October 14, 2025 • 42 mins
Ever wonder why a “simple” parking spot can decide what gets built on your block, how long your commute takes, or whether your favorite cafe survives? We sit down with Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, for a live episode recording that reveals how curb space, parking minimums, and meter policy quietly shape housing, transit, local business, and city budgets. Henry takes us from the horse‑and‑wagon era to modern dynamic pricing, connecting the dots between what seems like a technical detail and the urban life we all experience.
If you care about vibrant neighborhoods, small business turnover, housing options, or safer, greener travel, this is a candid, myth‑busting look at the hidden system running beneath every city. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend who swears there’s “never any parking”—then tell us how your city should use one block of curb.
Show Notes:
- Further Reading:
- Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazán, Joe McReynolds
- Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen
- Shade: the Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource by Sam Bloch
- To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
Follow us on social media for more content related to each episode:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Stephanie Rouse (00:37):
Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of
Booked On Planning.
In this episode, we talk withauthor Henry Graber on his book,
Paved Paradise, How ParkingExplains the World.
This was our second livepodcast recording ever.
We did one a few years ago withauthor Alana Bruce, but for our
fall APA Nebraska workshop, wehad Henry Graber out to talk
(00:57):
about his book.
We did a live podcast recordingand he wrapped up our whole
day, which was all surroundingthe world of parking with a
keynote.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:05):
Yeah.
And when Stephanie says thiswas our second live interview,
she's wrong, this was my firstlive interview.
She did interview Alana on herown a few years ago.
So it was very interesting tojust like a little insight into
the background of what we had todo.
We had to figure out whatmicrophones we were going to use
and how we were going to seteverything up.
And it was an interestingexperience.
(01:26):
So you guys will have to let usknow if you like these live
interviews.
Stephanie Rouse (01:29):
Yes, I will say it is much less stressful and
more fun having a partner incrime up there with me doing the
interview together.
So it was a better experience.
And I think we have the audiodown a bit more from that
episode.
If you go back and compare thetwo, I think they are uh light
years apart in quality.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:46):
Which is fine.
It's fine that our firstattempt didn't go super great.
So Henry's book talks about thehistory of parking and then
really how parking has shapedthe entire way we design and
develop in the United States.
And I thought it was reallylike you think parking and you
think, wow, this is gonna belike a really dry book, but I
thought it was really funny.
Stephanie Rouse (02:06):
I'd agree.
Yeah, he had a lot ofinteresting stories in there.
Like there's a whole section ontheft in parking uh that we
talk about a little bit in theepisode.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:15):
Yeah.
Who would have thought thattheft in parking was a real
thing?
You know, these days you driveup to a parking garage, you hit
a button, you get a ticket, youleave, you pay with your credit
card.
I never thought about howprevious to the technological
advancement that it would besuch a cash-based industry.
Stephanie Rouse (02:32):
Reading it, you could see it was a very great
companion book to Choop's bookand also the Choop Doctrine that
we just talked about in aprevious episode, but it kind of
builds on that and reallyrounds out this whole idea of
parking management.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:45):
Yeah.
And with that, let's get intoour conversation with author
Henry Gribar on his book, PapeParadise: How Parking Explains
the World.
Stephanie Rouse (02:53):
So a lot of you know that we run Booked on
Planning, a podcast that is nowin its fourth season, wrapping
up here.
We've done a live podcastinterview one other time at a
workshop with Alana Proust acouple years ago.
So this is only the second timewe have in-person interview.
I think we've learned a lotsince then.
So this will hopefully be amuch better audio once we
publish it.
But we have with us today HenryGabar, a journalist, author,
(03:15):
and researcher who writes aboutcities since 2016.
He's been staff writer atSlate, where he writes
Metropolis column with a focuson housing, transportation, and
the environment.
He was the editor of The Futureof Transportation Anthology by
Metropolis Books in 2019, andthe author of Pave Paradise, How
Parking Explains the World,which is what we're here to talk
about today.
It was named Best Book of theYear by the New Yorker and New
(03:39):
Republic.
His story about immigrants inthe meatpacking town of Fremont,
Nebraska, was a finalist forthe 2018 Livingston Award for
Excellence in National Reportingby a journalist under 35.
And his work has also beenrecognized by the National
Association of Real EstateEditors and the Writers Guild of
America.
He was a 2024 Lobe Fellow atthe Harvard Graduate School of
Design.
His next book, The Story of theStruggle to Build an Apartment
(04:01):
Building, is provisionallytitled Under Construction and is
under contract with PenguinPress, which hopefully we'll be
able to have you on to talkabout that book when it's
published.
Henry Graber (04:09):
Don't hold your breath.
Stephanie Rouse (04:12):
So, first question
the very niche?
And as Donald Schuop has beenknown to say, the boring field
of parking.
Henry Graber (04:20):
Well, for many years I was and continue to be a
journalist writing about cityissues.
And it seemed to me thatparking was a subject that kept
cropping up no matter what thestory I was writing was about.
So I would be writing a storyabout affordable housing and
parking would come up as thisenormous obstacle.
We'll be writing about busrapid transit, parking again,
(04:43):
big obstacle.
Municipal finance, parkingwould come up, policing, parking
would come up.
And then finally, I think theone that really drove it home
for me was visiting Houstonafter Hurricane Harvey in 2018
and talking to people who saidthat their houses were flooding
because of development happeningupstream.
And in some cases, they couldpoint to particular parking lots
(05:04):
that had been built that hadchanged the stormwater runoff
conditions in theirneighborhood.
And I had this kind ofrevelation that I was in this
metropolis where the houses thatflooded didn't correspond to
FEMA flood maps at all.
It corresponded to this giantman-made infrastructure of
parking lots and storm drainsthat we had built.
(05:25):
And so this kind of realizationthat, you know, we're in this
landscape where parking is sucha significant feature of the
urban environment that it'sactually shaping just about
everything we touch.
Jennifer Hiatt (05:36):
You state in the book that the parking problem
is as old as the road itself.
Can you give us a quickoverview of the history of the
parking problem?
Henry Graber (05:43):
Well, so you find some references to quote-unquote
parking going back toMesopotamia.
But what they're really talkingabout is just people
obstructing the roadway for onereason or another.
And one of the punishments thatgets mentioned is impalement.
So parking tickets, not so badafter all.
But I think you have toremember that up to you know
(06:09):
1900, everything in the roadwayis being pulled by an animal.
And so when we think aboutparking regulation up to the
invention of the automobile,we're thinking about something
that really concerns livinganimals.
And so one of the ways in whichthat obviously the enforcement
of that is a lot easier becausepeople don't just leave their
(06:29):
horses outside unattended fordays at a time downtown.
And one of the ways that thatcomes down to us today is in the
etymology of the word pound.
So, like a pound is where you'dgo get your car if it was
towed, but a pound is also whereyou might get a dog.
Um, and that comes from thiskind of shared history of
unclaimed property whereanything that was found in the
(06:50):
city would be brought to thepound.
And that was mostly animals,uh, although starting in
obviously with the invention ofthe Model T, it came to include
automobiles as well.
Stephanie Rouse (06:58):
I think that was one of the interesting
points was we've always beendealing with parking, and there
was uh a desire to have hitchingposts in front of your
businesses so that you couldpark your horse right in front
of the business, and today it'sjust transferred over to
vehicles where we need parkingright in front of our businesses
so people can park and and walkright in.
Henry Graber (07:16):
Yeah, one interesting change is that prior
to right when horses were athing, people considered parking
a real nuisance use.
They really did not wantstables to be in their
neighborhoods because you hadall these horses, all this
traffic, all this manure,obviously.
And then obviously we do a 180when it comes time to think
about automobile parking, andall of a sudden it's something
(07:36):
that we want and in factlegislate be included in in
every single uh building.
Stephanie Rouse (07:41):
So by now most planners have understood or
heard the concept that addingmore vehicle lanes induces more
driving.
But you point out in the bookthat adding more parking induces
more driving.
How is this relationship?
Henry Graber (07:52):
So I think it's it's kind of counterintuitive
because if you go back to themid-century city, there's this
idea that traffic is a hugeproblem.
The city is choking oncongestion, and the root of that
congestion is that there isn'tenough space to park.
And if we could just createenough off-street parking
facilities, we could vacuum thetraffic off the streets and
clear the way for commerce andmobility and everything else.
(08:15):
That proves very difficult, notonly because the rates at which
people use automobilescontinues to rise and rise and
rise, but also because you beginto destroy more and more of the
urban environment to createparking lots.
And so you create anenvironment in which people
actually can't get around in theways that they used to,
transit, walking, biking becomedangerous or simply inefficient
(08:39):
because the density of the urbanenvironment has been has fallen
as we sort of chip away at itwith these various parking
facilities.
And there is research thatbacks this up that in fact more
parking creates more traffic andnot the other way around.
There's a study of these, Ithink, seven or nine small
cities done by Chris McCahilland Norman Garrick, where they
(08:59):
tracked the creation of parkingspaces between 1960 and 1980,
and then the mode share in thefollowing two decades.
And what they found was thatthe more parking that was built
in those earlier decades, themore likely mode share was to
shift subsequently towardspeople driving.
And so, in fact, it wascausation that parking was
pushing people into using carsrather than just correlation,
(09:23):
parking emerging to meet thedemand of people in their
automobiles.
Jennifer Hiatt (09:27):
Around 580,000 people work in parking every
day.
I think people would really besurprised to find that out.
