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Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)
00:44:17
An interview with Henry Grabar
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hello and welcome back to New Books in Environmental Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. My name is Brian Hamilton of Deerfield Academy, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Henry Grabar. He's a staff writer at Slate, where he covers housing, transportation, and urban policy, and his writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal. He's here now to talk about his book, Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. It comes out today from Penguin Press. Mr. Krabar, welcome to the show.
- [01:37]
C
Thanks for having me.
- [01:39]
B
This is a wild and fascinating and haunting and urgent story, and I'm very glad to have read it. I've never before filled a book's margin with so many exclamation marks. You spend half of it explaining how Americans got into this mess and the other half suggesting how we might climb out of it. So let's start with the mess. And it's messy in all sorts of ways. But since this is an environmental show, even though we define the word broadly around these parts, I'll start by asking you to make the case that parking is, in your words, an environmental disaster.
- [02:11]
C
Gladly. I began this book. There's a few beginning points that I like to point to, but one of them was a reporting trip I took to Houston, where I was writing about stormwater flooding in Houston connected to these massive rainstorms that hit the city three times in three years, in 2015, 2016, 2017, culminating with Hurricane Harvey. And I remember talking to a homeowner there suggested to me that his house never used to flood until this giant mall with a huge parking lot got built just up the hill from him. And he was convinced that this parking lot was responsible for his house flooding. And that's very difficult to prove, but it did get me thinking about the extent to which our cities are essentially man made floodplains, composed mostly of impervious services like roads and parking lots. And one thing we can say for sure is that in Houston, neighborhoods that didn't flood in the 50s and 60s when they were built now flood because of upstream suburban development. So when we think about parking and its effect on the landscape, I think the most obvious one is simply that we have covered a whole lot of land with asphalt and concrete to provide parking. And that in itself has changed the environment of cities in ways I think, all for the worst. One of the most obvious ones is the urban heat island effect. A second is stormwater flooding. A third, which is the flip side of that is there's a lack of groundwater absorption, so aquifers don't fill back up when you're just flushing rainstorms right out to sea along these concrete conduits, like for example, the LA river in Los Angeles. And then obviously there's all the natural land that is lost to, to, to this development as well. So those are the kind of most, the first order consequences of creating all this pavement. But there's another one, and which is perhaps the biggest one, which is that pouring all this asphalt and concrete is not just an environmental cost unto itself, but it also encourages all this driving. And to me, the amount of driving that Americans do per capita, which is way higher than just about anyone else in the world, is, is inextricably linked to our approach to parking. And studies confirm this. I mean like parking is basically the lever you have that controls how much people will drive. And we have built an environment with so much free parking that we've made it basically not only created an incentive for people to drive everywhere, but made it impossible to get around any other way. And I don't need to go over here with your listeners, the environmental consequences of driving, but just really briefly, we're talking about greenhouse gas emissions, particle pollution, car crashes, and all of those, I would say, are intimately related to the way we decide to build our parking in this country.
- [05:25]
B
There's this central irony of your book is that we pay so little attention and we kind of in some ways know so little about this omnipresent, hugely influential feature of our landscape. You mentioned a lot. There's not a lot of. In the popular imagination, there are very few pop songs about parking. There's very few movies about parking. There's one Seinfeld episode. But there's also more seriously, more kind of rigorously. There's also just not a lot of trustworthy data either or there hasn't been it over time. And at one point, you note that there isn't even an official count of the parking spots in New York City. Maybe there's maybe 3 million, but we didn't really take that census. And elsewhere you liken urban planners kind of the way they use hard evidence of supposedly when making decisions about parking to medieval alchemists. So why has parking over the past century evaded more rigorous study?
