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It has become the organizing principle of American architecture, from the parking-first design of the strip mall to office towers that sit like sculptures atop their garage pedestals to the house itself, where the garage is often the largest room and the dominant feature of the facade.
Parking determines the size, shape, and cost of new buildings, the fate of old ones, the patterns of traffic, the viability of mass transit, the life of public space, the character of neighborhoods, the state of the city budget, our whole spread-out life in which it is virtually impossible to live without an automobile.
In 2006, the bicycle and pedestrian advocacy group Transportation Alternatives conducted a citywide survey of placard use. Three in four holders were using their permits illegally. Fully half of the cars parked illegally belonged to police officers. When the car was a safety hazard, it was a police officer’s personal vehicle 61 percent of the time.
one woman spoke for a nation when she said she bought a car before she had installed indoor plumbing, because “you can’t go to town in a bathtub.”
“The greatest problem has been with the merchants, lawyers, stenographers, clerks and the professional class in general, who are always using the streets for parking as long as they wish.”
By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.
an automobile needs 1400 square feet of living space. That is equal to the living space of a family unit.”
Transportation is America’s largest source of greenhouse gases, with drivers in Texas alone accounting for half of 1 percent of global carbon emissions.
because no one wants to walk more than two blocks for a parking space, parking operators are granted an oligopoly by default, with only a few choices available at a given location. “We’d never admit this,” admitted Jim Huger,
Local businesses found that parking spots were suddenly available for customers and deliveries. Restaurant workers used free parking on side streets instead of parking right in front of their workplaces. Downtown parkers found it easier to swallow garage prices, instead of blocking traffic by searching endlessly for openings at the curb.
Shoup’s radical doctrine: there is too much parking, and it’s too cheap.
You paid for parking with every breath of dirty air, in the flood damage from the rain that ran off the fields of asphalt, in the higher electricity bills from running an air conditioner through the urban heat-island effect, in the vanishing natural land on the outskirts of the city.
parking scholar Todd Litman calls “the cycle of automobile dependency,” in which car-centric transportation requires car-centric land use, which requires car-centric transportation, and so on.
In virtually every U.S. city, the most expensive neighborhood is a prewar, mixed-use streetcar suburb that would be illegal to build today.
“Rigid enforcement of the 2½ parking space requirement [for each unit],” a U.S. District Court concluded in 1980, “is one of the ways in which Parma has been able to keep all low-income housing out of the community.”
genuine, normie anger
In the Bronx, the Yankees threatened to move the team out of New York if the city didn’t provide two thousand extra parking spots along with the team’s new, smaller stadium, which sits at the intersection of three busy train lines. The city acquiesced, issuing $237 million in tax-exempt bonds to expand the parking system, paving over the neighborhood’s last regulation baseball diamonds to do so. By 2020, the garage was so underused that the concessionaire was bankrupt and owed the city more than $133 million.
The high cost of getting a car for each adult has created a cottage industry of subprime auto loans—high-interest, long-term debt.
dealers now make more money on loan interest and insurance than they do selling cars.
Charlotte had the urban form of a Triscuit atop a plate of spaghetti.
More than half of all trips in the U.S. were under three miles.
half of all trips could be accomplished on foot, on a bike, or on a small electric vehicle, if roads were designed for that kind of travel.
The history of ice cream truck rivalries is bloody. In 1969, armed rivals held up two Mister Softee garages in Brooklyn and the Bronx, taking nothing but the vital blender blades from thirty-nine trucks—rendering them useless before the blockbuster Fourth of July weekend.
Neighborhood Facebook groups, meanwhile, asked if they could do away with fire hydrants to create more parking. Starving for parking? Why not die in a house fire too?)
Like Amsterdam, Paris suddenly moved beyond a point of comparison. You didn’t need to take very many parking spaces to transform a city.
