Better than a windswept, empty carpark any day.