Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

The flaw in Gruen’s downtown designs, and indeed most machinations of postwar urban planners, was that they tried to compete with suburbia on its terms: by offering a calm, clean, single-use shopping destination that could be easily accessed by car. At that point, suburbanites might as well have gone to Southdale or Northland. And so they did.

Urban renewal projects targeted dilapidated but lively residential and commercial blocks for demolition. In their stead came car-oriented malls, office towers, and apartments. Some projects succeeded, some failed. All aimed to satisfy the expectation of easy driving and parking at the center of the city.

“The effect of the cars reaches far beyond the cars themselves,” wrote Christopher Alexander in A Pattern Language, his landmark study of human landscapes. “They create a maze of driveways, garage doors, asphalt, and concrete surfaces, and building elements which people cannot use. When the density goes beyond the limit, we suspect that people feel the social potential of the environment has disappeared.”

By the end of the 1960s, the emerging consensus was that we would never be able to build enough parking to restore the vigor of the prewar metropolis. In retrospect, the focus on parking as the key to ensuring downtown’s survival seems perverse.

Ground-level air pollution causes hundreds of thousands of deaths every year and is linked to a number of public health problems including lower test scores in children and Alzheimer’s disease in older adults. Sprawling settlement patterns are associated with higher levels of obesity. Cars crashes are the leading killer of young Americans and injure three million of us every year—including many pedestrians and cyclists, among whom minorities and low-income Americans bear the brunt of the damage. Not surprisingly, car-centric environments lead to the most injuries for both drivers and pedestrians.

Sprawl is built on a foundation of law (redlining, zoning, impunity for vehicular crimes) and government subsidy (highways, tax breaks, cheap oil) too vast and complex to diagram here.[*] But within that labyrinth of incentives, parking policy is both powerful and easy to reach. If you want lower emissions and fewer car accidents, parking is the place to start. It’s not the only way to get fewer people to drive. But because every trip ends with a parking space, it’s the easiest. “Control over the availability of parking spaces is a key policy instrument in limiting car trips and for the time being is the most widely available and readily accepted method of doing so,” states the United Kingdom’s Institution of Highways and Transportation.

Americans don’t like to walk. Victor Gruen’s Fort Worth plan set the limit an American driver would walk at two and a half minutes. In 1966, worried planners in Atlanta recorded average walking distance from a parking spot in peer cities: 501 feet in Nashville, 555 feet in Dallas, 478 feet in New Orleans. In other words, the average walking distance from parking spot to destination—the expectation of a walk downtown—was less than two city blocks. The implication was that lots and garages would be needed on every other block. Ironically, the proliferation of parking facilities was not helping this metric; studies have since demonstrated that pedestrians overestimate walking times when they find themselves exposed to a parking crater. A walk down a leafy street of houses and shops isn’t so bad. A walk past six parking garages to run a single errand is less appealing.

Something so simple as putting the parking lot behind the store, so that the front door and windows abutted the sidewalk, represented an unappealing challenge to the status quo.