Who are the major corporationsbehind parking and what role do
they play in shaping the parkinglandscape?
Henry Graber (09:40):
It's a question I get a lot because I think we are
so accustomed in so manyaspects of our life to find
these kind of big corporateentities who are pouring lots of
money into whatever field it isthat they're in, and they're
responsible for shaping, youknow, the way that beer gets
labeled or um, you know, the waythat a cell phone contract gets
(10:01):
written or something like that.
And in the case of parking,there are big companies that
often manage big city airportparking facilities, stadiums,
and so forth, but they'reusually not owning those
facilities.
They're mostly managing.
And so when you think about whois actually controlling the
parking stock, it's often prettylocal.
The owner of a building willalso own the garage inside it.
(10:24):
Or you might have speculators,land bankers who are sitting on
these downtown parking lotswaiting for decades until they
decide it's finally time to sellthat for a development site.
And of course, the number onesort of holder of parking is
probably just the Americanpeople in the form of their
single-family homes with theirthree-car garages and their
apron driveways.
(10:45):
So when we think about theparking stock, I think it's a
case where there are these bigcompanies, um, but they're not
really driving policy.
To the extent that they areinvolved in reform, it's kind of
interesting because one thingthat they do share with these
parking reformers, who we'lltalk about in a moment, is that
they have this awareness thatparking costs money to provide.
(11:07):
Um, it's not generallyprofitable to build a parking
garage from scratch as a kind ofbusiness startup idea.
You don't see people doingthat.
And that's one of the reasonsthat, again, these companies are
mostly managing garages.
The garages have been built bypeople who think it's necessary
for their business or becauseit's required by law, and then
they turn it over to somebody toget the revenue out of it on a
(11:28):
managerial basis.
But you're never gonna pay forthe capital cost of construction
by charging people uh a dollaran hour.
Stephanie Rouse (11:35):
And in your book, you point out that the
history of parking is in partthe history of theft.
It's a very interestingsection.
Uh, how are the two tiedtogether?
Henry Graber (11:44):
Well, for many years, parking was the largest
all cash business in the US.
So you had an enormous amountof cash changing hands, and
sometimes you had guys who werebeing paid, and they were mostly
guys, because it's kind of adangerous job, being paid, you
know, 10 bucks an hour to managea garage at which people might
(12:06):
be paying 60 or 80 dollars afterparking at a, you know, an NFL
game or something like that.
And so tremendous potential forcash to uh disappear from the
cigar box.
And this has persisted inplaces where cash is still the
way that um garages get theirtransactions handled.
And I was just talking tosomebody about parking garages
(12:28):
in Memphis who was saying thatwhen COVID hit, Memphis was very
concerned that they were goingto lose a lot of revenue from
their garages.
They took advantage of thislull in traffic to convert from
a cash system to a credit cardsystem.
And when they came back afterCOVID, they had half as many
people in the garages, uh, butrevenue uh was higher than it
(12:48):
was before.
So, you know, evidently uhsomething fishy was going on
there.
Jennifer Hiatt (12:53):
I think it's interesting that you mentioned
that in the garages, themajority of the enforcement is
male because in the beginning,parking enforcement was female.
Henry Graber (13:01):
That's true.
And uh I think that reflectsagain the kind of the difference
between how we think abouton-street and uh off-street
parking, on-street being a jobdone primarily during the day in
these kind of busy businessdistricts where I don't know
exactly why the first people todo this job were women, but I
think it has to do with the factthat it was considered a kind
(13:22):
of a service to enhance theviability of the neighborhood.
And so we wanted to put afriendly face on what was
designed to be really amanagement system.
And since we're in Lincoln,I'll share that before we we
talked today, you sent me thesehistoric newspaper articles
about the arrival of parkingmeters in Lincoln, and it's kind
(13:43):
of a beautiful thing to seethis account of people being
just amazed at the way theseparking meters were installed
and order was suddenlyestablished on the street
practically uh overnight.
Which is not to say that beinga parking attendant is not
sometimes a dangerous job aswell, because you do have to
deal with uh irate motorists.
Jennifer Hiatt (14:01):
You share about some of the parking attendants
in New York City getting punchedsometimes.
Henry Graber (14:05):
Yes, and there's a long and painful history of
parking attendants beingbasically abused for trying to
do their job.
And um, I think it poses aninteresting question now that we
do have license platerecognition, we could send cars
around basically just takingphotos of license plates,
running them against the metersystem and figuring out who is
parked illegally, but that mightresult in an uncomfortable
(14:28):
number of parking tickets.
Jennifer Hiatt (14:30):
You dedicated a whole chapter to Chicago's
decision to privatize theirmeters.
What was the reason behind theprivatizing and why was it a
horrible mistake?
Henry Graber (14:39):
So, Chicago, for those of you who don't know,
sold or leased, I would say it's36,000 parking meters for a
period of 75 years to a bunch ofprivate investors.
And the thinking behind thiswas Chicago had had some success
with privatization of publicassets in the 2000s.
And uh with the financialcrisis bearing down, they decide
(15:02):
what if we put our parkingmeters out to bid and they get
this offer for more than abillion dollars upfront for 75
years of parking meter revenue.
Now, at that point, the citywas making so little money from
its meters that this seemed tosome like a pretty good deal.
They were going to get abillion dollars right in the
(15:22):
sort of um at the dawn of thegreat financial crisis, and they
would have been able to, youknow, forestall raising property
taxes and so on.
Turned out to be very bad,however, because as the private
investors, led by MorganStanley, as they bid for this
asset, what they knew that thecity of Chicago did not know was
that those parking meter ratescould be raised quite
(15:44):
significantly.
What Chicago saw as a good dealfor them turned out to be a
very good deal for theinvestors.
They have already made theirmoney back, and there are still
50 years left or 60 years,almost 60 years left, on this on
this deal.
So for the city of Chicago, notonly did they lose out
financially, but they also lostcontrol of their streets.
And so when they want to builda bike lane or have a parade or
(16:05):
close a street to traffic for afarmer's market or something
like that, they need to write acheck to these investors who
control the parking metersupply.
They want to take a parkingmeter out of operation, they
need to install one somewhereelse.
And this is the status quo inChicago for the next um almost
60 years.
And the tragedy is the ratesfinally reflect the actual
(16:26):
demand to park in thesecommercial areas in Chicago, and
yet the revenue is not going topay for city services, public
transportation, street trees,benches, crosswalks, anything
like that.
It's just going into thepockets of these investors.
Stephanie Rouse (16:41):
Have you found any other cities that have
fallen into this trap?
Or was Chicago like the glaringexample of what not to do?
Henry Graber (16:47):
Chicago did frighten uh people for a long
time.
I think there's been a coupleexamples of privatization since.
And I don't think that itcouldn't work in principle.
It's just that you have tothink carefully about how you're
designing that contract.
In Chicago's case, the wholeprocess was very rushed, and
definitely the aldermen werediscouraged from uh looking
closely at what was actuallybeing negotiated.
Stephanie Rouse (17:10):
So in the book, you bring up the term forbidden
city a few times.
What is this and why does itexist?
Henry Graber (17:16):
So the forbidden city was a term that was
introduced to me by an architectin Los Angeles named Mark
Valianados.
And what he was describing wasthe way that walking around Los
Angeles, he had noticed all ofthese beautiful buildings that
dated from the early 20thcentury that really made up the
backbone of Los Angeles'architectural character.
(17:39):
And if you've ever drivenaround LA, you know that the
city is full of these like kookyhistorical pastiche examples in
its architecture.
You know, you have commercialbuildings come right up to the
street, you've got apartmentbuildings, all kinds of stuff
that have since been forbiddenby zoning because Los Angeles
downzoned itself in the 1950s,60s, and 70s, and also by
(18:03):
parking requirements.
And so what Mark realized, andhe would go on this tour, he
would take people around tothese often beloved structures
in Los Angeles, and he wouldsay, You like this?
Well, it can't be built now.
And it can't be built nowbecause the zoning doesn't
prohibit it, or it can't bebuilt now because this would
require 55 parking spaces, andso they'd have to buy and
demolish the adjacent, you know,six properties or or whatever.
(18:25):
And I think that is actually apretty powerful and
generalizable argument forpeople in all kinds of places.
I was speaking a couple weeksago to some parking reformers in
Connecticut who were saying oneof the most effective
techniques that they've found intrying to convince people to
move towards a mode ofdevelopment where there's less
(18:46):
parking is to just look aroundat these historic Connecticut
town centers and say, if if thisis what you like, then
recognize that the laws we haveon the book have made it
impossible to build this.
You know, they talk about likeGilmore girls.
Like look at the town StoresHollow, is that right?
Stars Hollow.
Stars Hollow.
Thank you.
Stars Hollow, uh, they say, youknow, that that's the kind of
(19:10):
thing that is, you know, it'sit's part of this forbidden city
of, you know, America'sarchitectural and urban history
that we have since declaredillegal to build, even as it is,
I think, acknowledged by mostpeople to be the thing that they
really like most about theplaces that they live.
Jennifer Hiatt (19:25):
We continually hear the development needs
parking to be successful, butyou make the point that some of
the most expensive real estatein the country does not have the
corresponding parking.
Why is this myth so persistentin the development world?
Henry Graber (19:36):
Well, there are certainly some places where you
do need to have places forpeople to park.
I think the issue is there isalready a lot of places for
people to park.
And so the question of whethera particular building needs to
have its own parking lot orgarage associated with it, often
there's enough place to parkaround that building for the
(19:59):
people who would need to drivethere.
