World Car Free Day 2019: 80,000 homes could be built on London car parking spaces within a mile of a Tube or train station

Privately owned parked cars occupy £172 billion-worth of London land on which homes could be built, according to a new report being launched at the World Car Free Day summit. 
In the car-free vanguard: homes at 10 Park Drive in Canary Wharf come with bike storage and electric vehicle charging points, supporting the clean air drive
Anna White18 September 2019

Parked cars take up two per cent of space in London — land worth £172 billion on which much-needed homes could be built.

A report being launched at the World Car Free Day London Summit on Friday will reveal that privately owned parked cars occupy 3,195 hectares — just shy of 7,900 acres — of the capital, whether on drives or on the street.

In a ranking of the top 10 biggest European cities, London came fourth behind Paris, Madrid and Vienna for space taken up by parked cars. Across all 10 cities, the total real estate taken up was valued at £1 trillion.

There are 868 car parks in London within a mile of a train or Tube station, 400 of which are owned by local authorities, and on which 80,000 new homes could be built, the research also shows.

Nick Whitten of JLL, author of the report titled The Direction of Travel for Automotive Real Estate, suggests the privately owned car could be replaced by the greener alternative of on-demand car pooling and public transport to reduce air pollution. “A bit like a shared Uber system or buses that change route depending on where you are,” he says.

The space currently used for cars parked along the roadside could then be utilised to widen cycle lanes or for linear parks, canals or tree trenches — long sunken beds that take excess rainwater to feed plants — he explains, while car parks could be converted with homes for new communities.

Although the summit takes place on Friday at UCL, the official World Car Free Day is on Sunday, when more than 12 miles of streets in central London will be closed to all traffic including Tower Bridge and much of the City.

Eighteen boroughs are organising “play streets” events where residents and the council create safe spaces on the streets for children to play.

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