The Parking Paradox

the place where the car is actually spending the most of its time is in a parking spot.

“I think there's a couple of images in your book of the structure and we've seen others have just overhead shots of cities today.”

It's sort of remarkable how much of it is parking. Yeah, the famous quip is like, look at America and look at Europe, and you wouldn't know which countries had its cities bombed into some of the rings.

There are something like two billion parking spaces in America.

That's about eight spots for every car, and parking takes up about a third of the land in our cities. That's a lot of pavement. We're standing in the middle of Cleveland's parking crater. We've got parking behind us, parking over here, parking over there, and on this fourth corner we actually have a parking garage. But despite all the space dedicated to parking, finding a spot on a busy street or an accredited parking lot,

can still feel like navigating the fifth circle of hell.

Well, parking wars got way out of hand in Kensington as a couple of car owners decided to slug it out over savings.

And parking where you shouldn't can come at a high cost. You're seeing it right, Laura Sherman's parking ticket, eight hundred thirty five dollars. Even if you aren't a driver, parking can still complicate your daily life. Our friends are elderly as we are. They can't walk the distance required to reach us from any available parking space. So they just don't visit us anymore.

For Henry Gribar, this dystopian world of parking in the US is a symptom of a much bigger problem. Our profound reliance on cars. Why is it so hard to get to job, to get to class, to see your friends, to go out on the town without owning a car.

“And why have we designed a city in a way where a down payment on a vehicle becomes the entry ticket that you need to participate in society,”

Henry has become a bit of a guru of American parking. In 2023, he published a book called "Paved Paradise," how parking explains the world. It tells the story of his quest to understand the complexities and weirdness of parking, from LA to Chicago, all the way to São Paulo and Disney World. And it highlights how the need for convenient parking has transformed our cities in our lives. The bookshots the top of critics' lists, and it made readers think about what gets lost in a car-dependent society.

Some cities, the parking space, is actually take up more space than the lanes on the roads that are used for travel. And parking spaces take up more space in the United States than space for housing. To be clear, Henry isn't rabidly anti-car. He lives in Boston and loves taking the bus.

But he knows that from most Americans having a car is critical.

And that's nothing new. I came across a quote from a woman in Muncie, Indiana in the 1920s who bought a car before she installed indoor plumbing at her house, because she said, "You can't go to town in a bathtub." We've built the system in which many people don't have a choice about the way they get around. So it's not realistic to expect people who live in call-to-sax 12 miles from downtown Houston to just give up to cars and bike to work.

For Henry, the answer isn't just shrinking the amount of space devoted to parking. It's enacting structural change that actually improves lives by replacing some of that parking with communal space like parks, or even more housing. By resetting people's expectations for what parking should look like, you can begin to imagine a world in which it takes up a little less space in our cities. I'm Andre Greenwald. I'm the Chief Policy Officer at VIA. And this is Moachift, a show about the past, present, and future of how we move.

In this episode, we dig into something that totally shapes our communities, parking. We unpack the challenges it poses, and talk about how public transit can help if we're willing to lean in.

“I think it's one of the major obstacles in the United States to imagine the society with lower rates of car ownership and use is if there are so few other options.”

Growing up in New York City, Henry was fascinated by the psychology of parking and traffic. He lived on broom street, close to the entrance to the Holland tunnel, a horrendous bottleneck. And one Thanksgiving day, when he was in his 20s, he strolled around with a camera and a microphone, interviewing families stuck in gridlock. And I remember going window to window and saying, "How's it going? Why did you decide to take this route travel at this time? Why are you honking?"

The fact that it takes an hour and a half to move these 12 blocks didn't seem to have discouraged anybody from trying to drive this road. And remember, this is Thanksgiving. They all do this every year. As Henry grew up, he started thinking about traffic and parking differently. I began to see parking as something that isn't just there, but as the result of choices that we've made.

Henry traced those choices back to the first half of the 20th century.

A time when many American downtowns were bustling with robust public transit systems.

“Where do you live? Where do you want to go? What time? How many of you at a time?”

