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Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World Around Us · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from
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all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors,
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designers, and everything in between.
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Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder.
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How did they get that job?
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Or become that person?
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The road to success is paved by all of us.
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Because everyone has a story.
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All of us, at some point, when asked by our friends, family, or significant others
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to venture to a new place have uttered the words What's the parking situation like?
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But have you ever stopped to wonder why we ask that?
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Tonight's guest unlocks the secrets of how parking has influenced our daily
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lives in a profound way, and chronicles them in his new book, Paved Paradise.
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We welcome writer and author Henry Grabar from Slate Magazine to
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Break Fix to talk about how parking Explains the world around us.
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Happy to be here.
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Joining me tonight as co hosts are Don Wieberg from Garagetown Magazine and Tom
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Newman, who you might remember from the Randy Lanier episode earlier this year.
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So, welcome.
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Thank you.
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Henry, it's great to meet you finally.
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Likewise.
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Hi, Henry, I'm Don.
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Hi, Don.
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This is such a divisive topic.
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So many people actually wanted to be on this episode.
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They all have something to say about parking and it's not
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lost on the non drivers either.
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Funny enough, just the other day, my daughters were arguing about
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how much parking they needed to add to their ever growing Lego city.
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And that brings us right to Henry's book.
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And not just a book, but a study.
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In parking.
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So Henry, tell us about the who, the what, the when, the where, the
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why of how this all came to be.
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What inspired the book and what pushed you over the edge to write it?
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One of my inspirations was traveling around to American cities, going downtown
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and just seeing how much space had been dedicated to parking lots and garages
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and feeling like this is such a weird way to organize what is supposed to
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be the economic center of this place.
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Why is there so much?
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Low value land use concentrated at what's supposed to be the
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most valuable place in the city.
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I think that's a mystery that's been with me for years now on a more specific
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answer would be to say that I work as a journalist and I write these stories
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about architecture and transportation and housing and at a certain point.
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Parking just kept coming up in story after story.
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And that may not surprise your listeners.
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I've since obviously talked to many people who have affirmed for me that
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parking is at the heart of what they do and their work and their concern
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in their daily life and all that.
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At the time, I felt like, wow, this is a subject that's absolutely everywhere.
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And I felt like hadn't really been explained in that way.
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It continues to come up and I don't think it's ever not going to end.
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Even just the other day, I was watching an episode of the hit series 1923, which
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is part of the Yellowstone Trilogy.
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Harrison Ford makes a comment as he rolls into town.
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He's like, where did the rails go for the horses?
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And the guy goes, I had to put in space for parking.
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He goes, well, where am I going to park my horse?
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It's a story as old as time, but what's interesting about that, taking us back to
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1923, I feel that we're at a point where history is repeating itself a hundred
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years later, going back to the 1920s.
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You make reference of this in the book where cities were changing,
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parking was taking over as it was expressed in that Yellowstone episode.
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But nowadays we have to consider the change in the automotive landscape.
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Where are we going to park?
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All of these EVs, how are we going to make charging available to electric vehicles?
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We've reached 7 percent market saturation.
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They obviously that number is going to increase.
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They wanted to increase, but parking is extremely limited.
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So now the ice powered cars are sort of like that horse that
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need to make space for the EVs.
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So you didn't really cover that too much in paved parking, but I wanted
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to explore that idea with you.
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It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
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One of the leading indicators of whether somebody will buy an electric
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vehicle is whether they have reliable access to charging for a lot of people.
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That's not a problem because they live in a detached single
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family home with its own garage.
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And so you can, at the very worst, just plug it in the wall, need slightly
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more reliability, maybe spend a little bit of money to install a level
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2 charger or something like that.
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According to the American Community Survey, 1 in 3 American households
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do not have a private home garage.
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And that means they either depend on some kind of multifamily parking
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situation, like a shared lot or garage, or they park on the street
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for either of those two groups.
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Transition to EVs is going to be really fraught because it's not clear
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exactly how we're going to be able to provide chargers at scale, especially
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for people who park on the street and.
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Obviously, if meeting our climate goals depends on decarbonizing the
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automobile fleet, and that in turn depends on installing all these EV
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chargers, and that depends on sharing parking and being cooperative in how we
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think about street space and all that.
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Boy, I don't know.
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It's a tall order.
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One of the things that I think our listeners would be really interested
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in is the origin of the garage.
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A very sacred space to petrolheads and gearheads like myself and Eric and Don.
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I know it's particularly important to Don.
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Can you talk a little bit about the origin of the garage and where that came from?
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Rumor has it that Frank Lloyd Wright built the first.
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Enclosed domestic garage in Chicago and the Robey house and you can still
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go see that it's a bulky concrete walled structure, which is typical
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of those early garages because they thought cars might explode.
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And so you need to be protected.
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And they also had, you know, like, uh, trenches in the floors.
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You could get down and work under there and garages were originally at least as
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far as cars are concerned where spaces.
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To work on cars, they weren't necessarily primarily intended to
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store cars, but to work on them.
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That is the origin story of the garage.
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And it's funny, even Wright recognized pretty early on, he
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started building carports instead of enclosed garages at a certain point.
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And I think he said, because he was afraid garages would fill up with stuff
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if he built them as part of the house.
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And indeed that did end up happening.
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Henry, what you're saying is spot on.
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I've heard this too.
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From my perspective, it came from the carriage house, but where we
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split here a little bit, the carriage house was obviously something more
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wealthier people had, and that was kind of where the transition came from.
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The wealthy person goes from having a horse drawn carriage to just a car.
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But I've heard Henry's story too, and I have heard that Frank
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Lloyd Wright was the first one to think, Hmm, where do we put a car?
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Well, 1 of the things that stuck out in the book, there's a whole set of
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chapters there where you talk about paid parking and metered parking
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and the advent of the meters and how that came to be in their history.
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And it's important to this discussion.
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And I think it plays into the conversation as well because I
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sort of gave it some thought.
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What wasn't mentioned was.
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The transition from the mechanical meter to the electric meters and
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every electric paid parking meter that exists, whether now they're park mobile
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enabled or otherwise means there's electricity at that parking spot.
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Granted might not be level three, 400 watt might be one 20 might be two 20, whatever.
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That's an opportunity for the parking capitalists to jump on that and say,
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let's consolidate a parking meter and a charging station all in one.
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I haven't heard about the idea of parking meters.
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I like that idea a lot.
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I have heard from people saying potentially lampposts could be
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used like streetlights, obviously, are another source of power
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that's coming into the street.
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And those could be used potentially to install level one trickle chargers.
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The problem with that is.
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You have to have your car plugged in for a long, long time to get
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enough juice to drive 300 miles.
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The other issue is if you're going to install something that's a little higher
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touch, it's going to provide more power.
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It's expensive.
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And I talked to the charging companies about this and they said, basically,
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it needs to be subsidized by cities.
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It doesn't really pencil out for them to install chargers at the curb because
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they're never going to make enough money.
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Charging people for that power to recoup the cost of installation and maintenance.
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And the maintenance is a big issue here because these are public things.
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People will vandalize them.
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People will drive into them.
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They'll just break.
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There's the weather, obviously.
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To have these things installed on the curb, they need to be subsidized.