But then the other thing isthat when we think about how
people use buildings and howpeople get around, there are
obviously other ways of gettingaround than driving.
And as density rises, as itbecomes more difficult to park,
you see more people using othermodes of transportation to get
from here to there.
And so there's this kind ofalmost magical threshold at
(20:21):
which when it actually becomeshard to park, you it almost
means that you've reached athreshold of density at which
transit, biking, walking becomemore viable.
And so, right as it becomesdifficult to park, you find
people who are saying, you knowwhat, I'm actually going to get
around in in a different way.
And so I think that's why youdo reach places that can obtain
(20:44):
this kind of super density wheremost people aren't getting
around uh by car.
And again, like enormous, ifyou're interested in like the
tax base, obviously a bettersituation to have a bunch of
properties that are just builtout to the max rather than to
have a surface parking lot ownedby the city every two blocks.
Stephanie Rouse (21:05):
I think the hardest part is getting to that
threshold and getting thecommunity to make changes that
will encourage more densitywithout the parking and to
eliminate certain parkingminimums.
We have a lot of backlash onreducing parking minimums in
residential neighborhoodsbecause residents, while they
have the three-car garages topark off street, are worried
(21:26):
about their neighborhoodsgetting clogged with parking.
If there is a new apartmentcomplex, it doesn't build
parking.
And so trying to get to thatthreshold, I think, is
challenging for mostcommunities.
Henry Graber (21:35):
Yeah, I was in Arlington, Virginia a few weeks
ago, and the planners inArlington have tried a
performance parking pilot wherethey are charging dynamic rates
for different blocks and so onand so forth.
But right adjacent to thesecommercial blocks, they have
residential blocks, and theresidential blocks are concerned
about spillover from thecommercial blocks.
And so they lobby to beincluded in these residential
(21:58):
parking permit zones, whicheffectively clears the curb of
anybody who doesn't live in theneighborhood.
And what was interesting aboutthis to me was they said in
Arlington they did a survey andthey found that these residents
report that their block is full,quote unquote, when it's at 50%
occupancy at the curb.
So the question of like thereality versus kind of
(22:20):
perception of a parkingshortage, I think is very
important to drill down onbecause if we want to permit
attractive architecture andmissing middle development and
affordable housing and walkableneighborhoods and all the things
that are made possible bypermitting development to not
include all these parkingspaces, we need to have a handle
(22:41):
on what the actual supply andavailability is.
And I think it's pretty rarethat communities get to the
point where there actually iszero parking available.
And, you know, you need to finda way to, you know, to charge
for it, to regulate who hasaccess to it and so on at a
neighborhood level.
Sure, there might be a blockhere where there's not parking
available at 6 p.m.
(23:02):
on a Saturday, but if yousurvey the entire stock, you'll
find almost always that there'sa bunch of parking available.
Stephanie Rouse (23:10):
You gave one example of how COVID impacted
one community with their parkingrevenues and their garages.
And I don't think there's asector of city life that wasn't
impacted by COVID.
Can you give some examples ofboth positive and negative
impacts to the parking industrythat came out of the pandemic?
Henry Graber (23:26):
Well, so when I was working on this book, I had
this kind of wish that peoplewould see that the curb lane,
which up to this point reallyhas been without any real
critical thought, allocated justfor the storage of cars, could
be used for other things.
Like imagine what it could beused for.
And then it was like I hadwished upon the monkey's paw,
(23:48):
COVID arrived, and that was thething that caused people to say,
oh, you know what?
We could fill up all theseparking spaces with outdoor
seating.
And all of a sudden, like wecould turn all our restaurants
inside out.
And people would um sit outhere and they'd increase the
revenue of the restaurants andthe tax revenue, and they'd
bring eyes on the street andsort of restore a sense of
(24:10):
street life in theseneighborhoods that had been hard
hit by the shutdowns.
You know, so I think that thatdid move the overton window for
people, even if there has been alot of retrenchment as the sort
of cars come out and sort oftake back their territory.
Um, I do think there was arealization that, oh, like this
is just this is just real estatethat could be used for
(24:31):
literally anything.
Uh, and I think that's a thatis a positive legacy ultimately.
The challenge, I think,primarily is that COVID has
really done a number on publictransportation.
And so if you've got citieswhere people are only going to
the office two or three days aweek, that poses some real
challenges for publictransportation systems that are
(24:52):
accustomed to having those nineto five five-day-a-week
commuters supply a good chunk oftheir revenue and then
subsidize maybe the off-hourservice or the um the you know
the routes that go uh in otherplaces.
And so I think as publictransportation reckons with
maybe a new model, maybe newroutes to provide more trips for
(25:14):
people who are doing, you know,people have been traditionally
been left out of transitplanning, childcare trips,
medical trips, daytime oroff-hours trips, public
transportation has really beenvery nine to five focused.
And I think there's an there'sa need to revisit that.
And the reason that concernsparking, of course, is that
while there is often a greatexcess of parking that we could
(25:35):
be making better use of,ultimately, I think the the way
to create a really vibrant placeis to get people traveling by
some other means.
Uh, and so big cities really doneed functioning, uh
high-quality publictransportation systems to permit
the kind of density that givesthem their magic.
(25:55):
I mean, there is no Chicago,there's no New York without
public transportation, even ifwhen you look at mode share, it
represents a relatively smallslice of the general commuting
population.
It is nevertheless essential tocreating an environment where
like not everybody needs a car.
And once everybody needs a carto get to work, there's traffic
(26:16):
effects, and then mostimportantly, I think there's
there's the need to park allthose cars and the way that that
just forces you to dedicate 50%of your land use to car
shortage.
Jennifer Hiatt (26:27):
To end your book, you point out the
criticism that changing parkingis a penalty that falls on the
backs of those who can leastafford it, which at face value
has some merits, but narrowlyfocusing on just parking is
missing the broader picture.
What do you envision asuccessful system to look like?
Henry Graber (26:43):
Well, I think this is where we can get back to the
necessity of public transit,biking, and walking being part
of the conversation, becauseultimately, what is the goal of
rethinking parking?
It's number one, that ourcurrent system has created a lot
of waste.
So there's a lot of wastedspace, wasted energy, wasted
materials, wasted money thatgoes into all this parking that
(27:05):
doesn't get used.
But also because while it'strue that giving somebody a car
is probably the most effectiveanti-poverty intervention you
could do for someone who doesn'thave a car, the obligation to
own a car, to participate ineverything society has to offer,
to access the labor market, togo to school, to go to the park,
(27:27):
the requirement that everyadult have a car to do all that
is an enormous tax.
I think the median Americanhousehold spends something like
$15,000 a year on their cars.
And it's the second largestexpense after housing.
And so, to the extent that wecan build a city or a town where
families with three cars canget by with two, or two cars can
(27:50):
get by with one, where sometrips can be made without a car,
we're really liberating peoplefrom that enormous financial
burden of lease payments,insurance, maintenance, gas, and
parking fees.
Stephanie Rouse (28:03):
We just finished here in Lincoln working
on a poverty elimination actionplan.
And what we kept hearing overand over from people that
participate in our publicengagement was that our transit
system isn't set up to allowthem to thrive, that they can't
take jobs on nights or onSundays because our transit is
doesn't run, or they have toleave two hours before a shift
to be able to get there in casethe bus has a breakdown and it's
(28:27):
only one hour headways.
And so typically they don'thave the option to own a car
because of the expense.
And so they're reliant on asystem that really doesn't set
them up for success.
Henry Graber (28:37):
Yeah, that sounds like a familiar predicament
where if transit is not fast,frequent, reliable, then it is a
big ask for people to say youshould travel without a car
because it's better, or we wantyou to do that.
I think there's often thischicken and egg question that
when I was in Omaha, we weretalking about this.
This question of, you know, canyou shift to a mode of
(29:00):
development and land use whereparking is less important before
you have provided the transit?
Or do you need to provide thetransit and get people riding
the transit and then you canbegin to chip away at some of
some of the parking and startcharging for it and limiting how
much you're building and allthat?
And I think it is complicatedbecause on the one hand, if you
charge for all the parking, butyou haven't provided the transit
(29:22):
yet in a way that servespeople's needs, then I do think
you're you are putting people ata at a disadvantage if if
they're they're reallystruggling to make ends meet.
On the other hand, there is noreason that anybody will use
transit, except people who haveno other option, unless it's
difficult to drive.
Driving is so much easier,cheaper, faster that unless
(29:43):
there are obstacles in the formof parking fees or traffic or
you know, limits on where youcan park geographically, that
until those things exist, likepeople are not going to use
transit.
So I think ultimately theparking shortage has to come
first before the Transit systembecomes a system that you know
people are going to want to useif they have a choice.
Stephanie Rouse (30:04):
I think Minneapolis is a really good
example of that.
I I worked there for a time andit was challenging at best to
be able to drive downtown and beable to park and go to work
there.
So the transit system wasreally set up to bring commuters
in an efficient and expedientway.
So that was the way most of usthat work downtown got into
work.
Henry Graber (30:24):
Yeah, that sounds right.
And I think again, with a lotof big cities, you hit a point
at which you literally cannotprovide more parking for
everybody who needs it.
You see this at universities,medical centers, and really
vibrant downtowns where at acertain point it's just not
possible to provide enoughparking.
And that's, I think, wherewhere transit really becomes
essential to permitting growthand densification.