These questions have all been studied by your transit company. But with the introduction of the Model T, car sales skyrocketed. An owning a car quickly became a symbol of economic and social status. So all those thriving city centers, they were caught in the crosshairs. Even starting in the 1920s, incredibly intense traffic jams that are created by the fact that

there's rising on a bill ownership, but cities have not adapted to accommodate it.

And so what you get is an insane parking situation.

Take this modern office building. If all the people in the building drove their cars to work, the parking area required would be greater than the force base of the building itself. And so cities are trying to figure out how to deal with this parking situation. And in fact, many experts believe that the traffic is actually caused by the parking.

Because people who are creating new traffic jams are just driving around looking for parking spaces. And so if you can create enough parking, you'll be able to solve the traffic problem. More parking wasn't the answer. Valueable land must be sacrificed to the traffic monster. But these changes only bring more cars into already overcrowded downtown streets.

And the traffic situation becomes more acute and aggravating than it ever was before. The city planners thought they'd found a fix. Passing laws that required new building developers to install parking themselves. Something called parking minimums. Henry says it was a way for governments to wash their hands of the problem.

But the effects of that decision rippled out for decades. They didn't have to instantly overnight build a bunch of parking spaces. But as cities turned over, new uses new buildings arrived. These laws really began to work their effect, and they ended up creating a tremendous amount of parking spaces in every American city. I mean, if you look at an image of downtown Denver from the 1970s, it's shocking how much land is being used just for storing cars.

“So I think these laws were effective at creating spaces to park, but at what cost.”

Since then, Americans have come to expect what Henry describes as the perfect parking space. And the perfect parking space is one that is convenient, which is to say 10 feet away from the front door of the restaurant that you're going to, or your house. It's available the moment you arrive, so you don't need to look for it at all. And of course, it's free. Henry calls this the parking trilema.

And in cities across the country, he argues it's fueled a downward spiral that arose a sense of place, safety, and accessibility. And it turns out that fulfilling all three of those expectations for every parking space for every person is nearly impossible without destroying the place that you're trying to serve with that parking in the first place. More parking eats up the urban landscape, reduces density to a point that public transit becomes inefficient, walking, biking becomes dangerous and difficult.

And generally urban density is so reduced that very few things are ever within walking distance. And so trying to solve the parking problem by providing more and more parking rarely achieves the objectives that you're looking for. I wanted to dig deeper into the long-term effects of this obsession with the perfect parking spot. And why Henry says he's still optimistic it can change.

But first, I wanted to know what it's like to see the world through his parking filtered glasses.

“What is it like to be Henry Gribard today now that you have learned about parking at such an extensive level you've written a book about it?”

Like, I imagine that when you're walking around a city, are you just thinking about this when you see parking spaces everywhere? Like, what is that experience like? Well, I'll tell you when it came time to dispute my parking tickets with the parking clerking in my city. It was a very high stakes encounter for me. I really got to win this case, preserve my reputation, the somebody who understands this subject and I did.

So that was good. You talk to people who get into bird watching. And they'll tell you that they walked down the street and suddenly what used to be a kind of cacophony of random chirps brings in a focus as being, oh, that's it.

And I guess it's sort of unfortunate that for me that that happened with parking instead of with birds.

If somebody was, you know, visiting America from outer space or could even just be from from a foreign country. And they were, you know, pretty unfamiliar with with American cities.

“Is there, I don't know, is there some place that jumps out to you that you would take them to show them how parking shapes the built environment in the United States?”

My first choice would be Los Angeles because I think many Americans think of Los Angeles as being the quintessential car city. But in fact, Los Angeles was built at a time when the automobile was just coming onto the scene and at one point had the largest street car network in the world in terms of miles of track. And so a lot of the core neighborhoods of Los Angeles were built around the idea that people would be able to walk places.

And maybe a child sold on one car, but there's plenty of pre-automable urbanism in Los Angeles. And what I think is so interesting about that place is it has this amazing post-war growth sport.

“And so you get the kind of pre-parking and post-parking landscape right next to each other.”

Sometimes on the same block and you can see these beautiful 1920s art deco apartment buildings built with no parking right next to basically a, you know, a, you know, a target with a giant surface parking lot in front of it. And that contrast to me really illustrates the kind of evolution of American architecture and urbanism.