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By the city or maybe by federal grants or something like that.
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And then again, you're looking at how much money are we going to spend
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to ensure that charging is electric.
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That's a complicated political decision.
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So then does it push it back to something you talked about in the
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book where now we have to relegate.
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EVs to a special parking lot or garage that has all the facilities and
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ability to charge those cars rapidly.
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One potential future here is that charging technology gets fast enough
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that actually charging in the future comes to resemble filling up at the tank
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and you're able to charge fast enough that it stops being such a concern.
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We don't need to think about electrifying every single parking space.
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Another one that I heard is that building codes will actually contribute more
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chargers than the Infrastructure Act.
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Will in terms of its commitment to charger installation, because a lot of progressive
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jurisdictions are now saying, if you're building parking, a certain amount of
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it needs to be electrified or needs to have the infrastructure in place to
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install electrification in the future.
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So the wires running under the concrete or whatever it is.
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So people I've talked to have said pretty soon at the rate of new construction,
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it's so much easier to build these things in new buildings than it is
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to install them in older buildings.
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Of course.
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Pretty soon new buildings are going to be contributing more
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EV chargers than retrofits.
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Or who knows, it could be like Mario Brothers.
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We just drive over a strip in the road.
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Boom!
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Fully charged.
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Don has actually talked about that before, where there's some concepts,
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almost like mag chargers you have on your phone, you can drive over them.
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Even Rolls Royce, I believe, Don, developed something that would
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slide out underneath of the car?
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Yeah, it was Rolls Royce.
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They have developed their electric car, but back in the day before they had one,
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they were feeling out their market and they were literally running around the
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world with this electric car showing their better customers the technology.
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You know, when asked, how do we charge it?
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They thought they were so slick because it was literally a slab
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that goes in your garage floor and the car just rolls right over it.
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The slab starts charging the battery.
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You're done.
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You don't plug anything in.
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You don't touch anything.
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The car and the slab do everything for you.
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Well, it was considered very gimmicky and it was very cute and very cool.
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But of course, back then all the customers were still fairly older.
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People who didn't really see a benefit or advantage to electric cars.
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So Rolls Royce, they just shelved the whole idea.
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And now I understand it's making a comeback because
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there's a younger buying circle.
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That technology has been discussed in several municipalities about if you stop
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at a stoplight, you have a magnet there and that magnet senses all the cars.
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And when it hits a certain number, then it clicks over the lights.
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Well, if we could do that with.
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Chargers, you would be charging your car while you sit at a red light.
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So red light to red light, you're charging all these electric cars.
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It was pretty cool.
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But to Henry's point, that requires a huge municipality investment, the city,
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the state, the County, whatever, they've all got to get in on this, or they've
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got to start getting the people to vote in a bond to cover the whole thing.
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Which again, it is a big political discussion.
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I love hearing about that kind of technology.
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And again, that may not be ready to go to market right this second,
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but it feels like more evidence that the whole scene is evolving.
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And so we're in this weird place where we are trying to obviously get the fleet
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to be electric as soon as possible.
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But at the same time, we don't want to commit billions of dollars to ripping up
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every city curb to install a technology that might be obsolete in 10 years.
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Exactly.
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That's a big part of the problem too.
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Everybody's worried about obsolescism.
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I mean, look at it, Tesla, arguably they were the first ones to market with a
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car that was acceptable as an electric vehicle while you're still plugging
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them in, in your house, they haven't adopted the drive over platform yet.
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Why is that?
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It's very interesting why Tesla has not gravitated to what
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Rolls Royce has been proposing.
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Why is that?
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I don't know how you feel about Tesla, but I've noticed
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it seems like what Tesla does.
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For the electric movement, the world follows it.
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Does every municipality want to invest in breaking up all the
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corners and installing these charges?
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It's a lot of work and a ton of money.
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And why we're talking about EVs first is because it's top of mind for everybody.
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And again, parking is even more important in some ways.
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And all of this is evolving together.
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And one of the things I really liked about your book, Henry, is that you
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didn't explicitly blame car owners, drivers, or otherwise, but the architects.
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And it felt like there was a plea for more mass transit in there.
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When I boiled that down, it made me think a lot about How it
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parallels this discussion about EVs.
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There's arguments to be made about how we're displacing the carbon emissions.
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We're moving it from the city centers back to the power stations by moving away from
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ice powered cars and people roaming around aimlessly looking for parking spots.
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And then now we have these EV chargers and the coal power plants are working
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harder than ever to power them.
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So it made me wonder.
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If we could switch to more mass transit, which the United States is so
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large, people oftentimes don't really understand its grandeur as compared
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to Europe and Asia and other places that have more robust mass transit.
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If we did ride more trains and buses, wouldn't then we be offsetting the
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parking and forcing the bus depots and the train stations to have to
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accommodate more people that are driving to them to then use their services?
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Yeah, I suppose that would happen.
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I mean, I think in places that do have higher rates of mass transit usage,
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carbon use per capita is lower full stop.
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So yeah, there's like some driving that needs to happen around those systems.
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But on the whole, it's definitely a more sustainable way to get from A to B.
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There are pros and cons in the US context.
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I try not to make this book a call for mass transit investment, because
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I think unfortunately, in a lot of places in this country, The land use is
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simply not conducive to mass transit.
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There's never going to be a sufficient density in some of these places to enable
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people to get to and from work reliably on an efficient mass transit system.
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That's self sustaining or like moderately subsidized.
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There are places in this country, obviously where mass transit absolutely
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should be invested in where we definitely could be getting around without our cars.
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But I think what's appealing about parking as a subject is.
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Even if you live in a place that's entirely car dependent, like one of
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the developers I talked to in my book is in Plano, Texas, north of Dallas.
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Totally car dependent environment, and even in a place like that, there is so
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much low hanging fruit in terms of the reforms that can be done around the
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way we treat parking to make a more pleasant and walkable environment.
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Even if everybody has to drive there and drive away.
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After reading the first few parts of your book, I sat back and thought to
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myself, we are a horrible species.
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I mean, that is truly.
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And before any of our listeners think I'm crazy, you describe terrible things
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like fights and property damage and even murder inspired by parking disputes.
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Even small things like when we've walked out of a store, get in our car.
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and notice somebody waiting for the parking space that we are about to vacate,
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we might adjust the mirrors, fiddle with the radio, adjust a package on the
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seat, you know, whatever, knowing that the person who is waiting is growing
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increasingly frustrated and even angry.
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And I think it's fair to say that all of us have experienced
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the latter circumstances.
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And if you haven't done that, I think you're just a big fat liar.
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So what do you believe is the source of this sense of entitlement and
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ownership with public parking spaces when here in the United States,
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we've been taught that property is kind of a pinnacle of our society.
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So why do we act this way when we don't actually own the parking space?
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That's a million dollar question.
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I just want to say, you make a fair point about the opening chapters of the book.
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However, the narrative structure of the book is sort of to set the stage
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with the problem and then emerge with some ideas for making it better.
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So, the human race, or at least the American people, are not all
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bad in general terms and also in terms of their approach to parking.
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There's definitely some reasons for optimism out there.