Stephanie Rouse (30:47):
And always the last question on our show, in
addition to your book, which wealways recommend that everyone
listening get a copy of, whatother books would you recommend
our listeners check out?
Henry Graber (30:57):
Okay, I'm gonna recommend three books.
The first of them is EmergentTokyo.
So this is a book by JoeMcReynolds and Jorge Almazan,
and it's about the particularurbanistic forms that make Tokyo
such an interesting city.
And they really go into greatdetail, both on an architectural
level and a historical level,on explaining how these
(31:21):
particular pieces of the Tokyoenvironment work.
They talk, for example, aboutthese multi-level commercial
buildings where you'll have arestaurant or something like
that on every single floor,which is something that I think
for Americans we very muchassociate with East Asia, like
that kind of thing.
And they explain how thosedistricts emerge and how they
(31:42):
function.
And it's really just adelightful book, even if you've
never been to Tokyo, to thinkingabout how things could be
different and how they work.
And then I also want torecommend Saving America's
Cities by the historianElizabeth Cohen.
That is a biography of theurban planner Ed Log, who was
the urban renewal czar in Bostonand uh also had roles in New
(32:05):
Haven and New York.
And what was so interestingabout that book to me was I
think after being as a NewYorker, I think Robert Moses
really dominated my view of whaturban renewal was about.
And having read The PowerBroker, came away with a pretty
negative impression of him.
And what Cohen does in thisbook is she really reminds you
(32:27):
that urban renewal was a liberalproject.
And it was a project that wassupported by a lot of inner city
neighborhoods, by a lot ofprogressive people who thought
they were doing the right thing.
And it just makes our reckoningwith that period of history and
the mistakes that were madeconsiderably more complicated
than the kind of good versusevil narrative of master planner
(32:49):
trying to demolish a bunch ofneighborhoods for highways.
And then third, I want to drawattention to a book that came
out recently, which is Shade bySam Block, which is about, as
the title implies, shade andposits that shade is this really
key thing to understanding howour cities function, especially
in a time of climate change.
(33:09):
And I think it's interestingbecause shade is so essential to
creating the kinds of livelyplaces that we all enjoy.
And yet it's so hard to comeby.
And that's partly because wehave zoned in such a way that
often explicitly is designed tostop shading from reaching this
sidewalk because there's thisidea that sunlight is always
(33:31):
better.
But also the challenges ofactually planting the trees that
we need in our cities.
Very complicated problem.
And what makes it interestingis it's one of those things
where sometimes everything isabout money, but tree planting
is not always about just nothaving the money for it.
It's about being able to managethis complex natural system and
the ways that it interacts witheverything around us.
(33:51):
One of the examples is that inLos Angeles they have like 30
rules about where trees can beplanted.
They can't be close tointersections because they could
get in driver's sight lines,and they can't be close to power
lines because they couldinterfere with the transmission.
And so in LA, they've sort ofwhittled away at the urban
environment.
And when you think about whereis the space actually left to
(34:12):
plant a tree, turns out there'sactually almost no room for them
on some blocks.
Stephanie Rouse (34:18):
We have about 15 minutes to open it up to
audience for questions.
Speaker 01 (34:22):
So my question is about dynamic pricing for
parking.
I guess can you just talk aboutwhat has worked and maybe some
of the challenges?
Are the challenges mostlypolitical in nature?
And then on-street versusparking structures, is there a
difference in how you mightthink about approaching that?
Henry Graber (34:37):
Yeah, that's a great question.
So one of I think DonaldSchuop's great achievements of
which he was most proud was thathe debuted the high cost of
free parking in San Francisco in2005, and everybody told him he
was crazy.
And then when he came back 15years later, they had abolished
parking minimums, establisheddynamic pricing, and uh and done
(34:58):
a bunch of other things that hebasically told them to do 15
years earlier.
In San Francisco, what thatlooks like is different meter
prices block by block.
And what's interesting about itis there is a great deal of
variation even from block toblock in the same neighborhood,
which shows that some driversare sensitive to price and other
(35:20):
drivers are sensitive todistance.
Some people want to park closeand pay for it, and some people
want to park a little furtheraway and pay less.
And so dynamic pricing is a wayof offering people these
options.
And so I actually don't thinkit's particularly politically
controversial if you alreadyhave parking meters to say, you
know what, we're going to find abetter way to manage this
(35:41):
system.
And there can even be politicaladvantages in places that have
done this.
One of the things that alwayshappens is publicly owned
parking garages get cheaperbecause there's this unfortunate
habit, which often stems fromthe fact that a bunch of public
money has gone into buildingthem, of charging a street meter
price to park in a garage.
Well, everybody would ratherpark at the curb.
(36:03):
And so if you charge that sameamount for the garage, you're
going to have people competingfor the same curb spaces and the
garage will be half empty andeverybody will say there's a
parking shortage.
And what happened in SanFrancisco was when they'd
established this dynamicpricing, meter rates on the
business streets went up, butthe garage rates went down.
And they found that they wereable to fill those garages with
the all-day parkers, theemployees, and so forth, and
(36:26):
leave the meter spaces on thestreet available for people who
are arriving.
And that technique has beenadopted in other places.
I mentioned Darlington,Virginia.
That's what they're doing.
They have, again, this samesystem.
And again, what you see isyeah, there's a block there
where it might cost $2 an hourto park, but then you might move
even 150 feet and it's 50 centsan hour.
And so there is really like alot of variation, even in what
(36:49):
you would think would be oneparking zone.
Speaker 00 (36:53):
My question is related to after cities kind of
do the hard work of getting ridof parking minimums, the next
barrier is convincing the banksthat would loan uh money to
these developments to do thesame thing.
Can you talk a little bit aboutways that cities or particular
bank maybe lending structurescan work our way towards that
(37:15):
sector getting in line withwhere we need and what we
require from parking?
Henry Graber (37:21):
That's a great question.
Bankers are by natureconservative and not
particularly interested inexperimenting with the projects
that they're lending money to.
And so I think it's no surprisethat in a lot of markets where
we have spent for the last 75,80 years, it's been illegal to
build a home with no parking.
So what we're dealing with isovercoming a really
(37:43):
long-standing practice ofthinking that you cannot sell a
house or rent an apartment if itdoesn't have its own dedicated
parking spaces.
And so I don't think it'ssurprising that it's hard for
bankers to overcome thatpreconception.
But the good news is it's been10 years, give or take, since
Hartford, Buffalo, San Franciscostarted doing away with their
(38:06):
parking minimums.
And we now have lots and lotsof examples of projects that
have been built withoutdedicated parking that pencil
and that have proved to beprofitable and work for the
people that are building them.
And not just in cities like SanFrancisco that are super dense
and have very robust publictransit networks, but also in
places like Buffalo, where mostpeople do drive, right?
(38:28):
And so, you know, what bankersalways want to see is comps.
They want to see you're tryingthis.
Has anybody else done it?
Did it work?
What's the rent roll like,right?
And so to the extent that thismode of development has become
more and more popular, it'sgetting a lot easier.
And so, you know, we're inLincoln and Lincoln might look
to Champaign, Illinois, which isa place that's seen a bunch of
(38:50):
development without parking.
Also a university town, also aplace where it turns out there's
a pretty high elasticity interms of whether people will
bring their cars or not.
There's a lot of flexibilitythere.
Denver is another case wherethey're building things without
parking too.
So Minneapolis, right?
So as the number of places thatare experimenting with this
increases, I think it's going toget easier and easier for
(39:11):
bankers to find examples thatthey feel comfortable with.
Speaker 03 (39:15):
Without going into too much detail, what's some of
the most effective things to sayto people who think they're
entitled to free parkingeverywhere and have like that
scarcity mindset to kind of getthem thinking of like why we pay
for parking and why it's noteverywhere?
Henry Graber (39:31):
I think the most effective thing is often to just
establish for them that thereare trade-offs involved.
I think if somebody is justdead set on maintaining free
parking forever and there's notthat much you can say to talk
them out of it, if that's theirpreference, but what you can say
is there are trade-offs.
Here are the trade-offs.
(39:52):
If we have free parking, wewill have a parking shortage.
If we have a parking shortage,it will become necessary for
these businesses and residencesto allocate half their square
footage to parking lots.
If that happens, we will nolonger have a dense and walkable
commercial neighborhood.
If that happens, the tax basewill drop and then your property
(40:13):
taxes will go up.
And so you can sort of runthrough the ways in which this
parking-centric mode ofdevelopment ultimately costs us
all.
But I think it helps to be ableto perceive the trade-offs.
And for different people, thatmight mean different things.
Some people who are motivatedby the idea that free parking is
impeding.
I think you have to tie freeparking to parking minimums,
(40:34):
right?
And if you have parkingminimums, you know, you might
have to demolish a bunch ofhistoric structures.
And that motivates some people.
You might have to chop down abunch of trees to build a
parking lot or a garage.
You might have to go into debtas a city to spend $20 million
on a public garage.
I mean, there are countlesscases of small cities that
perceive a parking shortage, arereluctant to make people pay
(40:58):
for the parking, and thenfinally they wind up spending
all that money on a giant garagethat nobody uses.
And those are all effectiveways of kind of raising
awareness about this issue.
One of the counterarguments youoften hear is well, I'll just
park for free out at thesuburban X or Y rather than
continuing to patronize theselocal businesses.
(41:20):
And people will say that andthey might do it.
