Latest / The Missing Middle Podcast / Parking Is Ruining Our Cities. Here’s Why | Henry Grabar

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Parking Is Ruining Our Cities. Here’s Why | Henry Grabar · The Missing Middle Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is parking really more important than housing?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's not an abstract trade-off.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's a real trade-off that happens at each one of these projects.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: They will say, oh, the transit service isn't good enough yet.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, the bike lane's not safe enough yet.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: But the reality is people choose not to use their cars only when it's difficult and expensive.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: If we start today, then in 30 years from now, we'll have a bunch of people who say, Oh, yeah, well, you have to pay to store your private property on the street.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Demographics, hosted by Mike Moffitt and Kara Stern.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Here's a weird bit of human psychology.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: In an urban neighborhood, most people refuse to walk more than two blocks from their parking spot to their destination.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: But put those same people in a massive Walmart or Costco parking lot, and they'll happily walk the equivalent of five city blocks without a second thought.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: When I learned that, it was a total wake-up call for me.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And once you notice that double standard, you just can't unsee it.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that contradiction is just the entry point into how parking has shaped our built environment, from driving up the cost of housing to crippling local transit.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: And these stories are at the heart of Henry Gerbar's book, Pave Paradise: How parking explains the world.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's a book our viewers have been asking us to cover since we launched the podcast, and we're so thrilled to have Henry joining us today.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the show.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna start with a really big question.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: You write in the book that parking by default is expected to be convenient, available, and free.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: So how has that principle shaped what our cities and suburbs look like?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I I think of those three attributes as being part of a trifecta of characteristics that constitute the perfect parking space.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: So when people talk about parking, they have something in their head.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: They have a parking space they're thinking about.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And they want three things from that.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: They want it to be available the moment they arrive.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: This is very important, right?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you have to circle around the block, then that doesn't count.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: They want it to be convenient, uh, as you mentioned in your intro.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: That usually means directly in front of the door of the restaurant or directly in front of their house.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And they want it to be free.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: These three attributes constitute a trilemma, which is to say it's pretty easy to find parking that fulfills two of the three characteristics.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: But if you try and get all three, you wind up uh often destroying the place that you came to park at in the interest of just providing more and more parking.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, the pursuit of the perfect parking space and the way in which it motivates so much of our community discussion, local politics, and urban design guidelines has uh led us to a place where we both have uh too much parking and and and seems also never enough.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: I want to read a few stats from your book that I found pretty mind-blowing.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: The National Parking Association, which is a trade group representing the parking industry in America, says parking is a 131 billion US dollar industry.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: There are at least three parking spaces for every car in America, which is more housing by square footage for each car than there is for each person.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: Drivers take 21% longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting, and 33% longer if the arriving driver honks at them.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And in total, according to a 2017 study, Americans spend 17 hours a year looking for a parking spot.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to go back to those three spots per car.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: The stat originally came from Donald Chu, right?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there have been a few estimates of how many parking spaces there are.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and we don't have an exact count.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually indicative of the way in which parking has been this ignored field of study.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: We obviously know how many cars are on the road and we know how many lane miles of roadway we have.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: And yet the space to store all those cars, which takes up an enormous amount of extremely valuable urban land, has never been counted.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's no official tally, even at the city level.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: They often don't know how many parking spaces they have in a neighborhood and how full those spaces are.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's so weird how they don't know how many spots there are, but they still have guidelines.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like this is how many spots you must have for each different kind of structure, right?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Like I don't know how they came up with those figures then.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: So in every zoning code, which governs the types of things that we build, how you need to design a certain space, what you're permitted to do with your land, there are these long tables that dictate how many parking spaces you need to include with each conceivable use.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just you need two parking spaces with every house.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's also parking spaces per square foot of office space, parking spaces per kennel in a dog pound, parking spaces per casket in a funeral parlor, parking spaces per bowling lane in a bowling alley.