Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

Whoever said life was about the journey and not the destination never had to look for a place to park.

Even car-friendly engineers never believed that Americans would abandon mass transit the way they did.

There are 15 million parking spots in the Bay Area, 2.4 for each car and enough to wrap a parking lane around the planet twice and still have some left over.

Transportation is America’s largest source of greenhouse gases, with drivers in Texas alone accounting for half of 1 percent of global carbon emissions.

Parking built into houses and apartments is a greater predictor of car use than density, transit, or any other neighborhood attribute.

The American modernist Louis Sullivan said form follows function; Don Shoup said form follows parking requirements.

“In Florida, parking will wipe out anything that’s historic. Everything is so new, cheap, fast, and when everything is cut-copy, it creates this super-mundane environment people just want to move through.” This was not snobbery, she insisted, but conscious design on the part of her clients, whose corporate strategy called for a frictionless shopping experience.

Transportation planning was really behavioral psychology.

Despite the cranes outside your window, the country produced fewer new homes in the 2010s than in any decade since the Second World War.

As the focus of city planning shifted from quality of life to equity, I could see how free parking could serve as a consolation prize for residents who had been pushed into the car-dependent periphery. Not to lure them, as in Victor Gruen’s day, but to offer them a small recompense for our inability to give them a home here.