- [06:12]
C
I am also perplexed by this. I think there was a time in the early 20th century when parking actually was the subject of rigorous study. And there were all these, you know, city planners who are reckoning with the impact of the automobile and thinking about parking as really, you know, the crucial component of car culture, because a car spends 95% of its lifespan parked. So if you're thinking about the spatial impact of cars, what you're actually talking about is mostly parking spaces. Not the road, not the vehicles themselves, but the parking. And so there was a time when it was, I think, rightly considered to be a really core component of evaluating all this. And, you know, a time even when. When the federal government poured all this money into interstate highway funding, where city actors were saying, you also have to pay for the parking. You can't just build all these highways, not build the parking. It's like building a bunch of train tracks without building the stations. I mean, the cars need someplace to go. And the federal government basically bowed out of that responsibility. And I think one reason is that we've always been confused about whether parking is a public or private responsibility. And. And that leads to. That's led to some degree, I think, of the public sector stepping back and say, this isn't really our problem. And so. And so that's a reason that, you know, you wouldn't have great data on that. And I guess the other part of it is that at the same time as we, you know, basically in the. In mid century, we created so much parking that it stopped becoming a problem for drivers looking for Parking. And once parking stopped being a problem in that sense, there was very little incentive to count it up. I mean, the degree to which parking became a serious field of study was because there wasn't enough parking and people were panicking about, about how that shortage would affect the city. But once we had enough parking, then it ceased to be of interest to, to the whole community of traffic engineers. I mean, it just, it drops off as a subject of interest. It's sort of marooned between land use and transportation and nobody takes any interest in it because in most places in this country it just stopped being a problem. There was enough parking. Of course, it didn't stop being a problem for all the reasons that I outlined related to the environment. It has many pernicious effects, which I think we'll continue to talk about in this interview. But as far as its importance as a legitimate field of study, it did sort of drop off the map.
- [08:49]
B
At the center of the narrative is really what's a tragedy in this colossal historical blunder. And you're telling, you know, you really changed the way I think about suburbanization and what happened to cities in the post war era. Would you tell listeners the story? What was the mid century downtown parking crisis?
- [09:08]
C
Well, I was quite shocked by this because I assumed that when you go to a city and you see there are parking lots everywhere, your first instinct, or my first instinct, was that that was a result of disinvestment and that most cities had become mostly parking. You know, you can look at downtowns and places like, you know, Kansas City or Buffalo or Louisville, Those places are 30%, 30% parking, just the parcels, not even counting the streets. And that also doesn't count the garages that are in the building. So 30% of parcels are exclusively for parking. And, and I guess what I'm saying is that when I, when I saw that at first you go to a place like Detroit or something and you think, well, this is just because it doesn't pencil out. Nobody wants to build anything here because there's no demand for. Turns out though that all of this parking was created intentionally or most of it was created intentionally and at mid century in this sort of desperate effort to create enough parking so that cities could compete with the suburbs. And I thought also that this would have been a sort of secondary issue. But in fact, no, this was considered by many downtown interests to be the primary, the most urgent crisis facing American downtowns as they came out of the Second World War. It seems unbelievable, right? Because we know that there's the sort of there's the crisis of racial inequality, there's the sort of environmental catastrophe of all this industrial pollution in cities. There's crime, there's job loss, all these things are happening. And yet downtown interests are laser focused on parking. But yes, in fact they were. And they did everything they could to create more parking, which included both bulldozing a whole lot of buildings, using urban renewal, Title 1 money, and creating car centric developments that tried to compete with the suburbs on their own terms. And also, perhaps most importantly, requiring that every new or renovated building include enough parking spots to accommodate everybody who might ever want to drive there. And that those laws, the parking minimums attached to redevelopment and development were some of the most influential laws this country has ever passed in terms of the look of the built environment and the feel of our cities. And we're still living with the consequences.
- [11:49]
B
Today I can hear listeners asking if this crisis was an illusion only, and if there really were, and as you assert a lot in the book, if there really are plenty of places to park, why does parking feel scarce?
