Well, yes. Any use of land would be more rational than using up several acres to park cars. Some of our best farmland is actually being lost to "development." In the Great Plains states, where there is plenty of room and you really DO need a car due to the great distances people need to travel, it probably still makes sense to build huge parking lots. In much of the rest of the country, though, big parking lots are a lot harder to justify, even on purely economic grounds. Here in Seattle, anyone who wants to put up a new building has to build an underground parking structure to go with it, which of course is a huge expense that stops some development in its tracks. It would be a lot better for the local economy if people drove less locally, and just walked, biked, and used mass transit. It would be a lot more pleasant, too. Vancouver, BC, followed the European model for its central areas, and it's now arguably the nicest city in North America.