Coffin burials are the last word in selfishness. You cannot ethically argue for them whatsoever. Parking in many urban areas is limited. If you must park your corporeal remains within precious terra firma in order to appease your silly belief structure, I would appreciate it if you let me park my car above them.
Likewise, if you feel the need to pay respects to those departed remains, by all means go ahead. But instead of Arlington National Cemetery, why not visit Arlington National Catacombs and Parking Facility? A catacomb is simply an underground graveyard. If it was good for early Christians, it's good enough for people today, right?
Let's take back these depressing blights, situated on primo real estate, and make the cities a little more bearable for everyone. If we built a fifteen story parking garage over large city cemeteries, people could opt for public transportation. You'd have less cars on the road and more people at work on time instead of looking for parking. Moods would improve and so would the quality of life on this plane of existence for a change.-- tourist, May 24 2006 (?) Related http://www.weirdnj....ies/_cemetery04.asp [Worldgineer, May 24 2006] Graves would be less wasteful of space if the spaces were reused after, say 100 years. They only stopped doing this in England as a plague prevention measure following the 1665 outbreak.-- hippo, May 24 2006 why not get burried in your car? Two problems with one solution.-- xenzag, May 24 2006 //Convert cemeteries into parking garages//
Over my dead body.-- skinflaps, May 24 2006 "There's a body in the trunk of my car."
Good one, Skin.
I haven't seen many places where this would be a useful conversion of purpose. (Where are you, Tourist?) There was a cemetary in Seattle that was right next to a park-and-ride facility, very close to SeaTac airport.
Otherwise, yes, cemetaries are morbid wastes of space. I wouldn't be caught dead in one.-- baconbrain, May 24 2006 Parking lots are a horrible, ugly waste of real estate too! Can't we knock those down and use the land to build affordable accommodation allowing people to live and work in the same locale, negating the requirement for all the pollution and waste that goes along with the outmoded form of transport that we've become fixated on for the last century or so? It's time to move on.-- zen_tom, May 24 2006 Quote: "Coffin burials are the last word in selfishness"... I'd suggest perhaps the motor car is in fact the last word in selfishness. Perhaps if we were to choose the time of our own demise and enact it by driving our cars into the ocean, this might help the surviving population by reducing the number of cars and the number of us idiots, and also by returning the matter from which we and our cars are made to the earth. Very dead fish.-- Twizz, May 24 2006 I'm expect cinemas would be showing Car of the Living Dead within months-- hidden truths, May 24 2006 I already drive on a mortuway.-- reensure, May 24 2006 Have to fish this one, being somewhat of a conservationist. In jurisdictions that don't care if there's no green left, at least there's cemeteries... and golf courses.
//Land is for the living,// not the automobiles, //dammit.//-- Shz, May 24 2006 How about building a parking garage that is raised about 2 stories or so off the ground, you would only need a few concrete pillars in the middle of the cemetery. This way you could still have your grass and grave stones etc...-- BJS, May 24 2006 "If we built a fifteen story parking garage over large city cemeteries, people could opt for public transportation."
So they drive to the parking garage and then take public transport from there? Why not just take PT from close to their homes?
Why the desire to wipe out some of the few remaining green areas within a city?
If you want to car pool to work or get public transport in goto work at a location that supports it, like www.thistlelanding.com for instance.-- Falcon80, May 24 2006 If we all (try www.thistlelanding.com) look for ways to (it's really cool for office space) advertise our wares on the (they have great support services) halfbakery, this site is going to become (alternatively, www.coopercrossing.com) very annoying. Please take your advertising elsewhere [Falcon80].-- methinksnot, May 24 2006 None the less, I think this makes sense, underground burials would stop large amounts of space being taken up for little reason. At the least stack the coffins verticly, so as to reduce the amount of space needed for each one.-- Germanicus, May 25 2006 I'd rather have a well-maintained park bearing the memories of generations past than urban sprawl for people to park their SUV's in.-- jellydoughnut, May 27 2006 random, halfbakery