- [12:02]
C
Yes, this is, this is one of the great paradoxes, right? Like you can look at these statistics and see that there are 4 to 9 parking spaces for every single car. There's between 1 and 2 billion parking spaces. And you can say, but that can't be right. It doesn't feel that way. And I know it doesn't feel that way. And part of the reason is simply just that everybody wants to drive to the exact same place at the exact same time. So there is, there are necessarily localized shortages of parking. Even as on a national level, we, we really have far more than we need. There is also the question of our, of our super high standards for parking. Many people want to, when they talk about I couldn't find a parking space, what they mean is I couldn't find a parking space right away, immediately in front of my destination that was free. And those are pretty high standards to apply for a good. You wouldn't expect that at a, at a, at a, you know, to walk into some hot restaurant at 8pm and get the best table in the restaurant. But everybody expects that with parking. But I think there are three more technical reasons that even in places that have enough parking, parking can still seem scarce. The first one is pricing. Parking is free almost all of the time to the user, which is to say when you drive up, you don't pay for it. And this has a few effects. What it means is that the best parking in the busiest locations tends to be taken by people who Arrive first thing in the morning and leave their car there all day, which is to say commuters. Now this makes sense. You would do it too. If you arrived at 7 in the morning, you'd park right in front of your shop. But then it turns out when everybody does this, then the shoppers and clients and the delivery guys and the people who come to eat at the restaurants, they get there at midday and they see there's no parking because it's all been taken by the people who work in the stores. That's a pretty standard situation in your average American small town. Now those people get mad and they realize that, you know, they may not realize that there is parking a couple blocks away. And this is where, you know, one thing we can do, right, is just install parking meters. They don't even have to be expensive. They just have to put a slight penalty on the prospect of parking your car there all day long so that the all day parkers park a few blocks away and then they walk a few minutes to get to where they're going. And that few minutes of walking amortized over the course of the entire day isn't actually a big penalty for them and frees up the best spots to people who arrive later. So that's, number one, parking is free, which makes it scarce, and it means that people use it perhaps inefficiently. Number two is that a lot of the parking is private. So because we have neglected to create order at the curb, say through installing parking meters, we've decided to require that every business includes a certain number of parking spaces. And there are these bizarre charts that you can read in every city code that will tell you how many spaces are required for each type of business. And the result of this is that the parking supply may be abundant, but it is balkanized between these various private fiefdoms between which it cannot be shared. And you'll see, you know, you go to the CVS and it'll say, this parking is for CVS only. And if you want to run next door and get a sandwich, you got to get back in your car, get back on the road and drive 100ft and go into the next parking lot next door. Now this obviously is very wasteful from a driving perspective, but it's also wasteful from a parking perspective because a lot of these parking lots aren't used at the same time. So for example, you might have the parking lot of a courthouse next to the parking lot of a movie theater. And the movie theater attracts its clients mostly at night. And the Courthouse mostly during the day, but sharing those is illegal. Same for an office and an apartment building. So in this way, there may actually be quite a lot of parking. But because there are these rules that sort of separate it between uses that might otherwise be complementary uses, it can sometimes feel scarce because one lot fills up even though there's an empty one next door. And then the final thing I'll say about why it feels so hard to find parking is that the rules and the management of it are very confusing. Like, you drive into a new city and you look at the signs and you're like, what the hell is going on here? And I think that that is. That is something that, like, if you were. If that were true for driving, it would be really bizarre. You'd arrive in a new city, and they'd have different ways of designing the traffic lights. So you'd be like, well, what's going on here? I don't understand. But. But that's how it always is for parking. You show up in a town, they may have spent millions building a public garage that's three blocks away from the main street, but you don't know where it is. And so you feel like you're marooned with no place to park.
- [16:57]
B
Thanks. Yeah. And you talk about these rules as one place. A villain. You describe. You spend a lot of time on what seems a villain in a very banal shape. The 1985 publication of the Institute of Transportation Engineers entitled Parking Generation Manual document that his legacy lived, you know, whose influence lived beyond its creator's endorsement of it, essentially. And. And even when. When their ideas have changed, it still has an effect. And you've talked about some of the ways that. That what the parking kind of the way parking shapes our landscape and what it makes have to happen, but it also, you know, it also makes things unable to happen.
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C
Right?
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B
And so that's one of the biggest legacies your book. And you say at one point, no one tracks the ideas that didn't happen. And so how should we conceive of the legacy of things like this manual?
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C
Well, the manual is where all these parking minimums get sort of codified, right? So when a city decides that it's going to require that every tennis club includes two spaces for every singles court and three spaces for every doubles court or whatever it is, you know, and they're all, like, super precise and sort of arbitrary like that. And they exist for every conceivable land use, right? And all these numbers are derived from and codified in these manuals that are Published by, by this sort of, what's the word? You know, a professional group of engineers, the Institute of Transportation Engineers. And these books, these books are, you know, so these books are sort of responsible for the phenomenon that I was just discussing wherein every building has its own private parking supply. They rely on a couple of faulty assumptions about how driving and parking work. One of them is that they always build parking for the maximum possible capacity of a building. So that for example, if you have an office building, your parking will be provided based on the square footage. But in reality it's unlikely that every floor of the office building will be rented at the exact same time and that every employee will show up at the exact same time and so on. Many of these spaces are only used part of the time, as I was saying. So when you require a church, for example, provide one space for every four seats in the pew, you're ensuring that the church is going to occupy a massive footprint that is mostly parking and that parking is only going to be full on Sunday mornings. So basically this manual and the various manuals that resemble it in direct cities, what to do have created an enormous amount of parking waste. Not only that, they assume that everybody drives everywhere. So they assume that, you know, it's called the parking generation book. Like as if buildings generate parking just by their very design, which in fact makes no sense. And you don't need to be a parking scholar to figure this out. An apartment building in New York City that's next to a subway line and an apartment building in suburban Houston are obviously going to generate different amounts of parking and driving. But the way these manuals have been put together ignores those local differences and imposes suburban standards of parking and driving on all this architecture. And obviously anything that doesn't conform to this can't get built. So when we talk about the unbuilt stuff, it's obviously hard to imagine because these projects don't exist. But one way you can imagine what's been lost is just to look at everything that America built before, say 1945 when the parking minimums were put in place. Triple deckers, row houses, mixed use buildings with a grocery on the ground floor that comes right up to the lot line dingbats in la. Bungalow courts. Every city has its own little pre parking vernacular that's basically been driven into extinction by these requirements.