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With respect to our fixation on parking, part of it, and this gets back to the
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idea that this book is not supposed to hold drivers accountable for the parking
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situation, part of it is that we live in a society where we all have to drive to do.
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anything.
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We have to drive our kids to school, we have to drive to the supermarket,
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we have to drive to go vote, we have to drive to work, we have to drive to the
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ball game, we have to drive to the park.
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That's not our fault.
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The environment is constructed in a way that makes it impossible to
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do anything else and places in this country where driving is optional.
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Are so scarce that they've become some of the most expensive real estate around.
16:51
It actually is perversely a privilege to be able to live in a place where
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you're able to walk, which is insane, but that's sort of where we've ended up.
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And that goes back, I think, to the fierce attachment we have for parking,
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because parking is literally the link between driving and whatever else
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you wanted to do in the first place.
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And so I think, of course, people get attached to parking spaces.
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There are also circumstances in which parking is scarce.
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And in those situations, I think people also get.
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Territorial, right?
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Like if you go to a cold weather city where people shovel out public spots,
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there is a sense of ownership that creeps in and that happens everywhere.
17:25
Honestly, people park in front of their house.
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They often begin to think that space belongs to them
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just out of force of habit.
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I found that to be a particularly fascinating part
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of the book is the psyche.
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There was an academic that you referenced in the book that did a study that just
17:39
to kind of paraphrase that said that.
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When somebody drives to a certain place and they have to park, there
17:45
has to be X amount of time between the destination and where they park.
17:50
I thought that was just truly amazing because, you know, I had this conversation
17:55
with my father and I'll come back to that in a minute, but I think contributes one
17:59
to the ownership piece of it, and two.
18:02
This perception that there is never enough parking.
18:04
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
18:06
That's a very important part of this, right, is that we have this
18:08
expectation of parking, which is that we have very high expectations and
18:12
particularly with respect to location.
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Now, I don't think this is a fixed figure.
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Actually, I don't think there is some golden rule that says an American
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will only walk 200 feet from a parking space to get to where they're going.
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If you look at a mall, for example, people will park at a mall.
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and they will walk five, six, seven, eight minutes to get from their
18:33
parking space to a store inside the mall that is their actual destination.
18:37
That's because malls are really nice to walk around in, and I think in
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cities that offer a pleasant pedestrian environment, you see that same
18:45
kind of flexibility about parking.
18:47
I'm from Manhattan.
18:48
In Manhattan, when you're driving someplace and you see an open parking
18:51
spot, even if you're five minutes away from where you're going, you take it.
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Because who knows what you might find when you actually get where you're going.
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So I have this kind of risk aversion.
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I like to park as soon as possible in case I don't find another spot.
19:03
Right.
19:04
But obviously if you're in an environment where the streets are pretty hostile
19:07
to pedestrians, there's no trees, there's lots of cars going really fast,
19:11
cutting in and out of driveways, well.
19:13
Then you probably do want to park directly in front of the restaurant.
19:15
You came to eat at, and it's probably not that interesting to you to park
19:18
five blocks away and walk under the highway to get where you're going.
19:21
Can you talk a little bit about how parking has a direct impact
19:25
on things like affordable housing?
19:27
And when I say affordable housing, I'm going to.
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borrow your explanation from the book, that's not necessarily a home or an
19:35
apartment that requires a lottery ticket from the city for you to become
19:39
eligible to rent that property at a reasonable rate, but how parking
19:43
in general just drives up the cost of housing, property values, taxes.
19:48
I don't think a lot of people realize just how much parking
19:52
affects what we keep in our pocket.
19:55
I don't like to think too much about.
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Affordable housing, which is to say, like, it's actually subsidized
20:01
by the government, requires a lottery ticket, et cetera.
20:03
I prefer to think about naturally occurring affordable housing, which is
20:07
to say, workforce housing that's built by for profit developers, but at a low
20:12
price point, doesn't have a pool hall or a dog park on the roof or anything like
20:16
that, but it's just a place to live.
20:18
And for Okay.
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Most of the history of this country, those types of apartments have been the backbone
20:24
of our housing infrastructure, and they have in recent decades disappeared.
20:28
One of the reasons they have disappeared is that we've made it really, really
20:31
challenging to build things, and one of the primary ways in which
20:34
we've done that is to require all this parking with every project.
20:38
There's just certain infill lots in cities where If you're going to require
20:42
every project to include two parking spaces with every unit, you are severely
20:46
constraining the types of structures that can be built both geometrically and
20:51
architecturally, but also financially, because building a spot in a structured
20:55
parking garage to say nothing of underground is really, really expensive.
20:58
So even if you make the project pencil, you find yourself entering this sort
21:03
of cycle of escalating costs and rents.
21:06
And I've talked to developers about this, and one of the things they say
21:09
is, Once you've built all that parking in, you're no longer at that bare
21:13
bones tier of affordable rental unit.
21:16
You're starting to add in perks and amenities, and then you say to yourself,
21:20
Well, maybe actually this project ought to be targeted at a higher income level.
21:24
And so then you install granite countertops, and then you install
21:26
that dog park, and then there's a Japanese rock garden in the back.
21:29
And so, these things tend to build, and you get in this arms race, where
21:33
everything's getting nicer and more luxurious, and before you know it,
21:36
you have very few people actually building the type of Basic work
21:39
a day, but perfectly satisfactory housing that is so desperately needed.
21:43
I'm from Los Angeles.
21:44
You're from Manhattan.
21:46
Both of us are from big cities.
21:47
And I think arguably Los Angeles is really the city that led the way they
21:53
saw the cars, the future way back when.
21:55
And so they started developing in that regard of, we have to create spaces for
22:00
all these cars that we're going to park.
22:02
We have to create.
22:02
Basis for people.
22:03
We have to create roads that these cars can go down and
22:06
not hit a horse on the way.
22:07
You know, when you bring up the low income housing, it's kind of interesting
22:11
because when you go back to Los Angeles and you look at a lot of older, what
22:16
used to be low income housing, even though they didn't call it back then,
22:19
it was just where the poor people lived.
22:20
The parking was basically the street.
22:22
Because there weren't very many cars and yet, isn't it ironic that LA grew
22:27
into this massive metroplex where you can't get around without a car.
22:32
I mean, you have got to have a car.
22:33
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
22:34
There's a bus and whatever, but you had to have a car.
22:37
So it was always interesting to me how those developers back then, how are we
22:41
going to build something for lower income people yet still accommodate the car?
22:45
And like you say, well, the minute you start accommodating the car,
22:48
well, God, they've got a car.
22:49
They must have some disposable income.
22:51
So yeah, let's.
22:52
Put a rock garden, let's make it a little nicer.
22:54
Seems to be more of the human DNA.
22:57
We want better, better, better, better, better.
22:59
We want to aspire to build the best, to be the best, et cetera.
23:03
And I think even for our poor people, if you'll just forgive that term
23:06
for a minute, we want them to be the best poor people in the world.
23:09
We have granite countertops.
23:11
We have electric vehicles for our poor people, if that makes any sense.
23:14
It is interesting to listen to you talk about how one pulls
23:18
at the other, which pulls back.
23:20
It's a very interesting pendulum.
23:21
This is a longstanding debate in the regulation of housing
23:25
in the United States, right?
