As John Lennon might sing, “Imagine there’s no parking, It’s easy if you try.” 

In the beginning, parking lots were created to curb chaos on the road. But climate change has turned that dynamic on its head.

Since the 1920s a little-known policy called parking minimums has shaped a large facet of American life. In major cities, this meant that any type of building—apartments, banks, or shopping malls—needed to reserve a certain amount of parking spaces to accommodate anyone who might visit. 

But transportation makes up almost one-third of carbon emissions in the US and cars represent a significant portion of those emissions. As the country attempts to aggressively cut carbon emissions, reducing dependence on fossil fuels will also mean rethinking what transportation and public space look like, especially in cities.

Earlier this month, the city of Austin, Texas, became the latest community to eliminate parking minimums and is now the largest city in the US to do so. “If we want half of all trips to be in something other than a car, then we can’t, as a city, in my opinion, mandate that every home or business have at least one parking space for each resident or customer,” said Zohaib Qadri, the Austin city council member who introduced the measure.

Reducing dependency on cars was a huge push for the initiative in Austin, said Qadri, who hopes the measure also will lead to a more sustainable city.

“Climate change is here,” said Qadri. “And we’re only going to make it worse by clinging to these very climate unfriendly and unsustainable transportation habits of the 20th century.”

Read the whole article: Cities Are Dialing Back Mandatory Minimum Parking Rules

I’ve managed without a car for most of my time in Philadelphia, the only exception being during the period when the idiots in charge made the misbegotten decision to move my place of work to the vast wasteland of Northeast Philadelphia. But I survived that somehow.

And after retiring, I donated the car to charity within a year as it just wasn’t worth the upkeep.

Living in a reasonably densely populated area as I do, I haven’t even had to take a bus ride in the last few years; I can walk to wherever I have to go.