How Parking Explains the World

If you own a car, you need to park it somewhere. This is so embedded in American culture that Seinfeld has at least three episodes about parking, including the Parking Garage and the Parking Space. As cars have proliferated, so have parking lots and garages, parking regulations and advanced tech. "Parking lies at the intersection of transportation and land-use, a bastard field of study shunned by both architects and traffic engineers,” writes author Henry Grabar, who proves an adept driver navigating this complex topic.

A book about parking regulations doesn't exactly scream page turner. Grabar has a journalist's flair for creating a narrative about people, rather than boring statistics, to explain how parking requirements subsidize car ownership, increase the cost while reducing the supply of housing, intensify traffic congestion, pollute the air and water, limit walkability in cities, degrade urban design, hinder the economy, penalize those who don't own a car, and accelerate global warming. In effect, people who cannot afford to own a car pay higher prices for food so richer drivers can park for free at the grocery store.

“Paved Paradise” opened my eyes to just how profoundly parking itself has contributed to the depressing blight of urban life, creating, “a super-mundane environment that people just want to move through.” The author notes a disconcerting fact about “The Sims” videogame, which tried to simulate the world as accurately as possible but had to cut back dramatically on the size of parking lots in its simulated city. An accurate visual representation was too grim and overwhelming for gamers to enjoy.

The high cost of free parking

The unseen costs of parking are enormous, going far beyond quarters fed to the meter and garage fees. Building on Donald Shoup’s 2005 The Hidden Cost of Free Parking, Grabar argues that if you look at parking as a use of land, we have it backward. In expensive cities, the most desired parking, curbside, is free or nearly free, while the least desired parking, in garages, is expensive. That leads to drivers incentivized to circle the block seeking an open space.

Referring to the 97% of curb parking spaces in New York City that are unmetered (free), Grabar notes, "This is some of the most expensive land in the world. And you can have it for free, provided you use it for just one thing: parking".

There is a ton of environmental damage due to reducing so much land mass to asphalt lots, such as: (1) greenhouse gas emissions from a construction, (2) loss of natural land to suburban development, (3) the urban heat island effect, (4) increased flooding, (5) water pollution from runoff from roads and parking lots, and (6) decreased groundwater absorption.

When parking is easily available, more people drive. (On the flip side, one study found that when employers stopped providing or subsidizing free parking, over 25% of employees stopped driving to work.) Increased driving leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions, ground level air pollution, and car crashes and injuries.

Walkable cities

It's mentioned in passing that one reason so many Americans are nostalgic for college campus life is that it’s one of the few times that they’ve lived in a walkable setting. On a real college campus, however, parking is more fraught. Most community colleges don’t have dorms, and even those that do typically only house a small fraction of their student body. Mass transit options in the United States are sorely lacking, especially outside large cities. Some colleges use parking as a revenue stream, separating lots by status (faculty parking, student parking, etc.) and relying on tickets to pay the bills.

many Americans want to live in walkable areas. Just look at where the most expensive places to live in the country tend to be: the dense, walkable, city neighborhoods.

Parking minimums maximums

Grabar dives into the history of parking regulations with gusto. Many of the parking requirements that we see enforced by zoning codes today were created by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the ITE, in the 1980s. They assumed that every building creates car trips, and all projects and streets and parking should be designed and constructed according to this science of trip generation. Also assumed was the instruction that commercial parking lots should be built to accommodate some of the busiest days that that commercial area might ever see, such as a Saturday before Christmas.

The parking requirements assumed that all homeowners could afford cars, wanted to pay for parking them, and that they preferred their cars to other modes of transportation. Big assumptions, all around. Then, by building so much parking, more people drove, or felt they had to; people became trapped in a cycle of automobile dependency.

What can be done?

Grabar recommends some obvious policy changes, most of which involve de-prioritizing parking in land use and trying to get parking prices right. Make curbside parking expensive, and people will be more willing to pay for garages, thereby reducing traffic from people circling blocks looking for spaces. More will also switch to alternative transit options or e-bikes, depending on their situation. Reducing the parking ratios required for stores, restaurants and the like can make for denser development, which makes places more walkable. Grabar even detours into housing policy, noting that laws to allow large-scale conversion of garages into Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) in California represents a badly needed shift from housing cars to housing people.

One upside of the mess that parking requirement have created is an accidental land reserve available for conversion from asphalt for cars to space for people. If (when?) city planners renounce parking requirements, America can reclaim land roughly equal to the size of the Netherlands. That potential is enormous, from parklets and outdoor seating to full dining sheds. Covid-19 showed a promise of what reclaiming some of that land from cars can bring to a city. We cannot change the past, but we can change the future, and in Paved Paradise Henry Grabar shows us a way ahead.

Like Shoup before him, Grabar’s prose, sense of humor, and penchant for storytelling help to bring the subject alive— indeed, he may have written the first (and only) parking page-turner. His book is a useful survey of the state of parking, rich with amusing stories and timely data. The text is accompanied by illustrations by Alfred Twu, the de facto artist of the YIMBY movement playfully depicting the themes of the book.

About the author

Henry Grabar is a staff writer at Slate who writes about housing, transportation, and urban policy. He has contributed to The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Wall Street Journal, and was the editor of the book The Future of Transportation. He received the Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for excellence in national reporting by journalists under thirty-five.