23:26
Like you can go back to the late 19th century, early 20th century, progressive
23:30
reformers visiting tenement buildings and saying these conditions are unacceptable
23:34
and every bedroom needs a window.
23:37
And every apartment needs a fire escape, those kinds of regulations.
23:40
I think today we would all basically say, yeah, that should be a basic condition
23:45
of having an apartment in this country.
23:47
We don't want people building windowless apartments just because
23:50
we have a housing shortage.
23:51
And I can think you could see parking on that spectrum to the original
23:55
desire with the zoning for parking.
23:57
Was not to entirely eliminate the construction of apartments, although
24:01
some people later used zoning for parking to accomplish that goal, but it
24:04
was really to ensure that we solve the spillover parking problem on the street.
24:08
There are unintended consequences to putting requirements on
24:13
the creation of housing.
24:14
You have to make choices.
24:15
And I think if you're interested in an automobile society,
24:18
everybody drives everywhere.
24:19
And you could certainly make the argument that it would be great if everybody
24:22
had a parking spot at their house.
24:23
But I think one thing we've realized over the last few decades is that that
24:26
requirement, however, noble in name, and I don't even think it was that noble in
24:30
name, but that's another conversation.
24:32
It has severe externalities in terms of the look of the architecture, the cost
24:36
of the housing, the walkability of the neighborhoods, like there's all kinds of
24:39
negative effects that go along with that.
24:41
I live now in Dallas.
24:42
I'm getting all this news from all over the place.
24:45
And it's the darndest thing.
24:46
We've got one developer here in Dallas and he's huge.
24:49
He literally gone from homeless.
24:51
To he's almost a billionaire.
24:52
So obviously property and parking minimums is a huge part of the conversation.
24:58
Now, when I moved here, I thought the last thing in the world I was ever going to
25:01
hear about again, we're parking minimums.
25:04
Maybe in Houston, you'd hear about this, but everywhere else in Texas.
25:07
Are you kidding me?
25:08
We have more land than we know what to do with out here.
25:10
So I don't think anybody, nope.
25:12
Nope, there's a lot of cities out there who want to be sophisticated and
25:16
big city and have parking minimums.
25:18
Well, of course, all the businesses are up in arms over this because
25:20
all that does is curtail business.
25:22
So it's interesting in a conversation with him, he told
25:25
me about Fayetteville, Arkansas.
25:27
And in Fayetteville, he sent me a video, real nice video
25:31
that this guy put together.
25:32
And it was how the entrepreneurs, the business owners, etc.
25:36
got together and essentially ganged up.
25:39
On City Hall and said, we want these gone.
25:42
Well, of course, City Hall said, well, where's everyone going to park?
25:45
Have to have our parking?
25:46
No, no, no, no, no.
25:47
Get rid of them.
25:48
And this is what's going to happen.
25:49
You're going to see success downtown.
25:51
You're going to see revitalization.
25:53
They had buildings in Fayetteville that Hadn't been used in 30 years because
25:59
they didn't meet the parking minimums.
26:01
It was really kind of crazy instead of being grandfathered in where, okay, this
26:05
building was built during the civil war.
26:06
It has five parking spaces, but it can service, you know, 300 people in a day.
26:11
The city said, no, we got to shut that down until you can build parking minimums.
26:15
I talked to a bunch of architects who described the situation
26:19
with historic buildings in particular as the parking padlock.
26:22
You may not be able to see it, but like across the front door, these
26:26
old buildings is a parking padlock.
26:27
Unless you provide enough parking, you can't unlock the door and do
26:30
something with the building that still affects structures today.
26:33
But if you go back and you rewind 70 years of our urban history,
26:38
how many buildings have we lost?
26:40
To this requirement, how many formerly walkable, formerly dense neighborhoods
26:46
full of like great old loft buildings with 14 foot ceilings have been torn
26:51
down to satisfy this requirement.
26:53
Back in Los Angeles, we had a restaurant tour.
26:56
He had a beautiful, beautiful building at the corner first in Maine.
27:00
I mean, how do you forget that?
27:01
And it was derelict.
27:02
Well, why can't we use it?
27:03
parking.
27:04
There's no parking for it.
27:05
Okay.
27:06
So if I buy this building and turn it into a restaurant,
27:08
let's say, what do I have to do?
27:10
Well, you have to provide all this parking.
27:12
Essentially what it meant was, you know, here's the block and here's the little
27:16
piece of property with the building.
27:17
Our guy had to buy basically this whole three quarters of a
27:22
block, leaving whatever businesses are leading up to his building.
27:26
So he had to buy all the houses.
27:27
Tear him down, pave it, and turn it into a parking lot for his now restaurant.
27:32
Is this still there?
27:33
Did it happen?
27:34
Did he tear down the block?
27:35
He tore down the block.
27:36
First in Maine, it's a place called Original Mike's.
27:38
You can look it up on the internet.
27:40
And yes, Big Mike, as is known, he's six foot eight.
27:43
He bought every single house one by one by one.
27:46
He literally had to go door to door, make offers to all these people.
27:50
That was insane.
27:51
And all the people accepted because they were good offers.
27:53
So he bought the entire block.
27:55
And then, of course, the city realizing, hey.
27:57
We've got a nutcase on our hand.
27:58
What can we built him for now?
28:00
The whole point was he hadn't even set foot in that building yet that he wanted
28:04
to turn into a restaurant slash nightclub.
28:06
He hadn't even touched that thing yet because he wasn't
28:09
sure he was going to be able to.
28:10
He had to secure all those houses, you know?
28:13
So yeah, the restaurant is still there.
28:14
He no longer owns it, but it is still there.
28:16
It's very popular.
28:17
So Fayetteville takes a chance.
28:19
They get rid of the parking minimums.
28:21
And the next thing you know, that Civil War building gets leased
28:25
by a company who wants to open a wine bar restaurant situation.
28:28
It is the cutest thing on the face of the planet.
28:31
And people are parking blocks away because they want to go to this experience.
28:36
They want to go see the wine cellar.
28:37
They want to go eat the food.
28:38
They want to do this.
28:39
Well, of course, next door you got a shop.
28:41
Next door you got this.
28:42
The next thing you know, Fayetteville, Arkansas is lifting
28:44
all of its parking restriction.
28:46
Now, it's been an incredible transformation.
28:49
To lift these, and it kind of goes with what you're saying, let's build a nice
28:53
little area where people will walk five to ten minutes to get to their destination.
28:57
Well, why are they doing that?
28:59
Because it's a nice area.
29:00
It's exactly what you say with Fayetteville, right?
29:02
The distance people are willing to walk is fungible.
29:04
It does fluctuate.
29:05
Based on the quality of the urban environment.
29:07
And if you create an environment, that's exclusively parking lots, you are going
29:11
to create the expectation of easy parking.
29:14
And it's a negative cycle in that sense.
29:15
I kind of blame Los Angeles for it in a way I go right back to it.
29:18
And that was the city of the future.
29:20
They were the ones who embraced the car and they realized this is the future.
29:24
We have to welcome the cars.
29:25
Part of how they did it was.
29:26
You have an avenue, and on either side of the avenue you have shops
29:30
and restaurants, and what they did was they built alleyways behind them,
29:34
and behind that were parking lots.