- [20:46]
B
And you note that often these are the most desirable parts of the cities we have now and they're also illegal right to build anymore.
- [20:51]
C
Yeah, it's a huge tragedy as we're.
- [20:54]
B
As we're thinking about how to get us out of this mess. You have to reckon with the politics of parking. And at one point you quip that quote, no clear cut rainforest could upset an LA liberal more than an endangered bank of parking spaces. Can you help us map out the kind of unusual, I mean, you know, urban, urban planning debates have their own kind of politics of their own. And could you help us map out the politics of parking? And, and how, and how have they remained so messy despite, you know, everything else kind of falling neatly into partisan camps over the last couple decades?
- [21:23]
C
Yeah, I think the politics of parking are relatively similar to the broader politics of land use, which is to say, and this has become a big issue, right, because the, the United states is about 4 million homes short of what it needs. And so rent is really high, it's really expensive to buy a home. Lots of people are locked out of home ownership, waiting for years and years, delaying household formation, delaying having kids because it can't afford housing. Parking is part of that, part of the reason. Housing is expensive and it's scarce. But the politics of parking align pretty neatly with the larger politics of zoning reform, which is to say that it's confusing. You would expect that conservatives, for example, would be all in on parking reform. There's a lot of attractive stuff in parking reform for conservatives. For example, it relies on the idea that you're allowed to do what you want with your own land. You want to build a restaurant and not provide any parking spaces, go do it. It's your land. It's not the government's problem. Another attractive thing about some of these parking reform ideas for conservatives is the existence of market pricing. Right. Like the curb is very much in demand. How are we going to decide who gets the best spots, the best parking spaces in town? Well, should we assign it with special placards that go to certain public officials? No, let's just put some parking meters there and we'll adjust the price and we'll figure out what the right price is to make sure there's always a space available. So I think those are classic free market ideas that ought to appeal to Republicans. And then on the Democratic side, obviously parking is a tremendous obstacle to housing affordability. It's a huge environmental disaster. It encourages all this driving and oil consumption and all this stuff. And, you know, maybe this is something where it sort of crosses political lines, but it's just an obstacle to building the types of communities that most Americans say they want, whatever side of the spectrum they're from, which is to Say walkable places with nice architecture where people feel like, you know, they get to know their neighbors and walk downtown and all this nice stuff that everybody is always fetishizing when they go to Disneyland. But we made it legal to do all that. And, and ultimately, so ultimately, you know, there's some places that we, where there's a potential for a coalition here. Right. But at the end of the day, unfortunately, people just love their parking spaces too much and they're too afraid of losing them to get behind a lot of these reforms.
- [23:55]
B
That said, this is sort of unusual as a muckraking book in that there isn't just the one tacked on chapter at the end about hope for the future or a call to action or things like that. I mean, half the book is about there is progress being made, there is a movement afoot that's been for a while now that's actually has can count some wins here. So can we, can we get sunnier here for a moment and maybe you could tell us for instance, the story of the revival of downtown la?