But I think the truth is ifyour downtown or your commercial
strip is, if free parking isthe only thing that's keeping it
going, then you you have biggerproblems.
And that you're never going todo better than the suburbs on
free parking.
You're never going to do betterthan them all, right?
And uh, and so I think that'sthat's important to reckon with.
(41:40):
And then the last thing I'd sayis there probably will still be
free parking, even if someparking is paid.
It's really about making surethat the free parking is a
little further away so that thepeople who are arriving and need
to run a quick errand or make adelivery or something like
that, they have access to thesepaid parking spots.
So almost everywhere that itestablishes parking meters,
(42:01):
there's a lower cost option.
It's just a couple blocksfurther away.
Stephanie Rouse (42:04):
Thank you, Henry, for joining us on the
podcast to talk about your book,Paved Paradise.
Henry Graber (42:09):
Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Hiatt (42:11):
We hope you enjoyed this conversation with
author Henry Gravar on his book,Paved Paradise: How Parking
Explains the World.
You can get your own copythrough the publisher at Penguin
Random House by supporting yourlocal bookstore or online at
bookshop.org.
Remember to subscribe to theshow wherever you listen to
podcasts, and please rate,review, and share the show.
Thank you for listening andtalking to me on the front.
Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of
Booked On Planning.
In this episode, we talk withauthor Henry Graber on his book,
Paved Paradise, How ParkingExplains the World.
This was our second livepodcast recording ever.
We did one a few years ago withauthor Alana Bruce, but for our
fall APA Nebraska workshop, wehad Henry Graber out to talk
(00:57):
about his book.
We did a live podcast recordingand he wrapped up our whole
day, which was all surroundingthe world of parking with a
keynote.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:05):
Yeah.
And when Stephanie says thiswas our second live interview,
she's wrong, this was my firstlive interview.
She did interview Alana on herown a few years ago.
So it was very interesting tojust like a little insight into
the background of what we had todo.
We had to figure out whatmicrophones we were going to use
and how we were going to seteverything up.
And it was an interestingexperience.
(01:26):
So you guys will have to let usknow if you like these live
interviews.
Stephanie Rouse (01:29):
Yes, I will say it is much less stressful and
more fun having a partner incrime up there with me doing the
interview together.
So it was a better experience.
And I think we have the audiodown a bit more from that
episode.
If you go back and compare thetwo, I think they are uh light
years apart in quality.
Jennifer Hiatt (01:46):
Which is fine.
It's fine that our firstattempt didn't go super great.
So Henry's book talks about thehistory of parking and then
really how parking has shapedthe entire way we design and
develop in the United States.
And I thought it was reallylike you think parking and you
think, wow, this is gonna belike a really dry book, but I
thought it was really funny.
Stephanie Rouse (02:06):
I'd agree.
Yeah, he had a lot ofinteresting stories in there.
Like there's a whole section ontheft in parking uh that we
talk about a little bit in theepisode.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:15):
Yeah.
Who would have thought thattheft in parking was a real
thing?
You know, these days you driveup to a parking garage, you hit
a button, you get a ticket, youleave, you pay with your credit
card.
I never thought about howprevious to the technological
advancement that it would besuch a cash-based industry.
Stephanie Rouse (02:32):
Reading it, you could see it was a very great
companion book to Choop's bookand also the Choop Doctrine that
we just talked about in aprevious episode, but it kind of
builds on that and reallyrounds out this whole idea of
parking management.
Jennifer Hiatt (02:45):
Yeah.
And with that, let's get intoour conversation with author
Henry Gribar on his book, PapeParadise: How Parking Explains
the World.
Stephanie Rouse (02:53):
So a lot of you know that we run Booked on
Planning, a podcast that is nowin its fourth season, wrapping
up here.
We've done a live podcastinterview one other time at a
workshop with Alana Proust acouple years ago.
So this is only the second timewe have in-person interview.
I think we've learned a lotsince then.
So this will hopefully be amuch better audio once we
publish it.
But we have with us today HenryGabar, a journalist, author,
(03:15):
and researcher who writes aboutcities since 2016.
He's been staff writer atSlate, where he writes
Metropolis column with a focuson housing, transportation, and
the environment.
He was the editor of The Futureof Transportation Anthology by
Metropolis Books in 2019, andthe author of Pave Paradise, How
Parking Explains the World,which is what we're here to talk
about today.
It was named Best Book of theYear by the New Yorker and New
(03:39):
Republic.
His story about immigrants inthe meatpacking town of Fremont,
Nebraska, was a finalist forthe 2018 Livingston Award for
Excellence in National Reportingby a journalist under 35.
And his work has also beenrecognized by the National
Association of Real EstateEditors and the Writers Guild of
America.
He was a 2024 Lobe Fellow atthe Harvard Graduate School of
Design.
His next book, The Story of theStruggle to Build an Apartment
(04:01):
Building, is provisionallytitled Under Construction and is
under contract with PenguinPress, which hopefully we'll be
able to have you on to talkabout that book when it's
published.
Henry Graber (04:09):
Don't hold your breath.
Stephanie Rouse (04:12):
So, first question
the very niche?
And as Donald Schuop has beenknown to say, the boring field
of parking.
Henry Graber (04:20):
Well, for many years I was and continue to be a
journalist writing about cityissues.
And it seemed to me thatparking was a subject that kept
cropping up no matter what thestory I was writing was about.
So I would be writing a storyabout affordable housing and
parking would come up as thisenormous obstacle.
We'll be writing about busrapid transit, parking again,
(04:43):
big obstacle.
Municipal finance, parkingwould come up, policing, parking
would come up.
And then finally, I think theone that really drove it home
for me was visiting Houstonafter Hurricane Harvey in 2018
and talking to people who saidthat their houses were flooding
because of development happeningupstream.
And in some cases, they couldpoint to particular parking lots
(05:04):
that had been built that hadchanged the stormwater runoff
conditions in theirneighborhood.
And I had this kind ofrevelation that I was in this
metropolis where the houses thatflooded didn't correspond to
FEMA flood maps at all.
It corresponded to this giantman-made infrastructure of
parking lots and storm drainsthat we had built.
(05:25):
And so this kind of realizationthat, you know, we're in this
landscape where parking is sucha significant feature of the
urban environment that it'sactually shaping just about
everything we touch.
Jennifer Hiatt (05:36):
You state in the book that the parking problem
is as old as the road itself.
Can you give us a quickoverview of the history of the
parking problem?
Henry Graber (05:43):
Well, so you find some references to quote-unquote
parking going back toMesopotamia.
But what they're really talkingabout is just people
obstructing the roadway for onereason or another.
And one of the punishments thatgets mentioned is impalement.
So parking tickets, not so badafter all.
But I think you have toremember that up to you know
(06:09):
1900, everything in the roadwayis being pulled by an animal.
And so when we think aboutparking regulation up to the
invention of the automobile,we're thinking about something
that really concerns livinganimals.
And so one of the ways in whichthat obviously the enforcement
of that is a lot easier becausepeople don't just leave their
(06:29):
horses outside unattended fordays at a time downtown.
And one of the ways that thatcomes down to us today is in the
etymology of the word pound.
So, like a pound is where you'dgo get your car if it was
towed, but a pound is also whereyou might get a dog.
Um, and that comes from thiskind of shared history of
unclaimed property whereanything that was found in the
(06:50):
city would be brought to thepound.
And that was mostly animals,uh, although starting in
obviously with the invention ofthe Model T, it came to include
automobiles as well.
Stephanie Rouse (06:58):
I think that was one of the interesting
points was we've always beendealing with parking, and there
was uh a desire to have hitchingposts in front of your
businesses so that you couldpark your horse right in front
of the business, and today it'sjust transferred over to
vehicles where we need parkingright in front of our businesses
so people can park and and walkright in.
Henry Graber (07:16):
Yeah, one interesting change is that prior
to right when horses were athing, people considered parking
a real nuisance use.
They really did not wantstables to be in their
neighborhoods because you hadall these horses, all this
traffic, all this manure,obviously.
And then obviously we do a 180when it comes time to think
about automobile parking, andall of a sudden it's something
(07:36):
that we want and in factlegislate be included in in
every single uh building.
Stephanie Rouse (07:41):
So by now most planners have understood or
heard the concept that addingmore vehicle lanes induces more
driving.
But you point out in the bookthat adding more parking induces
more driving.
How is this relationship?
Henry Graber (07:52):
So I think it's it's kind of counterintuitive
because if you go back to themid-century city, there's this
idea that traffic is a hugeproblem.
The city is choking oncongestion, and the root of that
congestion is that there isn'tenough space to park.
And if we could just createenough off-street parking
facilities, we could vacuum thetraffic off the streets and
clear the way for commerce andmobility and everything else.
(08:15):
That proves very difficult, notonly because the rates at which
people use automobilescontinues to rise and rise and
rise, but also because you beginto destroy more and more of the
urban environment to createparking lots.
And so you create anenvironment in which people
actually can't get around in theways that they used to,
transit, walking, biking becomedangerous or simply inefficient
(08:39):
because the density of the urbanenvironment has been has fallen
as we sort of chip away at itwith these various parking
facilities.
And there is research thatbacks this up that in fact more
parking creates more traffic andnot the other way around.
There's a study of these, Ithink, seven or nine small
cities done by Chris McCahilland Norman Garrick, where they
(08:59):
tracked the creation of parkingspaces between 1960 and 1980,
and then the mode share in thefollowing two decades.
And what they found was thatthe more parking that was built
in those earlier decades, themore likely mode share was to
shift subsequently towardspeople driving.
