As a matter of fact, most people go to work by car, do a weekly shop by car, drive to the seaside etc. In outer urban areas, people drive to the station by car and do "park and ride". And once I moved out to "the countryside", i.e. Zone 5, I soon realised that public transport or walking is totally impractical.
There is a temptation to somehow see car parks in urban areas as a something secondary, a bit of a sad waste of space or something squidged into the little gaps or on bomb sites, and some of them are genuinely ugly, just a patch of cracked asphalt with a meter or two. Others look quite nice, with little strips of shrubs and trees or surfaced with those little bricks which let the water drain off, I've even seen some with playgrounds, where Dad can take the kids while Mum finishes the shopping.
For some reason, many people have a romantic fascination with trains, train stations and harbours. There are some people who are "train spotters" and the architecture of many larger train stations is very impressive, be it Victorian Gothic ironwork or something flash and modern and underground. It's nice to sit in a restaurant overlooking the harbour watching the boats come and go. But nobody says "Ooh, what a lovely car park!" or advertises a flat by saying "Uninterrupted views over the car park".
Let's take the world as it actually is; on industrial estates at the edge of town, it is not unusual for three-quarters of the area to be used for employees' parking. With retail estates, the area of the car park is usually at least half the total area. Here's one a few miles down the road from me, which has lots of little trees and shrubberies and used to have a nice little playground next to the Burger King:
.The matter is more complicated with the really big shopping centres (or airports), the amount of parking space has to equal total shop space, but nobody wants to walk two miles across a car park, so they build multi-storey car parks (the car park is usually as high as the shopping centre itself), which are impressive in engineering terms but not nice places to be. Interestingly, airports make as much money from parking charges as they do from landing and take off fees, allegedly.
But car parks are vitally important if you want to "rejuvenate the town centre" (above and beyond collecting taxes from the rental value of land and not turnover or wages, and with LVT, there is all the more incentive to rejuvenate them, because that means more revenues, natch). One of the reasons people give for shopping "out of town" is that it is easier and cheaper to park your car.
So maybe one solution to declining town centres would be to knock down half the shops and build a multi-storey car park instead. Remember, the rental value of shops is limited by the amount of easily available parking spaces nearby; and the rental value of car parks is limited by the number of shops, places of work etc in the vicinity. Whether that rental value is collected directly with parking charges, or whether parking is "free" and the shops pay higher rents comes to the same thing.
So a town centre with just shops and no parking can never grow beyond "just enough for the daily or weekly needs of people within walking distance", if these people want more than that, they have to drive elsewhere. And a town centre with just a huge car park and no shops is pointless as well. It's a question of finding a balance, and as a rule of thumb, equal areas of car parks and of shops seems "about right".
Of course, if you think about it, nice looking car parks could be the "village green" for towns in the motoring age. You can use them for other stuff at weekends, like public events, Jubilee parties, demonstrations, outdoor concerts, fun fairs, car free days with a bouncy castle and face painting etc. Though of course, you'd need to organise public transport to those events :b
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