Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

From behind the wheel, some of those changes—parking spaces vanishing for a bus lane, a row of saplings, a restaurant patio—will be frustrating. But my hope is that drivers will not see those changes only through their windshields, and that making it harder to park might also make it easier not to drive. A world with better parking would allow us to find our feet. Without parking baked into the streets and the architecture, and without fixing the density of residents and the style of commercial activity, how many more people could live in walkable places? How many car-dependent places, freed from parking law, could grow into neighborhoods where people could ride a bike? Where a family with three cars could get by with two and a family with two cars might manage with just one? Where kids could walk to school again?