As we move towards a place where parking becomes, if not a required than an expected part of every piece of construction.

And you can really watch that take shape as you go block by block in Los Angeles.

“I want to stick with this idea of required parking a bit longer. What role do zoning codes and regulations, what role do they have to plan all this?”

Yes, so most cities in their zoning code have a special chapter where they say how many parking spaces must be included with each particular use. So if you're building an apartment building, you need 1.5 parking spaces per unit. If you're building a building alley, you need four spaces per lane. And so on often up to the point where even uses that you wouldn't think would require parking do require parking. There are parking requirements for cemeteries and there are parking requirements for municipal wastewater facilities and so on those requirements do cost money because parking takes up so much space and cost so much money to build.

And so it is, in a sense, you know, putting a tax on the construction of every new home or the opening of every new business to say, we're going to require this thing of you. And unlike say requiring an inspection of a kitchen and a restaurant, this is both an incredibly expensive time consuming and permanent thing that you must provide with your with your new business or your home. But it's also one where the public rationale that justifies it is very shaky. This is not a matter of public safety or even necessarily a matter of public interest to make sure that every apartment has two parking spaces and yet that is the law in most cities.

And when I saw the title of your book, and I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but my first thought was of the journey Mitchell song and I was curious if you're a fan and also sort of what you were trying to get at in terms of meaning with that title. Yes, I am a journey Mitchell fan with this subject in particular, you know, there's not a lot of Shakespeare quotes you can you could reach for and I liked it too because I thought it, I hope it summons for a certain type of reader, a recollection that, you know, what are we actually talking about when we think about all this parking space, we're talking about space that used to be natural land.

So I do think there's a certain kind of quote unquote environmentalist who is still attached to the idea that there should be free parking everywhere. There might need a reminder that, you know, parking is actually standing in opposition to all of this natural land at the old church of cities and I think you see this debate take take shape in in housing policy all the time where people will say, we can't have this apartment building going up in this city because there's a tree here. And I get it, like, I love the trees in my neighborhood, I feel personal attachment over them too, but if those people don't live there, they're going to live 10 miles away on what used to be like virgin forest.

And not only are they going to take up that virgin forest parcel, but they're also going to drive 20 miles to get to work every day. I think that that sort of reminding people the connection between parking spaces and environmentalism and and ask them to think a little harder about what they think of as being good for for the neighborhood and good for the planet, I think was my hope there.

Almost sort of a metaphor for anti nature, right? It has changed the way that stormwater gathers and floods.

“People's houses because there is so much land that has been paved, so much impervious surface that contributes stormwater into our into our sewer systems.”

It has changed and significantly contributed to the urban heat island effect, especially because so many parking lots are asphalt and they're black. It obviously is a hostile environment for animals, birds, bugs, etc. And then perhaps most importantly, it consumes enormous amounts of energy and materials to create all this parking. So I think those are the kind of obvious environmental consequences of building all this parking, and then I just want to add one more, which is that didn't incentivize us all the striving, which is the country's largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

And also, even if we could electrify the entire fleet of vehicles, an enormous source of local particulate pollution, the dust from tires and other roadway particles and so on, all of that is I think the way that parking contributes to our landscape, maybe in the traditional sense of the word. And I think that's what the Congressmen who had previously served in local government, he told me, and I think he was joking, partly, but maybe not. He told me that what unifies Republicans in Democrats more than any other issue is when somebody proposed is taking away their free parking.

And you know, there's just so much opposition to it.

This, what you think has allowed some places to overcome that resistance, and if there are any success stories to jump out to you.

“I think you're spot on in saying that taking away parking spaces is basically a losing political issue, right?”

And so you have to offer people something in return, right? If you're going to charge for parking, you have to spend those parking fees locally and create improvements that people can see and benefit from in use. And that's been tried in a place like Boulder, Colorado, right? Where they have these municipal garages and people park in a garages and the revenue from the garages goes to supporting bus passes for downtown employees, public space improvements, so on. And so people feel like when they go to downtown Boulder, they're getting their money's worth. If there were surface parking lots adjacent to every business in downtown Boulder, it would not be a charming place at all. It would look like any other city or look like any other suburb.

