Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

by Henry Grabar

The country builds more three-car garages than one-bedroom apartments. More square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.

By some estimates there are as many as six parking spaces for every car, meaning that our national parking stock is never more than 17 percent occupied.

Everyone wants parking to be convenient, available, and free. But the forces of time, space, and money conspire in such a way that no thriving place can meet more than two of the three parking needs.

for all the talk about roads and cars, every vehicle spends an estimated 95 percent of its life span parked.

By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.

The first was dynamic, demand-based pricing at downtown parking meters to free up spaces, charging for curb parking based on its availability.

The second was an end to the parking-minimum laws that required new parking spots in every new or renovated building.

Parking requirements helped trigger an extinction-level event for bite-sized, infill apartment buildings like row houses, brownstones, and triple-deckers; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021.

Despite the cranes outside your window, the country produced fewer new homes in the 2010s than in any decade since the Second World War.