When I seek a parking spot near my local grocery store, I am brought face to face with a form of sprawl. While I am not one to drive around for long looking for a parking spot (it seems a waste of time and energy), I find myself dealing with a simple form of sprawl: parking spots occupied or blocked by shopping carts. The parking spots can't serve their intended purpose because someone has left behind an underuse.
Previous shoppers have left shopping carts about, instead of returning them to the corrals or the store itself. They create unusable parking spots, and force me to walk -- and drive -- further than would otherwise be necessary.
Sometimes there is one straddling two parking spots, one of which would otherwise be available for me to park in. Depending on the width of the parking spot and how far back in the spot the cart is sitting, I may be able to get my car into the spot and get out of it without chipping my paint.
Sometimes the shopping cart is left in the middle of the parking spot, and either I must get out of my car to move it, or simply keep going.
I find a parking spot, and walk back past the offending shopping cart. Usually, I'll take it into the store with me, or move it to a cart corral. And when I leave the store, I'll again walk past that parking spot, forced to commute further to where I could find parking for my car.
I'm pretty good about returning my cart to a corral, though in some of the lots, the positioning of the cart corrals is a puzzlement:
A cart is an underuse of a parking spot. A motorcycle or bicycle is not. Either one of the latter represents a shopper.
Working outward from this little microcosm, how do we structure ourselves more logically, to avoid sprawl? We create incentives for people to put land to good use; to clean up after themselves when they're finished using a site and make it available to the next person. We'll spend less time and energy commuting, and create less pollution. Let's get the incentives right, for the common good.
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