Finding a parking space is often hard. Lets do the math and then the psychology to figure out why.There are 265 million registered vehicles in the USA and each of them has at least three parking places and maybe as many as ten. If you doubt this number think of yourself. You have one at home, one at the office and one at the mall. The discrepancy between three and ten shows how little real study has gone into this problem. But using these numbers and being conservative there are a billion parking places in the country. And you still can’t find one.

From a space standpoint it comes to about 5000 square miles of parking places which sounds like a lot but is less than two tenths of one percent of the country. I could compare it to the interstates or the National Parks, but that would require more work and still wouldn’t find you a parking place.

But I do know why you can’t find a parking place. It is because you are a human and so you have a mammalian clock that says among other things you should eat at dusk so the parking lots at the restaurants are full at 6:30. We are basically herding mammals so we mostly all go to work at the same time and to the mall at the same time. And of course this is all exacerbated by service providers scheduling things when we are most likely to want them. So on to the solution.

The way to find always find a parking place is to be counter cyclical. Shop late go to the movies early eat you big meal in mid afternoon.  Or just park in the far corners of the lot and learn to enjoy walking.

Parking problems are the poster children of First World Problems.