Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

Everyone wants parking to be convenient, available, and free. But the forces of time, space, and money conspire in such a way that no thriving place can meet more than two of the three parking needs.

Drivers take 21 percent longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting, as if their holding is suddenly worth more once someone else wants it, and that very desire enhances their sense of power and control. They wait 33 percent longer if the arriving driver honks.

At airports, parking sometimes brings in more money than aviation itself. (Not having a proper mass transit connection can be good business.)

In the seven years that followed her parking ticket, the woman was arrested twice. She spent six days in jail. By the end of 2014, she had wound up paying the court $550 but still owed $541. All for a parking ticket. Counterintuitively, this state of affairs is exacerbated by cheap or free parking, which creates the supply constraints that make it necessary to break the rules, and haphazard enforcement, which requires cities to impose big fines to have any deterrent effect at all. When meter systems are working well, enforcement revenue goes down, because people can always find a place to park.

Even before COVID-19, 46 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds lived with their parents. After COVID-19, that figure rose to 52 percent—the highest mark since the Great Depression.

The history of ice cream truck rivalries is bloody. In 1969, armed rivals held up two Mister Softee garages in Brooklyn and the Bronx, taking nothing but the vital blender blades from thirty-nine trucks—rendering them useless before the blockbuster Fourth of July weekend. (In East New York, an accomplice also kidnapped a Mister Softee driver and blew up his truck.) In 2004, a pair of Bronx seniors selling ice cream with their fifteen-year-old granddaughter were left in critical condition after a former apprentice beat them with a wrench over a route dispute. “A route is money,” the couple’s fourteen-year-old grandson coolly observed.

Why hadn’t these trucks been booted long ago? Because, the city alleged, their owners traded them for token prices, as little as $200, between scores of shell companies. One ice cream truck, which racked up $219,000 in unpaid fines between 2010 and 2017, was traded twelve times between thirteen different shell companies, adopting thirteen different license plates in the process. Each time, the truck would be transferred before the city could collect.