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: The answer to your question is those requirements are based on very little study.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: They're relatively unscientific in spite of their uh precision, um, but they illustrate the guiding philosophy that there is nothing worse than not having enough parking, and that we would much rather err on the side of too much parking than not enough.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that has been the kind of philosophy of urban planning in most of the world for the last 80 years in order to accommodate the automobile.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think only in the last maybe 15 or 20 years we've begun to reckon with the consequences that, in fact, there can be too much parking.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the consequences of that uh might be worse than going someplace where there isn't quite enough parking.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's only recently that we started seeing cities in Canada at least uh getting rid of their parking minimums.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: Our audience is very housing focused, and so a lot of them might have some idea of how minimum parking uh requirements uh hurt the housing market.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: But can you go over how that works?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: I would think of it in three different ways.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is that parking costs a lot of money to build, right?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is self-explanatory if you've ever built parking, um, but I think remains opaque for most people because we pay so little for parking when we use it.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a little plot of asphalt or concrete.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: How much could it possibly cost?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: But building parking in a structured garage in a Canadian city probably costs$50,000 to$100,000.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Underground parking costs more.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: Even surface parking uh is expensive, not just to grade the land and pour the asphalt and stripe it and all that and landscape it and light it, but also there's the opportunity cost of the land.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that brings me to the second part of the way that parking relates to housing.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: In addition to all of that money being spent on parking, sort of going into the cost of development, raising the rents, raising the sale prices of a condo or a house, it also takes up space.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so this has a powerful effect on the types of housing that get built.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: You often see small urban lots where the parking requirements are so high that you limited basically uh anything uh greater than a single family home in terms of housing density uh from being built because the the geometry of it just doesn't work.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: In theory, all the parking could go underground.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's the way they did it in Sim City, right?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: They just pretend that the parking is underground.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But in reality, underground parking is so expensive that you have to build on the surface if you're building a small infill lot and you just run out of space um to house the cars that are required uh to build the housing.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third way I would think about it is at a neighborhood level and a and a transportation level where parking just limits the conceivable density in a way that then has these knock-on effects, uh, which in turn require more parking.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there is a certain threshold density at which transit can be provided, at which people will ride transit and you can provide that service without too much of a loss.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the more parking we require, the lower the density gets.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so you wind up creating a landscape in which it becomes very difficult not to drive.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we've seen that obviously in housing, but especially that's apparent in our commercial districts where all the buildings sit like, you know, little islands in in seas of parking and it becomes uh very difficult or dangerous to walk between different locations.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: I love that Sim City example where they couldn't make parking spots realistic and how big they are, because then otherwise the game would just be really boring.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: It would just be Sim parking lot.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think when they designed the game, they actually went around cities measuring things.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: They concluded that parking actually took up so much space that if they were to design the game modeled after a real city, it would just be boring and ugly, and nobody would want to play it.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you fly over a city in an airplane, you can also get a glimpse of this.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: Most downtowns have 20 to 40 percent of the land area is made up of parking, and that's not even including the parking at the curb, right?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: We're just talking about pure parking partials in terms of lots and garages.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: So there really is a vast amount of land that's consigned for this very low value use, and often not just uh consigned to a low value use that's that's necessary, but a low value use that's that's rarely at 100% occupancy and is often uh overbuilt to the detriment of both the the builders who built that, the people who pay rent on those properties, and and everybody who who goes to the place, right?
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because nobody likes uh walking past a bunch of parking lots and garages.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think my entry point into learning about parking minimums was an example here in Toronto.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: There was a building going up really close to Union Station, which is like the main transit hub of the city, and they had to shrink the number of social housing units by 34 because of the parking restrictions and among other restrictions, but parking was the biggest one.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: We lost a whole bunch of market rate housing in for that one.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: But the social housing, I kept thinking like, these are people who are paying living so close to the transit station, they're right downtown.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: They don't need to have a car, they can't afford market rate housing, so they're they're not well off.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: What are the chances that they have a car and that they wouldn't want to live somewhere that didn't have a parking space?
