What if you could rent a place to store a giant pile of your stuff free?

The bad news is: You can. If you own a car, you can park it on the street in many neighborhoods without paying a cent.

Of course, that seems totally normal — but maybe it shouldn't. As Paul Steely White, executive director of the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, points out, streets are actually public space. We think they're a place for cars to drive and sit (mostly sit), because that's what we've gotten used to. His goal is to get us all to think differently.

To that end, his group sponsored a night at the Museum of the City of New York last week, called Streetopia. Hundreds of people visited three floors of exhibits, all showcasing ways to reclaim the city from automobile dominance, such as Barcelona's "superblocks." Choked by traffic, that Spanish city is creating small neighborhoods of maybe three square blocks each and allowing cars to drive only around the perimeter. The chunk of blocks becomes a community — kids can play in the streets again, and bicyclists don't fear cars — while air pollution and noise pollution plummet.

But the starkest, most perspective-changing exhibit was simply time-lapse footage of a typical corner in Manhattan where a bike rental rack sits across from some on-street parking. Over the course of a single day, you see people swarming the bike rack, taking bikes out, bringing them back. For a while, almost all the bikes are gone, and then the rack fills up again, and then off they go. And across the street, taking up twice as much space as the rack, are two cars, just sitting there, parked all day.

You start to realize how much space we have simply ceded to cars and what a waste that is.

"Parking is a finite public resource," says White. That space we think of as the place where cars have a right to sit all day could be used differently. It could be used to expand the sidewalk or make a bike lane. It could be given over to buses. It could become space for businesses to open up cafes or kiosks — and pay taxes on the land. Or it could be planted with grass and turned into a playground. We think of it as "parking" only because we believe that cars have the right to it.

I was talking to a car-owning friend about this, and he said that free parking is no different from free education. Some people don't own cars; some people don't have kids. Our taxes pay for schools and on-street parking anyway.

But streets are not like schools. Streets are public land that we are giving away. Would we let a private citizen build his house in the middle of a park? Of course not, because we recognize the park as something that belongs to all of us. It's time to think of our streets that way.

So then: How do we wrest them back from the car owners?

Some alternatives that have been tried elsewhere are working. London charges a giant premium to drive into its business district, and as a result, traffic (and parking) are down while commerce is not.

Each summer, Paris turns some of its roadways into "beaches," complete with sand and palm trees. Somehow the citoyens survive.

Los Angeles raised its parking meter fees, with the predictable result of cars parking for less time. That means cars are circling for less time, too.

"Streets can be designed for either cars or people, but not both at once," White says.

It's time to stop giving away precious public land.

Lenore Skenazy is the founder of Free-Range Kids, a contributor to Reason.com and the author of "Has the World Gone Skenazy?" To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.