29:36
And that, for Los Angeles at least, that's where the parking minimums
29:40
started, was they realized, oh my gosh, we've got all these businesses
29:44
entertaining all these people, they're bringing their cars, they're not
29:47
able to park them, so now we have to impose these parking minimums on them.
29:51
It was an understandable decision by the city, but at the same
29:55
token it's a double edged sword because it drove business away.
29:58
Don has inadvertently reached back to another episode that we did where we
30:02
had David Page from Food Network on, and we talked about his new book Food
30:06
Americana and the influence that food has had on the automotive industry.
30:09
Sort of the undertone here is, especially in these city centers where
30:14
they're trying to change things over and even the urban and suburban areas.
30:17
A lot of these decisions revolve around food and our ability to get it, whether
30:22
we're getting it, take out, dine in or grocery stores, people need to eat.
30:28
We need our own personal fuel.
30:29
And so it's really funny how we don't talk about it.
30:32
It's almost like food is sacred in this sense where we don't recognize how it even
30:38
influences this discussion about parking.
30:40
Yeah, I think that's true.
30:41
I think restaurants have suffered the most from this policy.
30:43
We talked a lot about housing is obviously more important in a fundamental way
30:48
to our society than restaurants are.
30:50
But the thing about restaurants is that the requirements for
30:53
restaurants are super, super high.
30:54
And a lot of cities, it's one space for every 100 square feet of interior space
31:00
and a parking space with an ingress and egress is about 300 square feet.
31:05
Maybe 250.
31:06
So you're talking just at a basic level, 2 to 3 times as much real estate
31:11
devoted to parking as to restaurant, 100 square feet, a restaurant,
31:15
250, 300 square feet of parking.
31:17
And so, yeah, you do end up by requiring.
31:21
A kind of land use that is mostly parking and I think you look at a fast
31:25
food restaurant in the suburban strip mall and that is kind of corporate
31:28
architecture that comes from standards that have been established by Chick
31:33
fil a or Taco Bell or whoever it is.
31:34
That's also very much in tune and a form that has evolved with
31:38
those local parking requirements that say that for every parking.
31:42
Number of stools at the counter or whatever.
31:43
You need this many parking spots.
31:44
That's an interesting point too, because you're talking about the size
31:49
square footage of the parking space.
31:52
While absolutely pertinent to food in restaurants and so forth and so on,
31:57
I was really struck by that same kind of logic being applied to housing in
32:03
terms of, okay, you're building an apartment complex or a townhouse unit
32:09
or set of units, maybe there's 10.
32:11
Because of zoning laws or somebody's arbitrary decision for these 10 units,
32:17
we now suddenly need 40 parking spaces.
32:19
And I know that's a little bit hyperbolic, but based on the research
32:23
that you've done and what I've read, it doesn't quite seem that far fetched.
32:28
I got my attention drawn recently to a project in Venice, California,
32:32
where the project was opening on an old public parking lot.
32:36
And so in addition to all the parking spaces required for the units, They
32:39
had to rebuild all the spaces in the parking lot, and that can really
32:43
push your parking ratios really high.
32:44
And I think, again, it makes sense intuitively to a lot of people.
32:48
They say, you're building something in a dense neighborhood, you
32:51
have to provide parking, because otherwise it won't be enough.
32:53
I think what those people don't realize is, in addition to the fact that,
32:56
obviously, more parking creates more car ownership, which creates more
32:59
traffic, you're building yourself into a big congestion problem,
33:02
but there's also the fact that Parking is so expensive to build.
33:05
And this is one of the things that shocked me most when I started working on this
33:08
book, because you think of parking as being the land use of last resort, the
33:11
thing that happens when the building's been torn down and there's nothing
33:14
else that anybody wants to do with it.
33:16
But the average cost of a stall in a structured garage in 2023 was 28, 000
33:23
nationally in LA, it's much higher.
33:26
Underground, it's much higher.
33:27
Think about that.
33:28
At the typical fee that people are willing to pay for parking, it takes so long to
33:33
make a 28, 000 parking space pay off if it ever pays off, considering the cost of
33:39
maintenance and depreciation and all that.
33:40
So it's a real difficult situation.
33:43
I shared a story that kind of illustrates this challenge, if you will.
33:48
I hesitate to call it problem because I'm sure that there are people that are
33:52
smarter than me that, you know, have quote unquote planned ahead, but still,
33:56
it just kind of seems a little bit off.
33:58
A couple months ago, unfortunately, my mother wound up being diagnosed with a
34:03
condition that had her in the hospital.
34:05
Prior to that, I was over at my parents house, and we were talking
34:08
about what books we're reading.
34:09
And I looked at my dad, and I said, you need to read this book, Pave Paradise.
34:13
And he said, what?
34:14
Parking?
34:15
Are you kidding me?
34:16
And I said, well, let me ask you a fundamental question.
34:19
Is parking a problem?
34:20
And he goes, oh, yeah.
34:21
There is never enough parking, and kind of what Eric alluded to at the
34:26
beginning of the show, whenever we set out, the first question a lot of people
34:29
ask is, what's the parking situation?
34:31
Like I said, he was convinced that there's never enough parking.
34:34
Mom has her procedure.
34:36
She has to be admitted overnight.
34:37
I happened to look out the window of her hospital room and
34:41
it overlooked the parking lot.
34:42
My eyes kind of got a little wide there for a second because
34:45
perspective is everything, right?
34:47
And I said, hey, Pop, come here and take a look at this.
34:50
You know, he looked up and he goes, yeah.
34:52
And I said, do you remember that conversation we had
34:54
about never enough parking?
34:55
Probably the first third of the hospital parking lot.
35:00
Was packed, not an empty space anywhere.
35:03
But then you looked out beyond and the remaining 60 to 70%, you know, whatever
35:10
was just a sea of empty asphalt.
35:13
And I said, do you still think we have a parking problem?
35:16
His jaw literally hit the floor.
35:19
You know, when we talk about the problem with parking is
35:22
it's a perception issue, right?
35:24
We have an excess of parking that nobody wants to use.
35:29
It's all about the parking we want, right?
35:32
That's an opportunity to talk about.
35:34
I think 1 of the most.
35:36
Counterintuitive ideas in the book, which is the idea that paying for
35:40
parking creates more parking spaces.
35:43
And what you describe in that hospital parking lot is often true on a local Main
35:47
Street where the very best spots will be taken first thing in the morning by
35:52
people who more often than not work at the businesses or the offices on that block.
35:59
And they will park there at 7 30 or 8 in the morning and
36:02
they will park there all day.
36:04
And so people will arrive at midday and they'll say, there's
36:06
no parking available here.
36:08
They'll be correct that there is no parking directly in front
36:11
of the place they want to go.
36:12
But often that available parking is just one block, two blocks away.
36:16
And what's happening here is that it's sort of poorly organized.
36:19
If you charge even a little bit for those prime parking spots,
36:22
those all day parkers will find that over the course of 12 hours.
36:26
You know, that dollar an hour starts to add up, especially if
36:29
they're parking there every day.
36:30
And so they'll park two blocks away, and that means that when you show up for
36:34
lunch, you'll have a spot directly in front of the restaurant that's available
36:37
to you, and it will cost you one, two, three dollars, something like that.
36:41
And for the people who park further away, maybe it's free parking, maybe it's
36:44
cheaper parking, but in any case, the walk that they make to and from work,
36:48
to and from their car, Is amortized over the course of that 12 hour workday.
36:53
I think that's an important thing to think about walking distance as well.
36:55
Nobody wants to walk 10 minutes to spend 30 seconds in a store
36:59
picking up their dry cleaning.
37:00
But if you're working for 12 hours and 10 minute walk isn't so bad.
37:03
What you 2 have brought up here.
37:05
It kind of sounds like the segue to where cities start to slide
37:09
back into that parking minimums.
37:11
Conversation because you're bringing up people who they arrive at 7730
37:15
in the morning, they get the prime space in front of their work.
37:18
The car sits there all day.
37:19
And then they come out, they go home because they leave
37:22
their car there all day.
37:23
But other people are arriving.
37:24
They got to park 23 blocks away.
37:26
I think this is where city council, etc.
37:29
Start to wake up and say, Hey.
37:31
We need parking minimums.
37:32
And I wonder, do you see that too?
37:34
Am I on the right track?
37:35
I think that's, I think that's the history of parking minimums in a nutshell is
37:39
you have these overcrowded city blocks, merchants fearful that their customers
37:43
are going to leave and go to a suburban shopping mall and parking minimums are
37:47
the result to try and constrain new businesses from opening and putting
37:51
more pressure on the parking picture.
37:53
There is obviously another way, right?
37:55
I mean, the other way is.
37:56
charging for that parking.
37:57
There's often this fear, if we charge for our parking, no
38:00
one will come here anymore.
38:01
If that's true, you have bigger problems.
38:04
If the whole attraction potential of your central business district, your retail
38:09
strip, if what you're offering is only good enough for free parking, if it's
38:13
not worth a dollar an hour to someone who's driving down there, then frankly,
38:18
it's obviously just not that good.
38:20
I'm not trying to be mean, but this gets borne out when you
38:22
start charging for parking.
38:23
People continue to come, they continue to patronize the restaurants and
38:26
shops, they find the parking situation is easier than it was before, and
38:30
that's worth something to them, right?
38:32
Because there is a cost of free parking, and it's time.
38:34
It's the time you spend getting to the main street, finding there's no available
38:38
parking, circling the block, etc., etc.
38:41
You know, Don Shoup, who's the godfather of parking studies, would
38:45
say, you should price the parking.
38:47
So that there's always an available space on every block and if that price is so
38:52
high that nobody drives there anymore.
38:54
Well, then you lower the price.
38:56
I mean, that's kind of the magic of parking meters is that it is a
38:59
wonderfully flexible policy as opposed to, for example, tearing down a row
39:04
of houses to build a parking lot.
39:06
That is hard to reverse.
39:07
Yeah, and that's a fantastic thing, and I'm going to give a quick
39:11
shout out to my friend Mike Carr.
39:14
He's actually a land use attorney, and when I told him about this podcast
39:18
that we were going to do, he was very enthusiastic because he deals with it.
39:22
He described a brewpub investment company that purchased an industrial
39:27
area, a former plant of some kind just north of Philadelphia.
39:31
And they turned it into this brew pub, shops, so forth and so
39:35
on, made a parking lot based on the usable space that they own.
39:38
The township that it resides in, they basically told the owners
39:42
that you don't have enough parking.
39:44
They said, what are you talking about?
39:45
We have enough parking.
39:47
Our lot's never full, but we're profitable.
39:49
We're doing well.
39:51
And they said, well, you know, maybe if you installed meters, we could share
39:54
the profits and increase the parking that will attract more people to you.
39:59
And they said, no, I think we're good, but you could do it if you cut down the trees.
40:03
And their response was, we like the trees.
40:06
And basically told them to go pound sand.
40:08
And they won.
40:09
I don't know that some of the studies really capture the end user,
40:13
what all of us may be thinking.
40:15
Some of it is reactionary.
40:16
Some of it is, based on behaviors that have been observed.
40:19
But in this conversation, I begin to think about how I choose my parking.
40:23
There's often times where I want to pay more for a particular type of parking.
40:28
So I'll give you a prime example.
40:29
I hate driving in the district of Columbia.
40:32
So I will take any Metro and station because I can park
40:35
there all day for five bucks.
40:37
And when I'm in the city, I don't need my car anyway, but because I'm a car guy.
40:41
I'm more worried about my car and what state it's going to be in when I get
40:45
back and, you know, not having to drive through potholed, ridden streets of DC.
40:49
And the same is true at the airport.
40:50
I pay more for covered parking because I don't want my car out in the elements.
40:56
When I come home from a trip as a car enthusiast, I think about
40:59
parking in a totally different way.
41:00
That whole situation is yes.
41:02
What is the parking situation?
41:04
But what's that premium parking that I'm going to get?
41:06
Not because I'm trying to show off, but because I'm trying to
41:09
protect my personal investment.
41:10
So there's a lot of other factors here.
41:12
And I think that plays in maybe to the discussion and it's sometimes overlooked.
41:16
Yeah.
41:16
I think also we should acknowledge too, that there is a gender
41:20
element at play here too.
41:22
I've talked to women drivers who will say they also will value a premium parking
41:26
space because they don't want to walk 15 minutes through an urban street at
41:30
night or through like a sketchy ass parking garage or something like that.
41:33
So like, that's another group.
41:35
I mean, it's kind of another question about whether this is fair or not, but
41:38
let's just say there is definitely a market out there of people who would
41:42
like to be able to ensure that they're going to have a great and safe parking
41:47
spot that's close to where they're going.
41:48
And I think that's where the mobile apps come into play.
41:50
And my wife has brought up more than once an app called parking Panda,
41:54
which was not referenced in the book.
41:55
You get references to park mobile and some other apps like that, where you can
41:59
do metering digitally and things, but parking Panda is actually a reservation.
42:04
System.
42:05
So think about that.
42:06
You're a single female.
42:07
You don't want to walk through that parking lot at night, but
42:09
you could reserve a spot at a certain time near a store.
42:12
So you're closer.
42:13
I think that parking Panda, that more concierge white glove approach
42:17
to parking is really interesting.
42:18
I ask her frequently how it really works and she says it works great.
42:22
I've always gotten the spot that I reserved.
42:24
There's nobody else sitting in it and things like that.
42:25
And so something else to look at.
42:27
There's a lot of technology now that can help the parking situation.
42:31
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
42:32
One of the things I've been wondering about lately is like.
42:34
What if we thought about parking meters away?
42:36
We think about tolls.
42:37
Now there's a lot of places where you drive around New York and you
42:41
get told automatically via license plate recognition or easy pass.
42:44
Yeah.
42:45
Or easy pass.
42:46
But like now you don't even need easy pass.
42:47
They'll just take a photo of your license plate and send you a bill in the mail.
42:50
It's made this process very seamless and people generally no longer think about it.
42:54
Like.
42:55
Oh, I'm about to pay again for this service.
42:58
It's just become kind of a fixed item on your monthly budget.
43:01
Oh, you got to account for insurance, registration, tolls, etc.
