Flying as a guest in a friend’s light aircraft I was impressed by the huge amount of land devoted to vehicles as opposed to other uses. My observations begged the question: after highways, freeways, boulevards, avenues, streets, lanes, on/off ramps, parking lots and spaces, driveways, garages, repair shops, sales lots, (excluding underground, mid-building and rooftop spaces for storage or repair of vehicles) has been accounted for, what percentage of our civil environment remains for housing, recreational, governmental, commercial, and industrial use?
Roads don’t use up that much space
There are approximately 400 million metres of tarmacked road in the UK. The area of the UK is approx 250K square kilometres or 250 billion square metres. Roads vary in width wildly, so assume roads are 10 metres wide on average. That gives us 4 billion square metres. 1.6%. So be generous and call it 2%
Well, lets take as an example my block (in the central residential area of a major urban area, Minneapolis Minnesota, platted and annexed to the city 100* years ago).
The block has 14 lots, each 40’ wide by 127’ long = 5080 sq. ft each, 71,120 sq ft total of residential space. But each has at least the back 12 ft devoted to a garage & parking area, which uses up 480 sq ft each, total 6,720 for the whole block face. So that leaves only 64,400 sq ft of house & yard & garden as residential space.
The street in front of the block is 48 ft wide (half for our side) is 24 ft x 1834 ft long = 22,008 sq ft of frontage street. At each end of the block is a side street 56 ft wide (28 ft for our side) by 127 ft long = 3,556 sq ft. Plus in back there is a 16 ft wide alley (8 ft for our side) by 1834 ft long = 14,672 sq ft.
So the totals are:
- residential space…64,400 sq ft
- frontage street…22,008 sq ft
- side streets… 3,556 sq ft
- alley space…14,672 sq ft
- total vehicle space…40,236 sq ft = 38% of the space in my neighborhood devoted to vehicle travel or parking. This is strictly a residential neighborhood, so it doesn’t include any space for gas stations, auto repair shops, new/used car dealers, parking lots, etc. In commercial neighborhoods, they will take up a good deal of space. In suburban areas, the percentage would be smaller, since they mostly don’t have alleys, and have larger lots.
I guess that number will vary a lot with the type of location you are seeing. Modern suburban areas will probably be the highest with all those parking lots, wide avenues, etc. Old city centers might be a lot lower with narrow streets, underground garages, etc. Rural areas even lower (unless you think of arable land as tractor roads)
Does “civil environment” mean incorporated town/city limits or is the entire country up for grabs?
If it’s the latter then (in the USA at least) the percentage of land covered by manmade materials would be totally and completely dwarfed by the percentage of exposed natural land.
Flying over a busy town is one thing; flying over the vast thinly populated parts of Montana or Wyoming is a different thing.
On a side note, the first time I flew in to my home state of New Jersey I had the opposite reaction the OP did: I was stunned at how much green there was—we were approaching Newark, the very definition of urban, and though I was expecting the concrete wasteland to begin at the state line, there was still lots of green everywhere.
This is because of all the trees planted in our cities, while the countryside is planted fields.
Here in Minneapolis, the forest in the city is probably larger than it was when this was unsettled land 200 years ago.