Henry Grabar

This book is both engrossing and thought-provoking. It is also a book that will change how you look at the world around you. This is surprising considering that this book is about the parking of cars.

Henry Graber begins with a number of stories about how parking requirements make it difficult to build affordable housing. He also discusses the many conflicts that arise as a result of disputes about parking. As an extreme example of how parking distorts life in the city, he tells the story of show more an elderly woman in Boston who needs her car to go to the grocery store but is afraid to use it because she knows she will lose her parking spot.

Grabar tells the history of curb parking and parking garages as well as the history of the parking meter and the shopping mall. Although there is a lot of literature about traffic, there is relatively little about parking considering that cars spend some 95% of the time parked. He spits out facts and anecdotes at a firehose pace adding many surprising facts. For example, he says that "it is estimated that there are as many as six parking spaces for every car." Parking regulations are responsible for much of the nation's signage with 80% of traffic signs related to parking.

Particularly useful is his analysis of the financial aspects of parking. It points out that land in Manhattan is the most expensive in the world but is generally free if you want to use the land to park your car. He illustrates the value of curb side parking by explaining how ice cream trucks and food trucks accept parking fines of up to $30,000 per year in order to park by the side of a road. Several concrete construction projects are discussed allowing him to put a concrete figure on the costs of providing parking. For one project, the cost to provide the required parking spaces adds $1700/ year to the rents people need to pay. Several projects could not be built as a result of parking requirements. One surprising fact is that many cities actually made more money from parking fines than from the money collected from their parking maters.

Graber is particularly critical about the requirement for parking minimums but says that there is now a trend for cities to eliminate or reduce the amount of parking required. Cities that reduced the amount of parking often found a number of positive benefits. One benefit was that it made housing more affordable. Also, historical neighborhoods with less than the required amount of parking are often the most desirable and most expensive areas for people to live in. Having less parking improves the appearance of the buildings in the neighborhood as well.

The book concludes with a variety of examples of how cities are putting their curbsides to other uses than for parking. show less

Grabar's book is a fascinating examination of the many ways parking rules our lives. With entertaining anecdotes, backed up by recent data (and copious back matter at the end of the book) the author makes a powerful case for the need to modify our thinking and planning about parking. He avoids being overly evangelical by his conversational narrative style and sense of humor, but it's impossible not to be changed by his presentation about the absurdity of the dominance of the automobile and show more parking on our lives, especially in towns and cities. The sociological, emotional, and financial repercussions are catching up with us. As someone who rarely reads nonfiction for enjoyment, I found this book to be a fun read, and plan to give several copies as gifts. show less

Comprehensive anti-parking screed: Americans in particular have insisted that parking be payment-free, steps from their ultimate destination, and always available. But only two out of the three are achievable at any one time, and the result has been a country optimized for cars instead of humans, high housing prices, traffic congestion, and much worse. “[M]ore than half of baby boomers, a group that tends to dominate local politics, said free parking was more important than affordable show more housing in their neighborhood.”

A great aside on parking & organized crime explains that parking is perfect for money laundering because it’s a cash business and nobody can really keep track of how many cars parked that day, especially since most parking is unused most of the time. (As a cash business, parking lots are also good to rob, for writers looking for that kind of thing. And they still make a lot of money because, given parking habits, parking garages tend to have a monopoly or oligopoly, especially at places like college campuses.)

About that utilization: Even neighborhoods where people think you can’t ever find a parking space are almost never fully utilized, and their fullness is for only short periods. By some estimates, there are six parking spaces per car! But parking-centric design means you’ll still feel frustrated much of the time.

His solutions include zoning that allows parking-free construction or at least much lower parking minimums, although the neighbors scream bloody murder about it; this allows cheaper housing and also turns out to encourage people not to own cars. “If the Empire State Building had been built to the minimum parking requirements of a contemporary American city, for example, its surface parking lot would cover twelve whole blocks.” He also wants dedicated off-street parking, to reclaim the streets for non-drivers and accustom people to parking a block or two away from their destination rather than holding out for the holy grail of a spot right in front of where they want to be. And of course more urbanist design more generally: “One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance.”

