How much space do Montreal's cars take?

There were 783,883 cars registered for personal use on the Island on Montreal in 2022, according to the Société de l'assurance automobile du Québec.

If we imagine one parking space for each of these cars, how much space do they take up?

How big is a parking space? It looks like 8.5 × 18 feet (2.6 × 5.5 m) is fairly common [1, 2, 3, 4].

So, 783,883 cars times 2.6 × 5.5 meters comes to 11,209,527 square meters. In other units, that's 1121 hectares, or 2770 acres.

Let's see that on a map:

That square shows the minimum amount of surface area required to park all the cars registered in the Island of Montreal, as if they were dropped by a giant crane into a parking lot like this:

Of course, more space is dedicated to parking than one spot per car. A recent report estimated that there are, on average, 3.2 to 4.4 parking spots per car in Canada.

Let's see what that looks like on a map. We'll use a figure of 3.8 spots per car, which gives us an area of 4260 hectares: