Paved Paradise Quotes

“By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“One study from 2017 found that U.S. drivers spent, on average, seventeen hours searching for parking every year—$345 per person in wasted time, fuel, and emissions—and the numbers were much higher in big cities.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“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.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“(Car) Dealers no make more money on loan interest and insurance than they do selling cars.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“The country builds more three-car garages than 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.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“Of course, people didn't stop coming to California. Newer, younger, and poorer residents just spilled out away from the coast, into fire-prone forests in the north of the state and scorching deserts in the south. Drive till you quality for a mortgage, and then spend the rest of your life driving to work.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“By 1972, the Detroit City Planning Commission made a downbeat assessment of how the Motor City's downtown had wound up dedicating 74 percent of its land to vehicle movement and storage: "The automobile has an insatiable appetite for space. It needs about 300 square feet when stored in its home quarters; 300 square feet when stored at its pace of destination; and 600 square feet on its way. It further needs about 200 square feet for those places where it is sold, repaired, and serviced. Thus an automobile needs 1400 square feet of living space. That is equal to the living space of a family unit.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“for all the talk about roads and cars, every vehicle spends an estimated 95 percent of its life span parked.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“The desert agglomeration of Phoenix has 12.2 million parking spaces, about 3 per person, 4.3 per vehicle, and 6.6 per job, divided more or less evenly between the street, commercial facilities, and home garages. Parking accounts for 10 percent of the manmade landscape in the Valley of the Sun.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“The general manager of the Cleveland transit system, D. C. Hyde, argued in 1952 that parking was doing the opposite of what its builders believed: “Destroying buildings and using valuable land for more and more parking lots and garages hastens decentralization. . . . It is just as sensible to stop doing things that bring more automobiles into already congested areas as it is to stop buying drinks for a person who is already drunk.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

“the Valley of High Parking Requirements. On one edge of the valley were single-family homes, fast-food restaurants, low-slung commercial box stores—all the familiar building types that could be comfortably “parked” at ground level, even if parking took up 60 or 70 percent of the property. On the other edge of the valley were high-density, high-value properties like offices, hotels, malls, and condos that could afford to build structured (or even subterranean) parking garages. Anything in between was impossible to build because it was impossible to park—surface parking would take up too much room; structured parking would cost too much to build. The Valley of High Parking Requirements was barren ground where nothing would grow.”
― Henry Grabar, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World