Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
By Henry Grabar
Penguin Books, 2023
When it comes to parking, nearly everyone expects it to be free, convenient and plentiful.
Journalist Henry Grabar, citing a growing chorus of progressive urbanists and environmentalists, explains how this is all wrong. Put simply, parking has devastated our cities, wasted valuable space, entrenched car dependency, worsened the climate disaster and raised the cost of housing and most other goods.
Over most of the 20th century, through direct and indirect influence of the car lobby and associated industries, it became standard practice to allow free or heavily subsidised parking kerbside, just about everywhere. On top of that, off-street parking minimums were established that assumed that most people would drive everywhere and therefore every daily function of people would require more parking.
These requirements ended up encouraging greater car use, in an ever-worsening spiral. Researchers found that for every car space added per 100 residents, it led to a 1% increase in the proportion of residents driving to work. Professor Donald Shoup, the world鈥檚 foremost expert on parking, has said that parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars.
Rough estimates put the number of parking spaces provided at between three to four per car. When this space is added to the road area required for movement, plus area required for sales, repair and traffic signage, it comes out close to the floor area of an average home. Detroit, for example, ended up dedicating 74% of its land to cars, accelerating urban decay.
Whilst this spatial largesse is heaped upon cars at almost no direct cost to drivers, by contrast, space for humans to live is expensive, as evidenced by our current global crisis in housing costs. This helps explain the growing phenomenon of unhoused people living in their cars.
The solution, according to Shoup, is charging more for parking, reducing demand and providing less of it. These basic Econ 101 arguments were the basis of his groundbreaking 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking. A few simple calculations within showed that the land value of parking provided for each car is more than double the actual value of the car itself.
Before long, Shoup gained a loyal army of followers that started to put his ideas into practice. 鈥淧arklets鈥, whereby a parking space was turned over to a picnic table and some potted plants, started in San Francisco, and spread to cities like Singapore, Montreal, Madrid, Berlin and Mexico City.
In New York City, Janette Sadik-Khan hired Danish architect Jan Gehl to survey the streets. In 2009, 350 beach chairs were rolled out in the middle of Times Square. Pedestrian injuries fell by 40%, car crashes by 15%, and commercial rents tripled.
In London, Mayor Ken Livingstone removed parking minimums, and in Paris, Anne Hidalgo is removing half the parking spaces. Gehl was behind Sydney鈥檚 plan that saw George Street pedestrianised and the light rail installed.
Clearly, many of these changes have resulted in great improvements towards human-centred cities. They also lighten our load on the planet, critically necessary in a time of climate emergency. But they have all been highly contested, especially by the auto lobby and people either forced into car dependency or unable to imagine better ways of satisfying everyday human聽needs.
Subjecting parking to the logic of the market might be the tough love it needs, but it will require us to address the much deeper inequities in society that subsequently become more visible as a result.