Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

Just as license plate readers and cameras had eliminated the hassle of tollbooths, new technology was emerging that could make paying for parking just as seamless. Don Shoup had proposed the idea in a Times op-ed in 2018, noting that the city’s three million on-street spaces were 97 percent free and covered 6 percent of New York’s land mass. Seventeen square miles of land. Thirteen Central Parks. Pricing just half those spaces at $5.50 a day, Shoup calculated, would raise an astounding $3 billion a year, enough to bond a new subway line. The $5.50 number was not incidental—that was the cost of a round-trip subway fare. Yaruss took up the idea in 2019 with an op-ed in the New York Daily News that made a radical proposal: trade free parking for free transit. By metering all the city’s parking spots at $6 a day, he reasoned, the city would raise as much as the nation’s busiest mass transit system collected in fares each year. The estimate was conservative, since a free transit system could also abandon all the expensive machinery of fare collection (or continue to charge for commuter railroads)—and the costs of prosecuting fare beaters. It was progressive, since New York drivers were wealthier and whiter than their counterparts on the subways and buses. It was even, Yaruss dared to suggest, an idea that regular drivers (the gigging bass player, the locksmith, the UPS guy) might grow to like, since it would clear the curbs of all those cars that were used only a few times a mo...