- [24:18]
C
Yeah, that's a great, that's a great story because I think one of the, one of the questions people always have about these parking rules is, okay, so parking is required with every building, but everybody wants parking anyway. Nobody wants to not have a place to drive. Most Americans own cars. They, the median household owns 2.2 cars. I think so. So, so, you know, even if developers were left to their own devices, they might well build parking. And it turns out they do. But to figure this out, we had to find some place that would get rid of its parking requirements. And they've been so ubiquitous in the United States for so long that it's been hard to conduct an experiment. And that's exactly what happened in downtown LA about 20 years ago when the city decided to get rid of parking requirements for adaptive reuse, which is to say downtown LA had this splendid collection of early 20th century skyscrapers, most of which had been built as offices but had since been abandoned. And in cities like New York and Philadelphia, those buildings had been adapted and turned into condos in the 1980s and 90s. But LA wasn't happy, was having trouble with this. And one reason they were having trouble with this is that if you wanted to do a change of use, say from zoned office to zoned residential, you needed to provide an equivalent number of parking spaces to bring that building up to code. And if you're looking at an art deco 1930s skyscraper and you're going to turn it into say 62 bedroom apartments. You could be looking at adding 120 parking spaces to a historic skyscraper. So where are you going to put those on the first three floors of the building? Are you going to dig out the foundations, build a new garage? I mean, it's a huge problem. And L. A in about 2000 decided they were going to relax those requirements. And what they got was a tremendous building boom as all of these old skyscrapers, one after another, were converted into new homes for thousands and thousands of people. I mean, we're talking like a building boom. I think 6,500 units were created in the aftermath of this adaptive reuse ordinance. And did developers build apartments with no parking? Generally not generally, they built parking, they just didn't build as much as the code had previously required. So they took a sample, they figured out who are our clients here, who are our tenants, what's our market? And not only do we need to provide parking in the building, maybe we need some. But also downtown LA is a major business center. And so there's all these people who drive in every day and drive out at night. And what the developers of these buildings realized was that meant that there was a lot of empty garage space every night and that garage space could be available for those residential tenants. So you didn't even need necessarily to carve out a garage to make this an attractive proposition for a two car household moving into one of these apartments. They just parked their car in the garage a block away.
- [27:16]
B
So obviously code reforms are a big part of the solution as you see it. Another one, as you touched on a few times here, is really about price. And I'd like to invite you to just think, you know, say, say more about your arguments there. You put them in the mouths of free marketers. But also this is something you're pushing pretty hard in the book. And you at one point you talk about parking as a commodity, which is not the way I had it in my head. And although it's a weird commodity because you're also noting that 99% of the time it's free, so nobody's actually buying and selling it. But you argue the higher street parking costs offer one of the best ways of getting out of this mess. And, and that. But the time. And again you tell this really well in your great retelling of the story of Mayor Daley privatizing parking in Chicago, that even then nobody really knew how much parking should cost. So how do we get to that price? How do we find the right price?
- [28:03]
C
It's a good Question. I think a lot of cities had parking meters in the beginning because they realized that it was the only way to organize the curb. Right? It was the only way to sort things out and make sure that people parking for long periods of time would park a little further away. But after suburbanization, people became very reluctant to raise meter prices because they were scared that everybody was going to drive to the suburbs and use free parking at the mall. And what has happened in the decades since is that parking meters have become. They raise a lot of money for cities, but not in the way you would think. It's not because people are dropping quarters in the parking meters. It's because the parking is so cheap that it's impossible to find a space and people park illegally. And then the city makes money off illegal parking. So there's this kind of grotesque status quo in which the budget balancing city directors may not even want to raise the prices of the meters because they make so much money from illegal parking tickets. That said, there are a couple places that have started to say, all right, what would happen if we raise the prices at the busiest places? San Francisco, for example, did this very interesting experiment. San Francisco, the Municipal Transportation Agency, runs both curb parking and public garages. And for a long time, the curb parking was basically free, while the public garages cost money. And that's backwards. Everybody knows you'd rather park on the curb in front of the restaurant. You're going to. You can dip back into your car and get your backpack or whatever, rather than on the fourth floor of some dank and smelly garage that's two blocks away. So San Francisco, like many cities, had the pricing backwards. And what they did was they just reversed it. They said, all right, you want to park right in front of the restaurant, you're going to pay $2.50 an hour. You're going to park in the garage, pay $1 an hour. And they basically tinkered with their prices every six months until they reached sort of an equilibrium. And the equilibrium, the target here was to make sure that there was always a couple spaces on every block. It's not rocket science, right? And obviously it takes a while to figure out what the right prices are. But. But ultimately they did it. And they wound up in a situation where, yes, some parking got more expensive in the most in demand locations, but the garages got a lot cheaper and a lot fuller. And in fact, the enforcement revenue went down. So there were fewer people getting parking tickets after all this was said and done than there were before. Hmm.