Other sources of optimism, you know, cities that have invested in public transit and made it possible to build lots of housing without parking, have seen people get around other ways. That all is probably the example I would go to, I think Seattle was the only American city that saw major gains in bus ridership during the 2010s at a time when otherwise bus ridership was falling pretty much everywhere. They built an enormous amount of housing around transit that did not include what had previously been the required parking spaces.

And in fact, the savings in the foregone parking, the parking that was not built that would previously have been required amounted to $500 million in unbuilt parking spaces.

So, and that's just in one city over a period of like six years. And so I don't think it's a coincidence that Seattle was a place to solve these people starting to ride the bus because again, it's sort of about the provision of public transit.

“You need to have a good network to get people on the bus, but people are not going to ride the bus unless parking is a pain in the ass.”

And that is a very uncomfortable thing for people to wrap their minds around. Certainly it's not something I would say if I was running for mayor. I'm going to make parking up pain in the ass if you ride the bus. But it's just a reality. There's no world in which you lure people onto the bus when when the parking is still easy and free. What is your assessment of why we are not doing more as a society to change that? Is it sort of that that's just that it's politically very difficult? Is it like a lack of awareness that it's actually a problem?

Well, I would say we've built ourselves into a pretty big hole. We've spent 80 years building sprawl that is from a transportation choice standpoint, totally unredeemable. I'm sure you see sometimes these these little screenshots that go viral showing you how long it takes to walk in some of these neighborhoods from places that might be just a couple hundred feet away from each other. And it could take an hour and 15 minutes to walk because the street grid is so messed up and the highways cut these highways or even water features kind of cut across the landscape.

So yeah adapting those places that is going to be an enormous uphill battle. I think there are lots of people who would like to see change happen.

And so for people who moved to cities in the 70s or 80s and were accustomed to having free parking outside every place they wanted to go, you know, like it is inside felt right where they live on the upper west side but they're still is like driving to the movies and stuff.

It's very hard to let go of that culture and somebody wants to ask me like, well, you know, how do you get people to give up that expectation and I don't think you do.

“I think the moment at which you approach people about rethinking it is when they move to a new place.”

And Americans don't move as much as they used to, so that's hard. And if you look at places where lots of people do move in and out, I think you find a much more accepting culture about, well, maybe doesn't need to be this way, maybe we could do things differently. Or something Virginia is an example of that. It's a county with a lot of churn. People always coming to going and I don't think it's a coincidence that they've been able to have a pretty progressive urbanism policy in that place and I think it's related to that.

Let's say there's a new mayor coming into office, let's say like in a mid-sized city in the US, and they go to you and they say, look, I'm convinced about, you know, what you're saying about parking and I'm also willing to expand some political capital to try to change this in my community. I want to move the needle on it.

What are like one or two policies that you would say, okay, hey, just go do this, do it quickly and this will really help.

“I think getting rid of parking minimums is a no brainer. Many businesses and developers will still provide parking because they have their own livelihoods at stake, right?”

You want to be able to rent your apartments, you want to be able to sell your sandwiches and sell your services as a dry cleaner or whatever, and if you think you need parking, then you've got to get some. But that should be a decision that's left up to those individuals. And so I think that's a no brainer for cities and actually a pretty popular policy from what I can tell because it just keeps happening in all these different cities and there's been almost no coming back on it with very few exceptions.

People appreciate the growth in the feeling that of a place becoming more urban, more vibrant and so on.

And the other thing that's really important is is dealing with commuters because commuters are, you know, people who maybe come down and shop once in a while.

“They're probably going to come in a car, but people who are doing the same thing every day, that's where I think you really have the potential to make an impact on their choices.”

For example, you see a lot of really interesting research about workplace parking and how that impacts the way the people will think about how to get to work. And turns out not even by changing the amount of money that people pay, but changing how it's assessed so that people pay by the day instead of saying paying for a monthly or an annual pass can have an enormous effect on how often people drive to work. If you pay by the year, you sunk all that money into it, and so every day you decide to drive the parking is free, but if you pay by the day, then every day that you don't drive and park, you're saving a little bit of money, and I think that has a tremendous effect as well.