And so, in fact, it wascausation that parking was
pushing people into using carsrather than just correlation,
(09:23):
parking emerging to meet thedemand of people in their
automobiles.
Jennifer Hiatt (09:27):
Around 580,000 people work in parking every
day.
I think people would really besurprised to find that out.
Who are the major corporationsbehind parking and what role do
they play in shaping the parkinglandscape?
Henry Graber (09:40):
It's a question I get a lot because I think we are
so accustomed in so manyaspects of our life to find
these kind of big corporateentities who are pouring lots of
money into whatever field it isthat they're in, and they're
responsible for shaping, youknow, the way that beer gets
labeled or um, you know, the waythat a cell phone contract gets
(10:01):
written or something like that.
And in the case of parking,there are big companies that
often manage big city airportparking facilities, stadiums,
and so forth, but they'reusually not owning those
facilities.
They're mostly managing.
And so when you think about whois actually controlling the
parking stock, it's often prettylocal.
The owner of a building willalso own the garage inside it.
(10:24):
Or you might have speculators,land bankers who are sitting on
these downtown parking lotswaiting for decades until they
decide it's finally time to sellthat for a development site.
And of course, the number onesort of holder of parking is
probably just the Americanpeople in the form of their
single-family homes with theirthree-car garages and their
apron driveways.
(10:45):
So when we think about theparking stock, I think it's a
case where there are these bigcompanies, um, but they're not
really driving policy.
To the extent that they areinvolved in reform, it's kind of
interesting because one thingthat they do share with these
parking reformers, who we'lltalk about in a moment, is that
they have this awareness thatparking costs money to provide.
(11:07):
Um, it's not generallyprofitable to build a parking
garage from scratch as a kind ofbusiness startup idea.
You don't see people doingthat.
And that's one of the reasonsthat, again, these companies are
mostly managing garages.
The garages have been built bypeople who think it's necessary
for their business or becauseit's required by law, and then
they turn it over to somebody toget the revenue out of it on a
(11:28):
managerial basis.
But you're never gonna pay forthe capital cost of construction
by charging people uh a dollaran hour.
Stephanie Rouse (11:35):
And in your book, you point out that the
history of parking is in partthe history of theft.
It's a very interestingsection.
Uh, how are the two tiedtogether?
Henry Graber (11:44):
Well, for many years, parking was the largest
all cash business in the US.
So you had an enormous amountof cash changing hands, and
sometimes you had guys who werebeing paid, and they were mostly
guys, because it's kind of adangerous job, being paid, you
know, 10 bucks an hour to managea garage at which people might
(12:06):
be paying 60 or 80 dollars afterparking at a, you know, an NFL
game or something like that.
And so tremendous potential forcash to uh disappear from the
cigar box.
And this has persisted inplaces where cash is still the
way that um garages get theirtransactions handled.
And I was just talking tosomebody about parking garages
(12:28):
in Memphis who was saying thatwhen COVID hit, Memphis was very
concerned that they were goingto lose a lot of revenue from
their garages.
They took advantage of thislull in traffic to convert from
a cash system to a credit cardsystem.
And when they came back afterCOVID, they had half as many
people in the garages, uh, butrevenue uh was higher than it
(12:48):
was before.
So, you know, evidently uhsomething fishy was going on
there.
Jennifer Hiatt (12:53):
I think it's interesting that you mentioned
that in the garages, themajority of the enforcement is
male because in the beginning,parking enforcement was female.
Henry Graber (13:01):
That's true.
And uh I think that reflectsagain the kind of the difference
between how we think abouton-street and uh off-street
parking, on-street being a jobdone primarily during the day in
these kind of busy businessdistricts where I don't know
exactly why the first people todo this job were women, but I
think it has to do with the factthat it was considered a kind
(13:22):
of a service to enhance theviability of the neighborhood.
And so we wanted to put afriendly face on what was
designed to be really amanagement system.
And since we're in Lincoln,I'll share that before we we
talked today, you sent me thesehistoric newspaper articles
about the arrival of parkingmeters in Lincoln, and it's kind
(13:43):
of a beautiful thing to seethis account of people being
just amazed at the way theseparking meters were installed
and order was suddenlyestablished on the street
practically uh overnight.
Which is not to say that beinga parking attendant is not
sometimes a dangerous job aswell, because you do have to
deal with uh irate motorists.
Jennifer Hiatt (14:01):
You share about some of the parking attendants
in New York City getting punchedsometimes.
Henry Graber (14:05):
Yes, and there's a long and painful history of
parking attendants beingbasically abused for trying to
do their job.
And um, I think it poses aninteresting question now that we
do have license platerecognition, we could send cars
around basically just takingphotos of license plates,
running them against the metersystem and figuring out who is
parked illegally, but that mightresult in an uncomfortable
(14:28):
number of parking tickets.
Jennifer Hiatt (14:30):
You dedicated a whole chapter to Chicago's
decision to privatize theirmeters.
What was the reason behind theprivatizing and why was it a
horrible mistake?
Henry Graber (14:39):
So, Chicago, for those of you who don't know,
sold or leased, I would say it's36,000 parking meters for a
period of 75 years to a bunch ofprivate investors.
And the thinking behind thiswas Chicago had had some success
with privatization of publicassets in the 2000s.
And uh with the financialcrisis bearing down, they decide
(15:02):
what if we put our parkingmeters out to bid and they get
this offer for more than abillion dollars upfront for 75
years of parking meter revenue.
Now, at that point, the citywas making so little money from
its meters that this seemed tosome like a pretty good deal.
They were going to get abillion dollars right in the
(15:22):
sort of um at the dawn of thegreat financial crisis, and they
would have been able to, youknow, forestall raising property
taxes and so on.
Turned out to be very bad,however, because as the private
investors, led by MorganStanley, as they bid for this
asset, what they knew that thecity of Chicago did not know was
that those parking meter ratescould be raised quite
(15:44):
significantly.
What Chicago saw as a good dealfor them turned out to be a
very good deal for theinvestors.
They have already made theirmoney back, and there are still
50 years left or 60 years,almost 60 years left, on this on
this deal.
So for the city of Chicago, notonly did they lose out
financially, but they also lostcontrol of their streets.
And so when they want to builda bike lane or have a parade or
(16:05):
close a street to traffic for afarmer's market or something
like that, they need to write acheck to these investors who
control the parking metersupply.
They want to take a parkingmeter out of operation, they
need to install one somewhereelse.
And this is the status quo inChicago for the next um almost
60 years.
And the tragedy is the ratesfinally reflect the actual
(16:26):
demand to park in thesecommercial areas in Chicago, and
yet the revenue is not going topay for city services, public
transportation, street trees,benches, crosswalks, anything
like that.
It's just going into thepockets of these investors.
Stephanie Rouse (16:41):
Have you found any other cities that have
fallen into this trap?
Or was Chicago like the glaringexample of what not to do?
Henry Graber (16:47):
Chicago did frighten uh people for a long
time.
I think there's been a coupleexamples of privatization since.
And I don't think that itcouldn't work in principle.
It's just that you have tothink carefully about how you're
designing that contract.
In Chicago's case, the wholeprocess was very rushed, and
definitely the aldermen werediscouraged from uh looking
closely at what was actuallybeing negotiated.
Stephanie Rouse (17:10):
So in the book, you bring up the term forbidden
city a few times.
What is this and why does itexist?
Henry Graber (17:16):
So the forbidden city was a term that was
introduced to me by an architectin Los Angeles named Mark
Valianados.
And what he was describing wasthe way that walking around Los
Angeles, he had noticed all ofthese beautiful buildings that
dated from the early 20thcentury that really made up the
backbone of Los Angeles'architectural character.
(17:39):
And if you've ever drivenaround LA, you know that the
city is full of these like kookyhistorical pastiche examples in
its architecture.
You know, you have commercialbuildings come right up to the
street, you've got apartmentbuildings, all kinds of stuff
that have since been forbiddenby zoning because Los Angeles
downzoned itself in the 1950s,60s, and 70s, and also by
(18:03):
parking requirements.
And so what Mark realized, andhe would go on this tour, he
would take people around tothese often beloved structures
in Los Angeles, and he wouldsay, You like this?
Well, it can't be built now.
And it can't be built nowbecause the zoning doesn't
prohibit it, or it can't bebuilt now because this would
require 55 parking spaces, andso they'd have to buy and
demolish the adjacent, you know,six properties or or whatever.
(18:25):
And I think that is actually apretty powerful and
generalizable argument forpeople in all kinds of places.
I was speaking a couple weeksago to some parking reformers in
Connecticut who were saying oneof the most effective
techniques that they've found intrying to convince people to
move towards a mode ofdevelopment where there's less
(18:46):
parking is to just look aroundat these historic Connecticut
town centers and say, if if thisis what you like, then
recognize that the laws we haveon the book have made it
impossible to build this.
You know, they talk about likeGilmore girls.
Like look at the town StoresHollow, is that right?
Stars Hollow.
Stars Hollow.
Thank you.
Stars Hollow, uh, they say, youknow, that that's the kind of
(19:10):
thing that is, you know, it'sit's part of this forbidden city
of, you know, America'sarchitectural and urban history
that we have since declaredillegal to build, even as it is,
I think, acknowledged by mostpeople to be the thing that they
really like most about theplaces that they live.
Jennifer Hiatt (19:25):
We continually hear the development needs
parking to be successful, butyou make the point that some of
the most expensive real estatein the country does not have the
corresponding parking.