- [30:29]
B
Some people are probably thinking of having a concern, listening to you that you address at the end of the book that you know, that these. Raising parking, Parking. The price of parking on the street was regressive. Right. That it would be, you know, take a heaviest toll on people who can least afford it. So how do you respond to that concern?
- [30:44]
C
Yeah, that is obviously a major issue, especially as cities begin to focus on. On equity as maybe the main driver of urban politics as much as, if not more than, quality of life. I think the first thing I should say is that rich people own more cars and drive them more. So anything, any sort of tax that's attached to driving is going to hit the rich more than it hits the poor, just as a matter of basic economics. The second thing I would say about that is that as I just pointed out with the example of San Francisco, managing parking doesn't necessarily make it all more expensive. Some of it may become more expensive, but it may just become better organized, which might be a better deal for lots of working people who work with their cars. For example, in busy cities like Boston, New York, Washington, people who drive for a living, who do deliveries, who fix locks, who fix pipes, etc. Rack up hundreds and thousands, and even in some cases tens of thousands of dollars of parking tickets every year because there is never anywhere to park. So that system isn't exactly fair to those people who work with their cars, which is to say nothing of the sort of general economic loss caused by all the driving looking for parking, which is imposed on people who work with their cars for a living and their time. Actually, you may think, well, they shouldn't have to pay a parking meter, but their time is valuable too. And if the result of free parking is them circling and circling and in the end picking up a big parking ticket, I don't think that's. That's very fair either. But perhaps the biggest point is that free parking has many externalities which are unpriced in the sense that they don't have a strict dollar value attached to them when you park for free. But the costs are real. The costs are traffic. About a third of downtown traffic is estimated to be people looking for parking. The emissions from all that traffic, which tend to drift into the apartments of low income people, who tend to be the people who live along the busiest roads, unsafe streets. Which is to say that because we refuse to remove parking to create spaces for bike lanes, daylight intersections so that drivers can see kids who are about to cross, we live with thousands of pedestrians dying every year because we refuse to Build safe streets. And parking is part of that. And so one of the externalities of this messed up parking situation is the frankly exceptional level of automobile carnage in the United States relative to peer countries. And I guess the biggest part of it is that we have to go back again and remember that the reason we have all these parking requirements that make it so hard to build affordable housing in cities, they make it so hard to. To build affordable housing at all. In fact, the tack on tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of every apartment, whether or not the tenant is going to own a car, the reason we have those requirements is because we have been reluctant to sort out the curb parking situation. Right. It's the traffic and the congestion caused by free parking that force cities to require developers to provide those parking spaces. So that perhaps is the most serious externality associated with free parking, is that we put this massive, massive tax on affordable housing development. And that, to me, is a much more fundamental injustice than dropping a few quarters into the parking meter. And I guess maybe the last point I would say is that I think every city rightly wants to be focused on addressing inequality to the extent they can, but really that is the responsibility of the federal government and to a lesser extent, the states. It is not up to the parking manager of the city to be the one to say, I'm going to be the one who writes the scales and evens out income inequality in my town. And frankly, if you've been priced out of town by these ridiculous building regulations, including parking requirements, free parking is a pretty lousy consolation prize.
- [35:04]
B
You had your head in this stuff for a long time thinking about urban land use policy. And you've been started the book project before COVID What was it like? What has it been like witnessing the widespread reimagining of the use of curbsides and parking lots as the pandemic unfolded?
- [35:19]
C
Well, you know, I felt like I wished upon the monkey's paw. Are you familiar with that story? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, you. You wish on the monkey's paw and your wishes come true in the most terrible possible fashion. And. And my wish was that people would look anew at curb parking and think about how much that land was worth and what we might do with it if we hadn't decided 80 years ago that it was just going to be used for the free storage of private automobiles. And that's exactly what happened. Right. So I wish that people would have that awakening. And what I got was a global pandemic. So it's not really the way I imagined my wish coming true. But it did sort of happen that way, that all this parking that had once been thought essential a life or death component for all these businesses, including the businesses who had also fought for that parking. I mean, businesses are some of the most forthright opponents of like, bike lanes, bus lanes, parking meters. They are really attached to the idea of free parking. And suddenly in June 2020, they just said, all right, you know, let's just turn it all into restaurants, eating great. And the whole, the whole idea, the whole fundamental notion of parking requirements has been embedded in 80 years of urban planning. Went out the window in two weeks. And everybody was like, actually, it's better to just have it all be restaurant. So I was excited about that. I think we've still, you know, I think obviously there's been a lot of retrenchment since then as the drivers begin to claw their way back into. Into all this pseudo public space. And I think also, you know, restaurant seating is probably not, at the end of the day, the highest and best use. Right? Like, why stop there? Why not plant trees? Why not create places for kids to play? Why not, why not create bus lanes and bike lanes and. And more public space? Right? I mean, restaurant seating is only the tip of the iceberg, but I do think it opened up people's minds to what might be possible.
