Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

By simultaneously searching for parking spots themselves and measuring turnover time at the metered curb spots, they could multiply search time by the number of new parkers to obtain an estimate of total time spent looking for parking in the neighborhood. The figure was thirty-five hours every hour. The average cruising distance was a half mile. This single neighborhood, with its fifteen blocks of 470 underpriced meters, was generating 3,600 extra miles of extra driving every single day. A “reserve army of the unparked” in constant circulation. It added up to almost a million miles of driving a year, just looking for parking in one Los Angeles neighborhood. And Shoup and his team couldn’t even count all the Angelenos who, heading for a doctor’s appointment or a movie, drove around the block before settling for a garage. Putting various studies of road use together, Shoup concluded that nearly one third of all the cars in parking-scarce neighborhoods were looking for a place to park. If it takes three minutes to find a parking spot on a block, that block is generating sixty thousand extra driving miles each year. Shoup was like a Renaissance scientist, stumbling on the lost works of the twenties, thirties, and forties where parking was recognized as a complex and vital field of study and the parking meter venerated as a powerful tool.