43:06
One of the advantages of doing this with parking would be you
43:10
could get rid of this whole.
43:11
Rigmarole we go through with the parking meters and the fines, like
43:14
there's really no need for anybody to be fined for overstaying a meter and
43:18
there's no need for anybody also to have to pay more money than they need
43:22
to pay if they leave a spot early.
43:24
That whole system is so primitive and it doesn't need to exist
43:27
anymore because we have cars.
43:29
The drive around and read license plates and could just say, you were foreseen
43:33
in this spot at this hour, you were no longer in the spot at this hour
43:36
and you get billed according to that.
43:38
And that's that.
43:38
Same is true now at a lot of airports, they have those scanners that look down
43:42
to see if a car is sitting in the spot.
43:43
Not only does it help you find an available spot quickly, but that
43:46
technology can be used to say, okay, that car was there at that moment and
43:49
no longer there to be super accurate, because even when somebody is coming
43:53
by on a little scooter or something like that and taking those pictures.
43:56
That's based on a cycle, right?
43:58
How many times are they going by in an hour or whatever it is?
44:00
So the accuracy is better than, okay, I put in a quarter in the
44:04
meter and I only use 10 cents worth of that quarter, that sort of thing.
44:07
So Henry, in the book, you talked a lot about Solana beach, which is a
44:11
very particular area in California.
44:13
Lots of things going on there with respect to parking and housing and
44:15
architecture and things like that.
44:17
But I thought it was funny.
44:19
That this past summer, Don and I experienced what could be considered
44:23
parking hell in a way, especially for car enthusiasts, bigger than the
44:27
Solana beach problem encapsulated in 10 days is car week, which
44:31
happens in the Carmel Monterey area.
44:34
And not only is parking stressed in that area in general, now you have car
44:39
enthusiasts with multiple cars and trucks, and they're going to pebble beach and the
44:43
quail and all these shows and all this.
44:45
Extra is descending upon that area and it takes an already stressed
44:49
parking situation and makes it tenfold.
44:52
So I wonder if Car Week, Carmel, Carmel Valley, Monterey could be used in maybe
44:57
a future study to look at how they handle that situation because Car Week
45:01
has been around for many, many years and it's not going away anytime soon.
45:05
I mean, Car Week is a particularly funny example because it's like a very
45:08
vivid illustration of the old axiom, you're not in traffic, you are traffic.
45:13
You're not having trouble finding parking, you are creating a parking shortage.
45:18
It's tough because I think for a lot of big events, the obvious answer is
45:22
cars have never been good at getting a lot of people to one place at one time
45:26
because of simple geometric constraints.
45:29
But obviously if driving is a precondition, that's definitely
45:32
a tough one, but it would be a fun experiment to run, right?
45:35
Like you got a lot of, a lot of people who think about this stuff like you guys
45:37
do, surely they could come up with a system or an experiment or something like
45:43
that to figure out the parking situation.
45:45
Of course, a lot of the time, what you have in those situations, you
45:47
get all of a sudden a very vibrant black market for parking spaces.
45:50
You go to like, uh, near a college football stadium or like near
45:53
Churchill downs on the day of the Kentucky Derby, Indianapolis 500.
45:57
Yeah.
45:57
Like, you know, 25 bucks to park in my driveway for a couple of hours.
46:00
Yeah.
46:00
Or 25 bucks to park in the grass.
46:02
Like that's not even a parking spot, right?
46:04
It's not officially sanctioned.
46:05
Everything's a parking spot, uh, on the day of the big game.
46:09
In our last segment here, let's talk about.
46:11
Us versus them.
46:12
That's the U.
46:13
S.
46:13
versus other parts of the world, especially Europe and Asia,
46:17
which are also car dense as well.
46:19
You spent some time in Europe this summer, so did I, and I noticed a stark
46:24
contrast in the way Europe handles its parking situation versus the U.
46:28
S.
46:28
Obviously, they are more compressed, we have a lot more land, but
46:32
I don't see oceans of asphalt.
46:34
A lot of times, cars are Hidden from plain sight in these underground garages
46:39
or garages are built into buildings.
46:41
They're integrated.
46:42
Denmark has a big policy of no single use buildings.
46:45
So every building they construct has to have a multifaceted approach
46:49
to it and can be used for something in the future if it is abandoned.
46:53
So I wanted to talk about some of the differences there
46:55
between Paris, Copenhagen, even Montreal, you know, Canada handles
46:59
things differently than we do.
47:01
And some of your thoughts on what you've seen in your travels.
47:04
Yeah, let's just get one thing out of the way right off the bat.
47:07
The car ownership rate in Europe, and especially in Canada, is not that
47:12
much lower than it is in the United States, especially Western Europe.
47:15
It's easy to look at some of these European cities and just say, well,
47:19
that's Just a totally different paradigm.
47:21
We're never going to be like that, et cetera.
47:23
And there are definitely fundamental differences, but these remain societies
47:26
where lots and lots of people drive.
47:27
And I think one of the fundamental changes that they've made that distinguish
47:31
their urban environments from ours is to think about parking in a different way.
47:34
One thing I noticed in a lot of European cities and in particularly smaller cities
47:38
and even towns is that they have what they would call a park once strategy.
47:43
The idea is instead of an American city where like every sandwich shop and dentist
47:47
office and movie theater is required to have its own parking lot, a lot of
47:51
European cities will have a public parking garage, paid parking usually, that's
47:55
sort of on the edge of town or maybe even at the center of town, but they'll
47:58
have a few of them and there'll be really big signs when you drive into the city
48:01
that will say, here's where to park.
48:03
Here's how many spaces are left.
48:04
And you'll go there and you'll park, and then you will spend several hours on foot.
48:08
You will go from store to store, to restaurant, to movie theater, or see
48:11
a play, see a concert, or whatever.
48:13
And then when you're done, you'll go back and find your
48:15
way to your car and leave town.
48:16
But that is a way to ensure that there may still be lots of people that are
48:21
driving to and from the city, but they're not driving to and from the
48:24
various establishments inside the city.
48:26
And that permits that parking to be shared between all the uses in
48:30
the city, and also sort of kept off the main drag and out of sight.
48:33
And Don and I commiserated over an experience that we shared, but separately
48:38
in Venice, where you're not allowed to be in the ancient city of Venice.
48:42
You have to park in Padova and take the train in and everything is walkable.
48:45
There are no cars allowed in Venice.
48:47
You either do everything by boat.
48:48
Gondola, and then you have the option of bike, scooter,
48:51
Vespa, all that kind of stuff.
48:52
And Italian cities, Venice is not alone in that sense.
48:56
Florence is very similar.
48:57
You park on the outskirts of the city and you walk into the city.
49:00
Granted, they got to make deliveries and sometimes they have special
49:03
exceptions for things like that, but they try to push the cars out of the
49:07
cities and make them more walkable.
49:08
Now, you were just back from Paris, totally different situation there.
49:12
Yeah, Paris is really interesting.
49:14
First of all, it's a big city, right?
49:15
We're talking a metro area of 10 million people.
49:18
So it's not some little, no offense to Venice, but like it is a different scale.
49:22
They've decided basically that if you're going to drive a car in Paris, you
49:25
need to have a garage to park it in.