- [37:27]
B
Even note that the etymology of the word parking was for a tiny park on the edge of the street, right?
- [37:32]
C
Yes, yes. You have to go all the way back to basically the 19th century for parking to mean something other than what we know it as today. But yes, there is a reason that the word parking contains the word park, and that is because the curbside was once sprinkled with these tiny patches of greenery. And by the way, that's not just the idea of making our cities greener, is not just about creating more attractive public space, but it's also about creating shade, creating cleaner air, cooler streets in the summer, and also starting to deal with the impervious surface problem, right? Which is like, because so many cities are so paved, we're getting these climate change juiced, rainstorms that come and drop amounts of water that many cities haven't seen before, period. Right. New records being broken all the time. Basement flooding and parking is a cause of that because it creates all this impervious surface. But it can also be a solution because we've got all this free space that if we thought a little bit more efficiently about how we use it, we might be able to turn some of that into, say, you know, stormwater retention ponds, plant, you know, reedy plants that soak up water, etc. So, so that's, that's, you know, just one more possibility that becomes open to you at the curb once you stop seeing it as just a place to put cars.
- [38:58]
B
I want to close by asking you about an article you wrote for Slate back at the end of March, and it sort of serves as a postscript for the book. It's called How Paris Kicked Out Cars, and it details just the dramatic reforms that have reoriented the city's urban landscape and even turned one parking garage into a mushroom and endive farm. So what lessons does Paris offer us as we say goodbye?
- [39:18]
C
Well, it turns out endives do not need to grow in the sunlight. So that's something.
- [39:23]
B
They're white, I guess, right? I guess.
- [39:25]
C
Yeah, yeah, they're like, basically like, they're, they're like sunlight deprived plants. So. So they're great for parking garages. I don't think that urban agriculture is the long term, the long term future of our parking stock. Sometimes people say, well, parking garages could be turned into apartments, but ironically, parking garages often have lower load bearing capacities than homes and offices. So it's not that easy to just build a bunch of housing in an old parking garage. And also, obviously, the floor is slanted. But anyway, I digress. Paris has really embraced the idea that cars are at the root of many of the city's most pressing challenges, which is, say, air pollution, car crashes, traffic congestion, and all its externalities. And, and they've tried to use a lot of this parking space to create new public spaces. And I think my favorite initiative, and one of them is planting trees, right. Like Paris is grappling with these devastating summer heat waves, every year seems to bring some fresh new record. And obviously most people here don't have air conditioning, so that's a huge issue. And, you know, it's a very dense city, so there's not a lot of room. And so they're thinking, how can we cool off the city? We need to plant more trees to create more shade. And the only place really that's available is parking spaces because everything else is full, the sidewalks are tiny, the buildings are everywhere. And so they've started planting a lot of trees in the parking spaces. And the other thing they've done, which I really love, and I think this is a lesson that could easily be adapted to American cities, even if we may never have Paris's level of a mass transit system or its residential density or something like that is building play streets outside schools. So they've closed the streets outside something like 170 schools and turn those into play streets where kids get out of school and you'll just see them playing soccer as their parents chat along the sidewalk or sitting down at a cafe and kids learning to ride their bikes. And just the general hubbub that can be associated with school getting out when, when not everybody is when you're not worried about kids getting hit by a car. So they've done that outside 170 schools just in the last two years. And, and that seems like the kind of thing that, you know, any American city could could do something like that.
- [42:02]
B
Well, the book, again, is Paved Paradise How Parking Explains the World. It comes out today from Penguin Press. Its author is and my guest has been Henry Gabbar. If you're listening to this today, Tuesday, May 9th, and you're in New York, you can catch him tonight at Rizzoli Bookstore, 8 West 26th Street. Henry, thank you so much for your time and for this book.
- [42:21]
C
Thank you. My pleasure.