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: When people talk about what's more important, housing for cars or housing for people, or is parking really more important than housing?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's not an abstract trade-off.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: That's a real trade-off that happens at each one of these projects, where because of the constraints on the geometry of the site and on the amount of money that's available to build the project, you literally see apartments being deleted in favor of parking spaces.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you sometimes hear advocates for the tenants or owners of these affordable housing buildings saying, well, if we're gonna provide affordable housing, we should provide the full package because giving somebody a place to have a car provides them with this engine of economic mobility.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true, right?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: On an individual level, you are better positioned as a household to have better access to the labor market, to education, and so forth.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: However, if you frame that choice instead as are we gonna provide uh one more parking space for this for this unit, or are we gonna just have to delete this unit entirely?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I think the choice becomes very clear.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there are countless examples of projects.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: I remember visiting when I was reporting my book, a development for the formerly homeless in Austin, Texas, where they had um erased a bunch of housing units in order to create the garage, and the garage was always empty at a time when lots of people sleep in their cars.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: Those kinds of examples are what have motivated people in the last 10 years, I think, to revisit these laws and say, does it make sense to have these one size fits all prescriptions when even if it is a priority to include parking, does the government really know in this table of figures how much parking should be required?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Or should we leave that decision to the person who's actually building the project with the understanding that they know their clients or their tenants and they know the market they're building in and uh the transportation choices that people are gonna have?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's still, though, the rallying cry for neighbors when they want to object to a new build.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: The city wanted to build social housing on a surface lot.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually very close to me.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: A bunch of neighbors got together and fought it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: And there's this quote from one of them that went viral where they said something like, This parking lot is the heart of the community.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: We see this over and over.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: It can be a multiplex that's like a duplex or a fourplex that's not that not that dense on a residential street.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's always about parking, though, that people come together and fight it.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: How do we create a kind of policy environment that inoculates against that?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Is that possible?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: That is the million-dollar question, I think, because we're now seeing a lot of momentum around relaxing land use rules for the reasons we just discussed, namely the price and availability of housing has become a complete crisis point, not just in the United States and Canada, but I think lots of places in the Western world, right?
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so there is a lot of pressure on this particular issue, not just from housing, but also from a transportation standpoint, right?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because uh, in the United States, at least uh transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's linked to a whole host of other negative externalities.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's this idea that, well, it would be better if we had fewer people driving in the city.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, once those land use restrictions are relaxed and you begin to see development with fewer parking spaces, we know that buildings with fewer parking spaces will cause the people who live there to own fewer cars.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's quite a range of studies that demonstrate that if you provide more parking, people will bring more cars, they'll buy more cars.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: There is a sense in which if the neighbors are worried about traffic, then it is not in their interest to promote development that includes lots of parking because all of those people will have cars and they'll drive everywhere.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: You will have people who buy condos in these new developments or rent in these new buildings and park the car on the street, right?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what really drives the neighbors crazy.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: In the Boston area where I live, they just did a study of um comments that were made on development projects in the city and the suburbs.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they were looking at these comments and trying to figure out okay, um, what's motivating people to oppose new development or what subjects are they discussing?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the quality of the architecture?
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Is it the uh classroom overcrowding at the schools?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Comments about parking and traffic were by far the number one type of thing that people brought up when they were talking about new development.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: So it clearly is a major concern.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: At the same time, people don't always have a very good grasp on parking availability in their own community.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And as we discussed, they have extremely high standards.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: I went to a neighborhood um in uh in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., uh, a suburb called Arlington, Virginia, and they did a study of when neighbors decide that the parking on their block has reached saturation or capacity.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer was when it reaches 50% occupancy.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if so that's your standard, if if your standard is that once the parking is 50% full, we're gonna just do a moratorium on development and we're gonna bring our signs to City Hall and we're gonna throw the bums out of office.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really um a sound basis to make urban planning decisions, I think.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: But that is the human psychology behind this.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: You said in your book, I think that it was when the closest spots are all full all the time, right?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: People are very attached to parking their car directly in front of their home.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And changing those habits is hard, right?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I grew up in New York City when there were seven million people in New York.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's eight and a half million.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: There's many people who have lived in New York for their entire lives, and so they have a memory of what it was like to drive and park at a time when the city was 20% smaller than it is today.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, those habits cannot endure as as the place changes.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we have a whole bunch of people for whom those old habits die really hard.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have people who will oppose these changes on the grounds that they remember how it used to be.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: I think the thing that we have going for us when we think about the evolution of our cities is there's new people arriving every day.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And those new people have new expectations, you know, that planners uh can shape about how much parking is available, how much it costs, whether you should expect to be able to uh find a parking space in 10 seconds and store your car for free for days on end.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: We can revise those expectations today.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it would have been better to do it 30 years ago, but if we start today, then in 30 years from now, we'll have a bunch of people who say, oh, yeah, well, you have to pay to store your private property on the street.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's always been the way it is.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: In your book, you explain how making parking harder essentially is the most politically viable way to get people out of their cars and taking other modes of transport.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in my experience, when I've been covering this, what I've learned is that people want to be enticed into other forms of transit.