Why is this myth so persistentin the development world?
Henry Graber (19:36):
Well, there are certainly some places where you
do need to have places forpeople to park.
I think the issue is there isalready a lot of places for
people to park.
And so the question of whethera particular building needs to
have its own parking lot orgarage associated with it, often
there's enough place to parkaround that building for the
(19:59):
people who would need to drivethere.
But then the other thing isthat when we think about how
people use buildings and howpeople get around, there are
obviously other ways of gettingaround than driving.
And as density rises, as itbecomes more difficult to park,
you see more people using othermodes of transportation to get
from here to there.
And so there's this kind ofalmost magical threshold at
(20:21):
which when it actually becomeshard to park, you it almost
means that you've reached athreshold of density at which
transit, biking, walking becomemore viable.
And so, right as it becomesdifficult to park, you find
people who are saying, you knowwhat, I'm actually going to get
around in in a different way.
And so I think that's why youdo reach places that can obtain
(20:44):
this kind of super density wheremost people aren't getting
around uh by car.
And again, like enormous, ifyou're interested in like the
tax base, obviously a bettersituation to have a bunch of
properties that are just builtout to the max rather than to
have a surface parking lot ownedby the city every two blocks.
Stephanie Rouse (21:05):
I think the hardest part is getting to that
threshold and getting thecommunity to make changes that
will encourage more densitywithout the parking and to
eliminate certain parkingminimums.
We have a lot of backlash onreducing parking minimums in
residential neighborhoodsbecause residents, while they
have the three-car garages topark off street, are worried
(21:26):
about their neighborhoodsgetting clogged with parking.
If there is a new apartmentcomplex, it doesn't build
parking.
And so trying to get to thatthreshold, I think, is
challenging for mostcommunities.
Henry Graber (21:35):
Yeah, I was in Arlington, Virginia a few weeks
ago, and the planners inArlington have tried a
performance parking pilot wherethey are charging dynamic rates
for different blocks and so onand so forth.
But right adjacent to thesecommercial blocks, they have
residential blocks, and theresidential blocks are concerned
about spillover from thecommercial blocks.
And so they lobby to beincluded in these residential
(21:58):
parking permit zones, whicheffectively clears the curb of
anybody who doesn't live in theneighborhood.
And what was interesting aboutthis to me was they said in
Arlington they did a survey andthey found that these residents
report that their block is full,quote unquote, when it's at 50%
occupancy at the curb.
So the question of like thereality versus kind of
(22:20):
perception of a parkingshortage, I think is very
important to drill down onbecause if we want to permit
attractive architecture andmissing middle development and
affordable housing and walkableneighborhoods and all the things
that are made possible bypermitting development to not
include all these parkingspaces, we need to have a handle
(22:41):
on what the actual supply andavailability is.
And I think it's pretty rarethat communities get to the
point where there actually iszero parking available.
And, you know, you need to finda way to, you know, to charge
for it, to regulate who hasaccess to it and so on at a
neighborhood level.
Sure, there might be a blockhere where there's not parking
available at 6 p.m.
(23:02):
on a Saturday, but if yousurvey the entire stock, you'll
find almost always that there'sa bunch of parking available.
Stephanie Rouse (23:10):
You gave one example of how COVID impacted
one community with their parkingrevenues and their garages.
And I don't think there's asector of city life that wasn't
impacted by COVID.
Can you give some examples ofboth positive and negative
impacts to the parking industrythat came out of the pandemic?
Henry Graber (23:26):
Well, so when I was working on this book, I had
this kind of wish that peoplewould see that the curb lane,
which up to this point reallyhas been without any real
critical thought, allocated justfor the storage of cars, could
be used for other things.
Like imagine what it could beused for.
And then it was like I hadwished upon the monkey's paw,
(23:48):
COVID arrived, and that was thething that caused people to say,
oh, you know what?
We could fill up all theseparking spaces with outdoor
seating.
And all of a sudden, like wecould turn all our restaurants
inside out.
And people would um sit outhere and they'd increase the
revenue of the restaurants andthe tax revenue, and they'd
bring eyes on the street andsort of restore a sense of
(24:10):
street life in theseneighborhoods that had been hard
hit by the shutdowns.
You know, so I think that thatdid move the overton window for
people, even if there has been alot of retrenchment as the sort
of cars come out and sort oftake back their territory.
Um, I do think there was arealization that, oh, like this
is just this is just real estatethat could be used for
(24:31):
literally anything.
Uh, and I think that's a thatis a positive legacy ultimately.
The challenge, I think,primarily is that COVID has
really done a number on publictransportation.
And so if you've got citieswhere people are only going to
the office two or three days aweek, that poses some real
challenges for publictransportation systems that are
(24:52):
accustomed to having those nineto five five-day-a-week
commuters supply a good chunk oftheir revenue and then
subsidize maybe the off-hourservice or the um the you know
the routes that go uh in otherplaces.
And so I think as publictransportation reckons with
maybe a new model, maybe newroutes to provide more trips for
(25:14):
people who are doing, you know,people have been traditionally
been left out of transitplanning, childcare trips,
medical trips, daytime oroff-hours trips, public
transportation has really beenvery nine to five focused.
And I think there's an there'sa need to revisit that.
And the reason that concernsparking, of course, is that
while there is often a greatexcess of parking that we could
(25:35):
be making better use of,ultimately, I think the the way
to create a really vibrant placeis to get people traveling by
some other means.
Uh, and so big cities really doneed functioning, uh
high-quality publictransportation systems to permit
the kind of density that givesthem their magic.
(25:55):
I mean, there is no Chicago,there's no New York without
public transportation, even ifwhen you look at mode share, it
represents a relatively smallslice of the general commuting
population.
It is nevertheless essential tocreating an environment where
like not everybody needs a car.
And once everybody needs a carto get to work, there's traffic
(26:16):
effects, and then mostimportantly, I think there's
there's the need to park allthose cars and the way that that
just forces you to dedicate 50%of your land use to car
shortage.
Jennifer Hiatt (26:27):
To end your book, you point out the
criticism that changing parkingis a penalty that falls on the
backs of those who can leastafford it, which at face value
has some merits, but narrowlyfocusing on just parking is
missing the broader picture.
What do you envision asuccessful system to look like?
Henry Graber (26:43):
Well, I think this is where we can get back to the
necessity of public transit,biking, and walking being part
of the conversation, becauseultimately, what is the goal of
rethinking parking?
It's number one, that ourcurrent system has created a lot
of waste.
So there's a lot of wastedspace, wasted energy, wasted
materials, wasted money thatgoes into all this parking that
(27:05):
doesn't get used.
But also because while it'strue that giving somebody a car
is probably the most effectiveanti-poverty intervention you
could do for someone who doesn'thave a car, the obligation to
own a car, to participate ineverything society has to offer,
to access the labor market, togo to school, to go to the park,
(27:27):
the requirement that everyadult have a car to do all that
is an enormous tax.
I think the median Americanhousehold spends something like
$15,000 a year on their cars.
And it's the second largestexpense after housing.
And so, to the extent that wecan build a city or a town where
families with three cars canget by with two, or two cars can
(27:50):
get by with one, where sometrips can be made without a car,
we're really liberating peoplefrom that enormous financial
burden of lease payments,insurance, maintenance, gas, and
parking fees.
Stephanie Rouse (28:03):
We just finished here in Lincoln working
on a poverty elimination actionplan.
And what we kept hearing overand over from people that
participate in our publicengagement was that our transit
system isn't set up to allowthem to thrive, that they can't
take jobs on nights or onSundays because our transit is
doesn't run, or they have toleave two hours before a shift
to be able to get there in casethe bus has a breakdown and it's
(28:27):
only one hour headways.
And so typically they don'thave the option to own a car
because of the expense.
And so they're reliant on asystem that really doesn't set
them up for success.
Henry Graber (28:37):
Yeah, that sounds like a familiar predicament
where if transit is not fast,frequent, reliable, then it is a
big ask for people to say youshould travel without a car
because it's better, or we wantyou to do that.
I think there's often thischicken and egg question that
when I was in Omaha, we weretalking about this.
This question of, you know, canyou shift to a mode of
(29:00):
development and land use whereparking is less important before
you have provided the transit?
Or do you need to provide thetransit and get people riding
the transit and then you canbegin to chip away at some of
some of the parking and startcharging for it and limiting how
much you're building and allthat?
And I think it is complicatedbecause on the one hand, if you
charge for all the parking, butyou haven't provided the transit
(29:22):
yet in a way that servespeople's needs, then I do think
you're you are putting people ata at a disadvantage if if
they're they're reallystruggling to make ends meet.
On the other hand, there is noreason that anybody will use
transit, except people who haveno other option, unless it's
difficult to drive.
Driving is so much easier,cheaper, faster that unless
(29:43):
there are obstacles in the formof parking fees or traffic or
you know, limits on where youcan park geographically, that
until those things exist, likepeople are not going to use
transit.
So I think ultimately theparking shortage has to come
first before the Transit systembecomes a system that you know
people are going to want to useif they have a choice.
Stephanie Rouse (30:04):
I think Minneapolis is a really good
example of that.
I I worked there for a time andit was challenging at best to
be able to drive downtown and beable to park and go to work
there.
So the transit system wasreally set up to bring commuters
in an efficient and expedientway.
So that was the way most of usthat work downtown got into
work.