Why is America the worst? Because we see parking as a frontier that opens up anew every day, so, among other things, like other American pioneers, we feel free to disregard the actual rules. Icky: “Drivers take 21 percent longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting.” And our utility calculations are off regardless: people mostly like to search for the closest spot, underestimating the time that makes them spend driving around in circles and overestimating how much they’ll walk. (Of course, if you’re walking through a parking lot, it’s a much less pleasant walk than if you’re walking past houses or storefronts.) Parking violations are also infuriatingly arbitrary and offer opportunities for both abuse and corruption.

Speaking of which, Grabar tells a sad story of Chicago’s sale of its parking meters to private profiteers who then charged them for every street festival that shut down parking for a day. The city made much less than the sale was worth, of course, to fill one budget hole, and then its contract prevented it from improving things for drivers. “Parking ticket fines had to be at least ten times meter rates, and unpaid tickets had to be sent to a collection agency.” The new owner charged the city $73 million for issuing too many disabled parking placards—as much in one neighborhood as it had generated previously from all the parking meters in the city. Rahm Emanuel sold it as a political success when he decreased the amount the city was paying, but it was supposed to be getting paid!

On the plus side, Morgan Stanley raised prices so much that driving decreased, average space utilization went down to 25%, and transit and bikeshare improved. Grabar likes that and wants on-street parking to be more expensive if it is to exist at all, though he might let delivery trucks and similar vehicles get an exception. But it’s not great that Morgan Stanley made back its billion dollars with 64 years of receipts left to come.

Here, have some statistics: “If it takes three minutes to find a parking spot on a block, that block is generating sixty thousand extra driving miles each year.” But if you make on-street parking really expensive and garage parking less expensive, people circle less and violate fewer parking regulations, as San Francisco found.

Also some advice: don’t say “parking requirements” or “minimums.” That’s value-neutral at best, or implicitly conveys a need. Instead, try “costly parking mandates.” Existing minimums are both random (varying hugely by city) and incredibly overgenerous. DC required Target to build a 1000-car garage, less than the 1700 required by then-extant regulations; it was never half full and Target has now built a store in nearby Rosslyn with zero parking.

But this is politically hard, often impossible. Grabar suggests that free parking seems like the only thing many people can have, given the cost of housing (to which parking’s contribution is invisible). “Free parking near campus looks good for students who can’t imagine living close enough to walk. Easy parking in wealthy neighborhoods is a lifeline for workers who will never be allowed to live nearby. And acres of parking downtown feels like a right to commuters and shoppers when the bus comes only once an hour. In each case, parking stands for a primitive kind of access that both overshadows and impedes a more profound and widely held right to the city.” show less

As someone unfamiliar with the parking world, this book provided an up-to-date, thorough overview of its establishment in the United States. In the past few years, I have taken an interest in public transit and walkability but never thought about parking. I have lived on two sides of the equation. I grew up in a car-centric suburb and nowadays live a car-free life in a walkable neighborhood.

I remember that curb parking, while free for all, was kind of a territory in my small subdivision. I show more once made the mistake of parking in a spot I did not normally park in. The next day, there was a unfriendly handwritten note on my windshield expressing frustration that I parked in "their" spot.

My first corporate job involved commuting to a business park in another suburb. The hot topic at work was trying to stop residents at the neighboring apartment complex across the street from using the business parking. There were many people venting frustration and wishing the landlord would be more proactive. At the same time, I was sitting there, thinking about it, and the parking lot at work was never full. There were always free spaces. I never once, in my years working there, struggled to find a parking spot. I found the whole conversation amusing to to this day and very relevant to the topics discussed in this book.

Nowadays, I have the privilege of living in a walkable community where my office, grocery store, doctor's office, etc. is all within a half-hour radius of walking. I have not thought much about parking since then but feel a relief of not having to drive everywhere. It made me wonder why communities like these in the United States are so hard to find. This book provides context on how regulations like parking minimums and other well-intentioned strategies have encouraged American car culture.

This book enlightened me on this topic in a good way. I hope more people recognize this element of walkable communities. show less