Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

The “parking shortage” functions as a political cudgel to shut down new business and keep out new neighbors.

need for parking holds an insurmountable power over the decisions we make about the places we live,

is it need for parking or accessibility to shopping/work/public transportation/school

the need for parking is an evergreen retort, straddling the line between a real right of access and a contrived and disingenuous excuse.

Drive till you qualify for a mortgage, and then spend the rest of your life driving to work.

there is no access to nature without parking.

In Texas, beaches are presumed to be parking lots, and local authorities can keep cars off the sand only if they provide a parking space for every fifteen feet of beach closed to traffic.

Neighbors who demand that new projects come with more parking are essentially levying a tax, one that drives up the cost of new homes and stops a countless number from being built at all.

Residents who have chosen to live in older buildings in older neighborhoods depend on the public parking supply and do not want to share it. In these places, parking requirements for new buildings function as a protection racket, forcing new neighbors to pay for what old neighbors get for free on the street.

Commuters often say quickly finding a parking spot is the difference between a good and a bad day.

franeleros who ration out curb parking in Mexico City

In 2020, thousands of illegal parking complaints reported to the NYPD were closed in less than five minutes—meaning, without any investigation.

In city after city, the issue was the same: all-day car storage made the curb useless for the hourly comings and goings that nourished local business.

parking problem is all day parking when people who need parking benefit the area/issue with missed used zoning? no, if zoning was truly mixed use then we wouldnt need cars but what about dt houston more shops than spots

Contemporary analysts thought the root of the traffic problem was parking.

bohemian-intellectual backlash against the suburbs

Federal spending subsidized driving, while cities scrambled to raise enough money to operate bankrupt streetcar companies.

Making parking the private and exclusive responsibility of every individual destination had consequences far more destructive than any double-parked car.

Perhaps most importantly, making it easier to park did not get rid of the life-draining experience of traffic. On the contrary, it created traffic.

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

But the more parking lots cities built, the more people drove.

Flat as a tile and nearly as resistant to water, Houston is the epicenter of the urban flooding epidemic in the United States.

free parking in busy destinations creates shortages, which compel arriving parkers to cruise for spots, which puts hundreds of millions of miles on the road each year, or double-park, which generates traffic congestion.

Because neighbors fear parking shortages and parking laws render urban building sites expensive or simply unworkable, the parking problem acts as a limit on residential and commercial density.

Parking forces us to drive more. The more we drive, the more parking we crave.

The attached garage was a status symbol that implied the owner could afford elevated fire insurance rates. Even in 1919, it was rare enough that a writer could note, “Putting a garage in a house may sound like a joke, but it is not.”

In part, the ice cream truck’s raison d’être was derived from restrictive zoning:

The history of ice cream truck rivalries is bloody.

Parking is access. But it is access of the most superficial sort, one that often papers over deeper inequities we’re unwilling to address.