You know, the mayor only has so much control over that, but you can work with local businesses and institutions, big universities, big medical centers hospitals and so forth. And they can often be convinced that it might be in their interests to get more of their workforce out of their cars, and the reason for that is they provided an enormous amount of parking to their employees for which they pay a lot of money. And in many cases, they can save money instead of providing those free parking spaces, but just offering cash to people who don't drive the sort of parking cash out is what that policy is called.

And the results show that that's a tremendously effective policy in getting people to change how they get around. If you could do that at a city level, you have an enormous amount of positive externalities that would come from even moving that mode share of people driving from, you know, a 75% to 70 or 65%. Just like a little bit of a chicken and a issue or could be where you have this space that is extremely valuable is taken up by parking, and if you had much better transit, it might free you up as a city to redevelop that parking or to make a sort of better use of it, which would bring in a lot of revenue.

But it's hard to do that before you've first provided the better public transit and that cost money, right? Always a major objection in places that have been unable to kind of get over the political challenge of, you know, reducing parking, charging for parking, et cetera.

It's pretty challenging, and furthermore, the way we've built our urban landscape, our geography of housing and jobs, is so sprawling that it's not even just a question of investment.

It's also a question of, is this a neighborhood that can ever be efficiently served by public transit, but I think that, you know, there is reason for optimism there if you look at like Canadian cities, similarly sprawling have much higher rates of public transit use because they have much more investment. And I think the other reason for optimism is that we have a massive housing shortage, and so we do need to create all these units and that creates the possibility that neighborhoods that today are not sufficiently dense to support public transit use might in 10 or 15 years actually have that density.

This is in the country where you can watch that transition happen, like the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, right, like early to county, that's a place that has gone in the last couple decades from being a place where everybody drove to a place that has incredible urban levels of density, even though it's technically a suburb, and it's very much now, a walkable, bikeable community, and so this kind of change is possible.

“I think the chicken and egg question though, you will never get people to ride public transit if parking is easy, convenient, and free.”

In a country where the car ownership rate is so high and everybody has the option or almost everybody has the option of driving to work.

The thing that puts people on public transit is the fact that the drive to work has become somewhat more difficult, and that can happen through congestion, like it can just take so much time that people would prefer transit if transit is faster. But transit usually isn't faster, and so the reason people ride transit is because the drive to work costs more money, and the way that that happens is through parking fees is to a shortage of parking that compels people to ride transit, and until there is that shortage of parking and driving becomes difficult and expensive, people just aren't going to take the bus because they like it.

“I mean, I like taking the bus, but I would say I do not represent the normal American commuter.”

Henry, this has been really fascinating conversation, and before we go, I just want to know what if anything makes you feel optimistic about the parking situation in the US these days.

Something that's making me optimistic right now is that Boston is in the process of discussing whether to get rid of their parking benefits, and I think this is a city where parking is a blood sport, and people go crazy about parking, and I think it's a great sign that they are realizing that as much of a political third rail as it is. Ultimately, when you require all this parking with new developments, you are putting a tax on housing, and you are making housing more expensive for everybody who moves to the city, and that ultimately lowering the cost of housing is a more important issue than increasing the availability of parking.

And this comes after on the heels of several years, which the city has built more parking spaces than housing units, and so the fact that this is now being discussed at the city level in a place where, again, this is a very fraught local issue, I think gives me reason for optimism.

“Thank you, Henry, so much for being here today. My pleasure, thanks for having me.”

Henry Gribar is the author of paved paradise, how parking explains the world. Mochift is produced by latitude media and partnership with via. The show is hosted by me, Andre Greenwald, the show is produced by Max Savage Levinson and Bailey and Stephen Lacy. Sean Marquan mixed the show and wrote our theme song. It's also produced by me, Andre Greenwald, Francis Cooperman and Karina Salin from via. You can listen to Mochift at ridewithvia.com or anywhere you get podcasts. Thanks for listening.