49:27
They're really trying to cut down on street parking and
49:29
people who use street parking.
49:31
The idea now is that's for deliveries, that's for ambulances, that's for
49:35
pickup and drop off and taxis.
49:37
It's not for long term car storage, long term car storage has to happen
49:41
off the street because that street space is too valuable in a city.
49:44
That's as dense as Paris is in the last couple of years, they've
49:47
converted all these free parking spaces to all kinds of new uses.
49:50
And my favorite, one of these is they'll take blocks in front of schools
49:54
and turn them into play streets.
49:56
And this has happened all over the city, but like, they'll just get rid of the cars
49:59
and the blocks in front of the schools and on these blocks, they used to have
50:02
these big fences along the sidewalks.
50:04
To prevent the kids from playing and wandering into traffic
50:07
and getting hit by a car.
50:09
And since they closed the blocks of traffic and got rid of the
50:11
parking spaces, they've been able to tear down those fences.
50:13
And so you end up with this much more open and pleasant environment.
50:17
And it's pretty low touch, right?
50:19
It's not like they've done a ton of work, spent a ton of money.
50:22
Just the presence of these kids coming in and out of school all day creates a kind
50:26
of automatic social life in the street.
50:28
There's soccer games, there's hopscotch, there's kids on scooters, bikes, parents
50:32
picking up, dropping off their kids, and then other people from the neighborhood
50:35
too who will just come and they'll take that block if they're bringing their
50:38
cart to or from the market because it's easier than walking on some narrow
50:42
sidewalk and cafe terraces spreading out because it's quieter because you don't
50:46
have the motorcycles going by, etc.
50:48
All that's possible when you begin to look again at Parking spaces.
50:51
If we go over to Asia, we talk about Tokyo and other parts of Japan.
50:55
As an example, they actually feed the size of the vehicles accordingly, and
50:59
they have minimums and things like that, where even the width of the
51:02
car is important because that also dictates how many cars they can fit.
51:06
In a parking area versus some of the larger vehicles we have in the States.
51:10
This is why they don't have things like a Yukon or a Tahoe or an
51:14
expedition or something like that.
51:16
It just wouldn't physically fit in places that you could park,
51:19
let's say in downtown Tokyo.
51:20
So they have a whole different approach that it affects the automobile
51:24
industry in such a way that they have to physically make the car smaller.
51:28
And I think that's really interesting too.
51:29
So Henry, how can we make parking lots greener?
51:33
There's these oceans of asphalt out there and we see them being
51:36
overutilized and sometimes underutilized.
51:38
Like paddocks at a racetrack are completely empty if nobody's
51:42
there for a race, right?
51:43
And so it makes me wonder, especially in thinking about conversations
51:46
about us versus them and how Europe does things differently, why
51:50
aren't we seeing more solar panels?
51:53
Going up to provide shade for vehicles, keeping them cooler.
51:56
That way we don't have to run ACs as hard, which is a positive
51:59
thing for the environment as well.
52:00
And I bring it up because I've only noticed it in one place in the United
52:04
States and it has a European influence.
52:06
And that's at Ikea where they provide the shaded solar paneled
52:10
areas that you can park under.
52:11
So what are your thoughts on making parking lots greener in the future?
52:14
The economics are just not in favor of building those solar panels over parking
52:19
lots, which is unfortunate, but I agree.
52:21
It's a great place for them.
52:22
France actually has a law now that parking lots over a certain size, I think, have
52:25
to be half covered in solar panels.
52:27
So a city or state could do that and decide to try that out.
52:31
I think it'd be pretty interesting to see what happened.
52:33
The other thing about parking lots and making them greener is
52:35
obviously the impervious surface.
52:37
One of the issues we see every summer in the United States is these increasingly
52:40
intense rainstorms that Overwhelm our sewer system and flood businesses,
52:44
basements, people's houses, et cetera.
52:47
One of the ways we can deal with that is to try and address all this concrete
52:52
and asphalt that makes up our cities.
52:54
Parking lots are not the only or even the primary source of impervious surface.
52:58
That's probably buildings.
53:00
But the buildings are challenging to work with and parking lots are right there.
53:04
What could we do to make, maintain their parking function, but transform them so
53:07
that they permitted water to go into the ground and replenish our aquifers instead
53:12
of running right into our sewer systems.
53:14
And I think that's a big challenge, but it's not a very difficult one.
53:17
Somebody's going to figure out a way to do that.
53:19
And we ought to make it obligatory for new parking lots to conform to those rules.
53:23
What's next for Henry Grabar?
53:25
Where do you take this parking conversation next?
53:28
Do you have another book in the works?
53:29
Any spoilers you can share?
53:30
So far I'm on a, uh, parking policy road show.
53:34
I've got a couple trips scheduled to Orlando, to Denver, Santa Fe, Boston.
53:39
Gonna be talking parking.
53:41
More broadly, I'm a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
53:45
And so I'm taking classes and taking a break from writing
53:49
and trying to learn some stuff.
53:50
Well, Henry, we've reached that part of the episode where I get to ask
53:53
you any shoutouts, promotions, or anything else you'd like to share
53:56
that we haven't covered thus far.
53:57
This was a really thorough conversation.
53:59
Gotta give a shout out to Don Shoup, the Godfather of Parking Studies.
54:02
His book, The High Cost of Free Parking, is the Bible of parking.
54:06
It's a big book.
54:07
It's not for everybody, but it is the Bible.
54:10
And also to the Parking Reform Network, which is A really interesting group
54:14
of local activists who are trying to change parking laws for all
54:17
the reasons we've just discussed.
54:18
So if you're interested in this that might be a good place to get started Everyone
54:23
that says life is all about the journey and not the destination has obviously
54:27
never had to search for parking To learn more be sure to check out henry's new book
54:32
paved paradise available on amazon and audible Depending on your reading style.
54:37
You can reach out to henry at henry dot grab bar at slate dot com, or follow
54:44
him on social media via linkedin.
54:47
Henry, I could talk to you for hours on this, and I know that
54:50
sounds kind of geeky, but that's just the hard truth of it.
54:53
Candidly, I never really considered or even thought about how parking can
54:58
be so impactful, not just within car culture, but across many different
55:03
echelons of everyone's life, not just the people who own cars.
55:07
Henry, I can't thank you enough for coming on Brake Fix and sharing this
55:11
extremely interesting study on one thing that I think all of us, whether
55:16
you're a car enthusiast, motorsports enthusiast, just a person in general, have
55:20
a vested interest in, which is parking.
55:23
And I don't think any of us have really...
55:24
Sat down and thought about how much it affects our lives in a profound way.
55:28
And I think I can speak for my co hosts in this.
55:30
We appreciate you bringing this to light, bringing this to the surface and making
55:35
us take a deeper look, internalizing what parking really means to all of us.
55:39
Well, I, uh, I really appreciate you all giving us such a close read.
55:42
So fun to talk to people about this subject and especially to people
55:45
who have been thinking for so long about cars and how they work.
55:48
Thank you so much, Henry.
55:49
Oh, this was so fun.
55:50
Anytime.
55:51
Good to meet you, Henry Paradise
55:57
Pink.
55:59
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