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: So kind of using the carrot rather than using the stick of saying, well, it's going to be harder to drive.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: What do we do about that?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what they say.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they say, but it's not true.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: They will say, oh, the transit service isn't good enough yet.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, the bike lane's not safe enough yet.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, uh, the weather's not good enough.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, uh, we'll work on improving all of those things.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the reality is people choose not to use their cars only when it's difficult and expensive.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Driving is almost always the fastest way to get from A to B.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in both the US and Canada, even in our major cities, most people own cars.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you want to uh induce people to make those journeys in another way, the stick has to be used, uh, unfortunately.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, of course, there needs to be a baseline of transit service.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: The streets need to be safe enough for people to be able to cross them with, you know, with their kids without worrying about being run over by a car.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: All that is important.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but at the end of the day, the most important factor determining whether people are going to make those trips in their car or some other way is the cost and availability of parking.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because parking is a political third rail, that is challenging.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, that's very it in a sense, it's very easy.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a lever that's very, very easy to pull, right?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: You can overnight change the cost of parking.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can begin to develop some of the many, many surface lots that the governments own in in major cities.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you can ask private companies also to revise their policies to try and, if not, charge employees for the parking that they're using, then at least offer to people who don't drive an equivalent kind of cash bonus uh for not making use of those parking uh resources.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm convinced that people think that it's faster to drive in cities, but it isn't actually when you consider parking.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think this every time I open Google Maps and I'm like, how should I get there?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it'll say, you know, 15 minutes by car, 30 minutes by transit.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll think, oh, you know what, I'll I'll take my car this time.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: But then I end up spending almost as much time looking for parking at my destination and then walking from the parking lot to my destination.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: That is a great point.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: I I do think about that uh in the context of people's kind of volatile attitudes about parking.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it is related to this misalignment of expectation and reality that is in part created by these mapping softwares, right?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you say, if you've been told that you're gonna be at your doctor's appointment in 12 minutes and then you get there and it takes you five, 10 minutes to park and then walk from the space, then you're late and you're mad about parking.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: But what you should really be mad about is you didn't properly take into account um how much time it was gonna take you to get from A to B.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that may be part of what's motivating this sense of um, you know, parking needs to take me zero minutes.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, otherwise, we have a parking problem and that needs to be dealt with.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: Another issue that came up in the book that I actually didn't know about was that municipalities get more money from fines for parking than they do from getting money from people paying for parking.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you say that it kind of like has a corrosive effect on the social contract.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain what you meant by that?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: For for decades now, cities have made a lot of money from parking revenue.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you get a ticket because you overstayed a meter and you gripe about, oh, the city's always trying to take advantage of people for overstaying the meters, and it's just a way for them to raise money, you're not entirely wrong.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Many cities, the way they run their parking system is they have been reluctant to raise the rates uh for political reasons, because it's so explosive to tell people they need to pay more for parking.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: And because they're reluctant to raise the parking rates, what they get is a situation where there are overcrowded curbs and it's impossible to find a place to park legally.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so people park illegally and they pay fines.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it turns out this situation is actually more lucrative for cities than it would be to actually charge the proper amount, what Donald Schuop would call the market clearing price that creates availability on every block.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Cities that have done that have found that fines go down because when people have legal places to park and they feel like they're getting what they pay for, essentially, this focus on fines leads to a system in which people distrust parking managers, the whole city parking system because they perceive it as a sort of uh punishment-oriented uh money-making tool rather than what it was intended to be in the first place, which was a device to manage this scarce resource, which is the curb, right?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: We only have so much interface between land use and and the street.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to find a way to dole that out in the fairest way possible.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think the best system we've come up with is the parking meter.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Most of this conversation seems like it applies to cities, but what about suburbs or rural areas where you actually need to have a car because there aren't really any other options?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: What do you do in that situation?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I've been to a number of small towns that talk about this issue, and I actually think it's potentially even more relevant, or or or maybe one way to think of it is the stakes are higher in small towns than they are in cities.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason for that is small town fabric is very fragile and precious.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't need to demolish that many buildings to create parking lots before you've lost the whole town's urban fabric and really its reason for being.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the attitude here is often, well, there's free parking at the mall by the gas station.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to have the same standard of parking here downtown.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: It needs to be free, it needs to be instantly available, and so on.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And you're just, you're never going to do better than the mall and providing free parking.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you damage your assets in pursuit of that, you're losing the real only advantage that you have over these locations, which is the kind of serendipity and access and economic vibrancy that comes from that concentration of businesses and people that characterize a small town or a suburban center.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: I would add that unlike uh many big city neighborhoods, these places, small towns and suburban town centers, very rarely have bona fide parking shortages.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: They may complain that there isn't a space in front of the restaurant when I want it, but there usually is a space a couple blocks away, which makes it all the more foolhardy to embark on a quest to.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Demolish half of downtown or spend$30 million in public money to build a giant garage that goes unused because you didn't do a parking study.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: Countless cities forfeited money that could have been used to pay for schools or other public improvements to build these half-empty garages.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's the equivalent of jumping straight into having back surgery when a couple of uh stretches might have sufficed.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: You asked the reader to reframe how they're thinking about this to ask themselves, not why is it so hard to park, but why is it so hard not to drive?
