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Whoever said life was about the journey and not the destination never had to look for a place to park.
The country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments. More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.
We are what we build, first because our buildings are an expression of our values, and second because, in time, those buildings come to set the patterns of our lives.
Transportation is America’s largest source of greenhouse gases, with drivers in Texas alone accounting for half of 1 percent of global carbon emissions.
No clear-cut rain forest could upset an LA liberal more than an endangered bank of parking spaces.
The first was dynamic, demand-based pricing at downtown parking meters to free up spaces, charging for curb parking based on its availability. Shoup wanted San Francisco to create a parking market that would raise prices high enough to ensure free spaces on every block, as opposed to the familiar first-come-first-served system that leads to that lurching style of driving known as “cruising” for a spot—“parking foreplay,” per Shoup—as well as countless altercations.
On Sundays, double-parking during services is the source of constant neighborhood disputes. The rest of the week, churches try to put that surplus parking to use. Some host homeless people who live in their vehicles. At Arizona State University, the local Mormon church offers discounted parking to students if they agree to take a religion class. Parking with the university can cost up to $800 a semester; parking with the Latter-Day Saints costs $15 (plus a bit of your soul).
Meanwhile, the initial function of meters—to impose order on the streets by pricing a scarce resource—was subsumed by a new focus: making money.
Carol Schatz liked to say, “As long as LA is defined by two theme parks, a beach, and a sign, it can’t be a great city.”
Downtown was like a captured village, prisoner to the laws of a conquering tribe of drivers.
A year later, Governor Gavin Newsom abolished parking requirements near transit in California and became the highest-profile politician to elucidate the simple logic behind parking reform. “Basically we’re making it cheaper and easier to build new housing near daily destinations like jobs and grocery stores and schools,” Newsom said in a video he released when he signed the bill. “This means more housing at lower prices closer to walkable neighborhoods and public transit. Again, reducing housing costs for everyday Californians and eliminating emissions from cars. That’s what we call a
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With its tiny, gridded downtown and vast hinterland, Charlotte had the urban form of a Triscuit atop a plate of spaghetti.
And this is far North Plano, suburbia suburbia; the only way you can get here is to drive.
The children’s book The Wind in the Willows offers an early glimpse of the way drivers navigated the terrain. Behind the wheel emerges “Toad at his best and highest, Toad the terror, Toad the traffic queller, the lord of the lone trail, before whom all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting night.”
One of Sadik-Khan’s first steps as transportation commissioner was taking a trip to Copenhagen, where she borrowed an idea for New York: use the parked cars to protect the bike riders. By putting the bike lanes between the sidewalk and the parking lane, you had an instant wall between cyclists and speeding traffic.
The resulting digital map offered vivid proof of the mess, not just in cities but between them: where Romaine Street crossed from Los Angeles to the city of West Hollywood midblock, two-hour free parking during the day and permit parking from 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. changed to unlimited free parking during the day and permit parking from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
