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Am I misunderstanding something here but that just seems like a wild overexaggeration? As far as I'm aware the average car does not take up even 100sqft, never mind several hundred. A large parking space is about 160sqft...
A reasonably sized sedan might only be something like 7 x 16 feet, but parking spaces take up more area than that, and the car is using all of that space. Based on my googling, a space in the US can be upwards of 10 x 24 feet = 240 square feet total. It's often less, although 160 is not particularly large.
Under the Intl. Zoning Code (not necessarily widely adopted, but still a reasonable indicator of common US practice), a normal perpendicular space is 9 ft × 20 ft (180 ft²), while a parallel space is 8 ft × 22 ft (176 ft²) and a "compact" perpendicular space is 8 ft × 18 ft (144 ft²).
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I'd bet they're counting the parking space and also all the infrastructure required to get to the parking space. I could believe "several hundred" in that context.
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