The World’s Largest Car Parks?
Wednesday, 29th April 2009 by Ian Brown
While many malls, theme parks and stadiums may boast large car parks, most pale in comparison to car storage facilities like the one at the former RAF base in Upper Heyford, Oxfordshire.
After 43 years of service to British and US forces, the base was closed in 1993. Today the runways, taxiways and stands are home to countless1 thousands of cars and other vehicles. Just off the main runway we can even see a transport truck delivering or removing some vehicles.
Further west, Royal Portbury Dock in Bristol handles well over half a million vehicles every year, with areas dedicated to many of the major car manufacturers.
Many of the vehicles have white plastic covers to protect the bodywork during shipping. And on the quayside cars are being loaded onto a ship for transport.
Although there's always one person who doesn't read the memo about colour-coordinated parking, isn't there?
In the port of Vancouver we find a similar operation, with the north-eastern end of Annacis Island serving as a rail / sea terminal for vehicles.
We see rail cars and a ship with ramps deployed to receive or unload vehicles.
And again, there's always one...
Where are the largest car parks in your part of the world?
Thanks to Gareth Smart and Fabio Ferrari.
-
Unless somebody wants to count them? ↩︎
About the author
Ian Brown lives in Ottawa, Canada, and spends his spare time perusing maps to find new routes to ride on his orange bicycle.
In Germany there is quite a big shipping harbour in Bremerhaven:
View Placemark
The color-coordinated parking seems to work quite well ;-).
Would that covered bridge going over the tracks in Bremerhaven be a candidate for worlds longest covered bridge?
Quite an apt suggestion from Fabio Ferrari… 🙂
Jeff: It’s a strong contender – but Hartland Bridge seems to be a tiny bit longer – and is the -self-proclaimed – world’s longest.
My quick googleing at least didn’t uncover anything longer.
That number of cars certainly dwarfs the quantity of Chrysler’s stored on the Downsview airbase site in Toronto, although the primary runway is still used by the neighbouring Bombardier/DeHavilland plant.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Allen+Rd.,+Toronto,+ON&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=43.172547,57.216797&ie=UTF8&ll=43.742608,-79.462169&spn=0.004829,0.006984&t=h&z=17
Just in the last few weeks though, all the cars have been taken away. Already repossessed by Chrysler liquidators?
Worlds largest? Frequently the M6 just north of Birmingham. But seriously, aren’t there some down near Dover that have recently become huge – a response to the precipitous drop in car sales over recent months.
Amazing the coincidence — look at the first photo in today’s Big Picture in the Boston (MA) Globe:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/human_landscapes_from_above.html
4703 new cars getting shredded from a lot like these
On the border of Portland, OR, USA View Placemark
A while back a container ship tipped over, some huge degree of an angle and sat that way for weeks while a special crew tried to fix the problem, the ship was valuable and not quite lost. Wired has the amazing story of how they saved it http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-03/ff_seacowboys?currentPage=all#
Little known to me I was working for months next to the lot where they offloaded the cars once the ship was saved. I saw all these new cars parked in the lot (I walked to the river next to it) and wondered why they all looked they had already been either randomly hit or windows were broken. I figured vandals. Wired says the cars were offloaded and Mazda didn’t want to sell them because they had no idea how cars sitting at that angle for weeks would effect the long term life. The risk wasn’t worth it so 4,703 Mazda’s were all ground up in a HUGE shredder.
unless the maps have been updated these are those cars before they were shredded View Placemark
oh and as a bonus, check out the shoreline next to the lot for the skeletons of old wooden ships.
The largest car parks in my part of the world has to be the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. They seem to be the same port but are seperate.
LA https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=33.769373,-118.252115&z=17
Long Beach https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=33.776213,-118.223319&z=17
There are even Combine harvesters in LA
https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=33.769618,-118.251509&z=19
Also, I would think that Disneyland has one of the largest parking structures. https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=33.814739,-117.924553&z=17
View Placemark
Grimsby Docks
In little Rhode Island, the former Quonset Naval Air Station in North Kingstown is home to an underutilized container port. Most of these are VW’s and Audi’s.
View Placemark
Talk about timeliness! This was the Big Picture for today:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/04/human_landscapes_from_above.html
Not sure how it measures up, but this is Livorno:
https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=43.57565,10.327899&z=16
For you anglophiles, that would be Leghorn
Ok, so I want to know which one is the largest by vehicle parking area. Too bad the free version of GE will only let you measure lines and not area.
Montreal’s got a fairly large one — not sure on Area / Mi2 how it compares….
View Placemark
Port of Zeebrugge, Belgium. I didn’t count all the cars on all your submissions, but the Zeebrugge car handling operations seem to be bigger. Unfortunately, you’ll have to check on Live Search Maps, Google Eearth doesn’t cover our neck of the woods in hi-res…
Cheers