Book Review: Parking Wars

Reviewed by Julie Bush 

“Parking determines the size, shape, and cost of new buildings, the fate of old ones, the patterns of traffic, the viability of mass transit, the life of public space, the character of neighborhoods, the state of the city budget, our whole spread-out life in which it is virtually impossible to live without an automobile.” — Henry Grabar 

One of the primary issues raised at my neighborhood association’s zoning committee is parking. Developers want variances for less parking. Neighbors want more parking. At the same time, residents are asking for more affordable units to help make our quickly gentrifying neighborhood more equitable. As a design professional, I see how they are related, but find it difficult to successfully articulate why we can’t have it all without sounding like I’m on the side of the developer. Well, that changes with the information in Henry Grabar’s book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. In fact, I’d argue that this book should be required reading for anyone tackling these thorny issues around parking, housing, density, transportation and community.  

A book about parking might sound a bit dry, but Grabar opens with a street fight over a parking space that escalates to assault involving multiple people. The narrative continues in a similar way, offering real life stories from activists, developers, politicians and parking attendants. Everyone wants free parking, in front of their destination, available when needed. But Grabar meticulously explains that parking is never free — it determines so many elements of our designed environment that we haven’t realized the full cost we’re paying.   

The book is divided into three parts: What A Mess We Made, Charging For Something Everyone Expects For Free, and How To Fix The Parking Problem. All three sections feature examples of the history and the failures, with some solutions sprinkled throughout the first two parts. The book tackles the parking issue both in terms of new development and street parking within the right of way — both of which affect all of us as planners, architects, landscape architects, and people that move through cities and suburbs. 

New development parking minimums required by code affect the shape of our designs, the column grid spacing, and the leftover open space, if any. Looking at the history of the parking minimum code requirements, Grabar shows that the quantities required are arbitrary and don’t always use the same baseline — some requirements consider square footage, others consider maximum occupancy or maximum trips, and most are not specific to place. 

There are multiple examples of well-intended projects that failed because of parking minimum requirements, including a church that was intentionally looking for a neighborhood location that its parishioners could walk to. They couldn’t afford to buy land that would accommodate both parking and a church. In fact, the book says that the construction of buildings comprised of two-to-four units in the U.S. fell more than 90 percent between 1971 and 2021 — builders couldn’t afford the land to accommodate the required surface parking or the construction cost of structured parking. This leads to urban sprawl or very high density, and nothing in between.  

The book repeats itself throughout, utilizing different arguments and different examples to really drive its points home. Grabar often mentions the hypocrisy of planners or politicians that are committed to fighting climate change and encouraging biking, walking, and transit, but still require builders to include more parking.  

In terms of street/right-of-way parking, problems in cities started as early as the 1920s. People loved meters when they were first introduced in the 1930s because they created order and more turnover for parked vehicles, which pleased shop owners. By the 1950s/60s they fell out of favor, which happens to be around the same time that shopping malls — ringed with tons of free parking — started attracting more people to the suburbs to do their shopping. This led cities to imitate that experience and build more parking garages. I actually remember playing with my father’s metal toy parking garage from the 1950s, an early sign of the idolized car and parking culture we grew up in. Looking back, my toy garage was only ever half full because I didn’t have enough toy cars to fill it.  

Philadelphia gets a number of fun shout-outs throughout the book. Did you know that we have 2.2 million parking spaces or 3.7 for every household? The Philadelphia airport parking scam of the early ’90s takes up a good part of a chapter: An organized crime ring internal to the PHL parking garage would count long-term parkers as short-term and pocket the difference. Investigators estimate the grift netted the scammers $3.4 million over four years, but after the arrests, revenue was up by $7 million.  Grabar also mentions the show Parking Wars, which takes place in Philadelphia. The shout-outs weren’t making the city look all that great, but at least we didn’t sell our meters to Wall Street like Chicago did in the ’90s. That said, I was disappointed when he mentioned the pedestrianization of Times Square in New York City in 2009, but didn’t mention how the parking lot in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art became a temporary park called The Oval just a year later in 2010.  

Part Three offers multiple solutions, including demand-based pricing for meters to increase turnover, making it easier to park and reducing traffic — people won’t be circling looking for parking. Higher parking rates could also be a boon for transit and bike share use. Another idea is changing new development parking minimums to parking maximums and refer to minimums as “costly parking mandates” which are passed down to the renters, shoppers, etc. One solution that I found really interesting was charging more for long-term street parking. Many of us, myself included, own a car, but leave it unused for days at a time. The book didn’t say how this would be implemented, but you could easily envision higher permit parking pricing. The suggestion mentioned in the book was $5.50 a day or the price of a round trip on NYC transit. The money raised could go directly into transit infrastructure, flipping the cost to make car owners pay and transit rides nearly free. The author acknowledges the claim “that reducing parking availability, or increasing its price, is a penalty that falls on the backs of those that can least afford it.” He makes a different argument: “I can understand how this claim is compelling if you cannot picture a world of better parking, where housing is affordable and easy to build, driving is optional, streets are pleasant public spaces for children and the elderly, and a parking spot is available when needed.”  

Overall, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in design, whether it’s from a larger planning scale or an individual building design scale. ■ 

CAPTION 

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar 

PHOTO: JULIE BUSH