Car Elevators: Not Just for Rich People

In the densest cities in America, cars and people live in a constant competition for space. There’s only so much of it on, say, the island of Manhattan, and every street spot, parking garage and surface lot represents an asset where the city can’t put people (in apartments, offices or parks). This is a messy dilemma – one of the toughest cities face in the 21st century – and it’s complicated by the fact that plenty of these same people want to own cars even as they pay more to house them than they do themselves.

In trying to strike the right balance between the two, cities have a handful of options: There’s the behavioral fix (move more people onto transit or bikes), the engineering fix (build smaller cars), the sharing fix (everyone into a Zipcar!), the zoning fix (limit new parking in the code) and the pricing fix (jack up meter rates).