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, I like the way that you frame that.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm just not sure how you convince people to do that.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: Have you seen any progress or any hints on how to actually get people to change their mindset?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's there's a couple moments at which you can get people to change the way they think about this stuff, right?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: There are these big life moments at which people make decisions about where they're gonna live, whether they're gonna own a car, when they move to a new city is one of them, or when they uh move to a new location in the city.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, when they buy a car is a major moment, because if you buy a car, you've suddenly put yourself in the camp of people who think about parking all the time and have the option to drive and so on.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so when that happens, it, you know, you you kind of lose that person, uh, you know, they can still be a motivated member of the cause.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: I own a car and I I still um, you know, try and ride my bike and walk and use transit and all that.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it's very important to think about these big life moments, right?
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think when people are in their 20s is a major moment in which they're forming these habits that are gonna carry around for years to come, right?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so if you can make it possible, for example, for um kids when they go to university to live a life without a car, for um people in their 20s to live without cars, then maybe when they have kids, they will think, okay, maybe I can, you know, my household can get by with one car or perhaps with a cargo bike or something like that.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think you are seeing more and more people become more adventurous and unconventional and how they're thinking about mobility at these major life moments, in particular having kids, I think, which is a big challenge, trying to do that without a car.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: You are seeing more and more electric bikes that people use to get their kids to school, which is awesome, right?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Relief from the the school drop offline.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, there's only so much change that can happen at the level of parking policy.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing that needs to happen is the availability of alternatives and the redesign of streets to make them safe for people to get around, right?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's not just about getting rid of minimums and and letting density emerge in these neighborhoods, but you also need to really change the way the streets look.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's been uh pretty slow going in American cities, and and I think Toronto is having some uh struggles with that as well.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: What was your gateway into caring about this issue?
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh I grew up in New York City, and so for me, I I feel like my expectation was that it was always gonna be a pain in the ass to drive.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: My parents had a car that they kept in a garage that was about 10 blocks from our house.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it was like, oh, we're gonna use the car.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: That was that was an expedition to go get the car.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then I remember traveling to other cities and going around their downtowns and being like, what happened here?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_00: After the the Second World War, it looked like it was the American cities that got bombed rather than the European cities because there were so many craters uh downtown where buildings used to be that had been emptied out to create parking lots.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think one of the things that that struck me was the lack of vibrancy and the lack of activity.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it seemed to me like a genuine puzzle.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how did this happen?
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_00: I remember in high school reading the uh former New Yorker and and also Torontonian Jane Jacobs, who wrote about um parking lots as a feature of urban design.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'd never even thought about that before.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: But she refers to them as a border vacuum, which is to say a kind of feature of the urban environment that sucks the life out of whatever happens to be near it.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and I thought that was rather profound and sort of opened my eyes to the fact that parking and the city more generally was a field of study that could be, you know, written about in this way.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to tell people that this was a really fun read.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it's the way you write is just so much fun.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like the stories are great.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't get into this in this interview, but there's so much about like the dark underbelly of the parking lot industry.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it's it's really interesting.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope anyone watching who's interested in urbanism and like the weird history of parking picks up your book.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a really great one.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for joining us.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: My pleasure.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks everyone for watching and listening.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Our producer is Meredith Martin, and this episode was edited by Canadian Civil.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have a crazy parking story, let us know in the comments.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll see you next time.