Henry Graber (30:24):
Yeah, that sounds right.
And I think again, with a lotof big cities, you hit a point
at which you literally cannotprovide more parking for
everybody who needs it.
You see this at universities,medical centers, and really
vibrant downtowns where at acertain point it's just not
possible to provide enoughparking.
And that's, I think, wherewhere transit really becomes
essential to permitting growthand densification.
Stephanie Rouse (30:47):
And always the last question on our show, in
addition to your book, which wealways recommend that everyone
listening get a copy of, whatother books would you recommend
our listeners check out?
Henry Graber (30:57):
Okay, I'm gonna recommend three books.
The first of them is EmergentTokyo.
So this is a book by JoeMcReynolds and Jorge Almazan,
and it's about the particularurbanistic forms that make Tokyo
such an interesting city.
And they really go into greatdetail, both on an architectural
level and a historical level,on explaining how these
(31:21):
particular pieces of the Tokyoenvironment work.
They talk, for example, aboutthese multi-level commercial
buildings where you'll have arestaurant or something like
that on every single floor,which is something that I think
for Americans we very muchassociate with East Asia, like
that kind of thing.
And they explain how thosedistricts emerge and how they
(31:42):
function.
And it's really just adelightful book, even if you've
never been to Tokyo, to thinkingabout how things could be
different and how they work.
And then I also want torecommend Saving America's
Cities by the historianElizabeth Cohen.
That is a biography of theurban planner Ed Log, who was
the urban renewal czar in Bostonand uh also had roles in New
(32:05):
Haven and New York.
And what was so interestingabout that book to me was I
think after being as a NewYorker, I think Robert Moses
really dominated my view of whaturban renewal was about.
And having read The PowerBroker, came away with a pretty
negative impression of him.
And what Cohen does in thisbook is she really reminds you
(32:27):
that urban renewal was a liberalproject.
And it was a project that wassupported by a lot of inner city
neighborhoods, by a lot ofprogressive people who thought
they were doing the right thing.
And it just makes our reckoningwith that period of history and
the mistakes that were madeconsiderably more complicated
than the kind of good versusevil narrative of master planner
(32:49):
trying to demolish a bunch ofneighborhoods for highways.
And then third, I want to drawattention to a book that came
out recently, which is Shade bySam Block, which is about, as
the title implies, shade andposits that shade is this really
key thing to understanding howour cities function, especially
in a time of climate change.
(33:09):
And I think it's interestingbecause shade is so essential to
creating the kinds of livelyplaces that we all enjoy.
And yet it's so hard to comeby.
And that's partly because wehave zoned in such a way that
often explicitly is designed tostop shading from reaching this
sidewalk because there's thisidea that sunlight is always
(33:31):
better.
But also the challenges ofactually planting the trees that
we need in our cities.
Very complicated problem.
And what makes it interestingis it's one of those things
where sometimes everything isabout money, but tree planting
is not always about just nothaving the money for it.
It's about being able to managethis complex natural system and
the ways that it interacts witheverything around us.
(33:51):
One of the examples is that inLos Angeles they have like 30
rules about where trees can beplanted.
They can't be close tointersections because they could
get in driver's sight lines,and they can't be close to power
lines because they couldinterfere with the transmission.
And so in LA, they've sort ofwhittled away at the urban
environment.
And when you think about whereis the space actually left to
(34:12):
plant a tree, turns out there'sactually almost no room for them
on some blocks.
Stephanie Rouse (34:18):
We have about 15 minutes to open it up to
audience for questions.
Speaker 01 (34:22):
So my question is about dynamic pricing for
parking.
I guess can you just talk aboutwhat has worked and maybe some
of the challenges?
Are the challenges mostlypolitical in nature?
And then on-street versusparking structures, is there a
difference in how you mightthink about approaching that?
Henry Graber (34:37):
Yeah, that's a great question.
So one of I think DonaldSchuop's great achievements of
which he was most proud was thathe debuted the high cost of
free parking in San Francisco in2005, and everybody told him he
was crazy.
And then when he came back 15years later, they had abolished
parking minimums, establisheddynamic pricing, and uh and done
(34:58):
a bunch of other things that hebasically told them to do 15
years earlier.
In San Francisco, what thatlooks like is different meter
prices block by block.
And what's interesting about itis there is a great deal of
variation even from block toblock in the same neighborhood,
which shows that some driversare sensitive to price and other
(35:20):
drivers are sensitive todistance.
Some people want to park closeand pay for it, and some people
want to park a little furtheraway and pay less.
And so dynamic pricing is a wayof offering people these
options.
And so I actually don't thinkit's particularly politically
controversial if you alreadyhave parking meters to say, you
know what, we're going to find abetter way to manage this
(35:41):
system.
And there can even be politicaladvantages in places that have
done this.
One of the things that alwayshappens is publicly owned
parking garages get cheaperbecause there's this unfortunate
habit, which often stems fromthe fact that a bunch of public
money has gone into buildingthem, of charging a street meter
price to park in a garage.
Well, everybody would ratherpark at the curb.
(36:03):
And so if you charge that sameamount for the garage, you're
going to have people competingfor the same curb spaces and the
garage will be half empty andeverybody will say there's a
parking shortage.
And what happened in SanFrancisco was when they'd
established this dynamicpricing, meter rates on the
business streets went up, butthe garage rates went down.
And they found that they wereable to fill those garages with
the all-day parkers, theemployees, and so forth, and
(36:26):
leave the meter spaces on thestreet available for people who
are arriving.
And that technique has beenadopted in other places.
I mentioned Darlington,Virginia.
That's what they're doing.
They have, again, this samesystem.
And again, what you see isyeah, there's a block there
where it might cost $2 an hourto park, but then you might move
even 150 feet and it's 50 centsan hour.
And so there is really like alot of variation, even in what
(36:49):
you would think would be oneparking zone.
Speaker 00 (36:53):
My question is related to after cities kind of
do the hard work of getting ridof parking minimums, the next
barrier is convincing the banksthat would loan uh money to
these developments to do thesame thing.
Can you talk a little bit aboutways that cities or particular
bank maybe lending structurescan work our way towards that
(37:15):
sector getting in line withwhere we need and what we
require from parking?
Henry Graber (37:21):
That's a great question.
Bankers are by natureconservative and not
particularly interested inexperimenting with the projects
that they're lending money to.
And so I think it's no surprisethat in a lot of markets where
we have spent for the last 75,80 years, it's been illegal to
build a home with no parking.
So what we're dealing with isovercoming a really
(37:43):
long-standing practice ofthinking that you cannot sell a
house or rent an apartment if itdoesn't have its own dedicated
parking spaces.
And so I don't think it'ssurprising that it's hard for
bankers to overcome thatpreconception.
But the good news is it's been10 years, give or take, since
Hartford, Buffalo, San Franciscostarted doing away with their
(38:06):
parking minimums.
And we now have lots and lotsof examples of projects that
have been built withoutdedicated parking that pencil
and that have proved to beprofitable and work for the
people that are building them.
And not just in cities like SanFrancisco that are super dense
and have very robust publictransit networks, but also in
places like Buffalo, where mostpeople do drive, right?
(38:28):
And so, you know, what bankersalways want to see is comps.
They want to see you're tryingthis.
Has anybody else done it?
Did it work?
What's the rent roll like,right?
And so to the extent that thismode of development has become
more and more popular, it'sgetting a lot easier.
And so, you know, we're inLincoln and Lincoln might look
to Champaign, Illinois, which isa place that's seen a bunch of
(38:50):
development without parking.
Also a university town, also aplace where it turns out there's
a pretty high elasticity interms of whether people will
bring their cars or not.
There's a lot of flexibilitythere.
Denver is another case wherethey're building things without
parking too.
So Minneapolis, right?
So as the number of places thatare experimenting with this
increases, I think it's going toget easier and easier for
(39:11):
bankers to find examples thatthey feel comfortable with.
Speaker 03 (39:15):
Without going into too much detail, what's some of
the most effective things to sayto people who think they're
entitled to free parkingeverywhere and have like that
scarcity mindset to kind of getthem thinking of like why we pay
for parking and why it's noteverywhere?
Henry Graber (39:31):
I think the most effective thing is often to just
establish for them that thereare trade-offs involved.
I think if somebody is justdead set on maintaining free
parking forever and there's notthat much you can say to talk
them out of it, if that's theirpreference, but what you can say
is there are trade-offs.
Here are the trade-offs.
(39:52):
If we have free parking, wewill have a parking shortage.
If we have a parking shortage,it will become necessary for
these businesses and residencesto allocate half their square
footage to parking lots.
If that happens, we will nolonger have a dense and walkable
commercial neighborhood.
If that happens, the tax basewill drop and then your property
(40:13):
taxes will go up.
And so you can sort of runthrough the ways in which this
parking-centric mode ofdevelopment ultimately costs us
all.
But I think it helps to be ableto perceive the trade-offs.
And for different people, thatmight mean different things.
Some people who are motivatedby the idea that free parking is
impeding.
I think you have to tie freeparking to parking minimums,
(40:34):
right?
And if you have parkingminimums, you know, you might
have to demolish a bunch ofhistoric structures.
And that motivates some people.
You might have to chop down abunch of trees to build a
parking lot or a garage.
You might have to go into debtas a city to spend $20 million
on a public garage.
I mean, there are countlesscases of small cities that
perceive a parking shortage, arereluctant to make people pay
(40:58):
for the parking, and thenfinally they wind up spending
all that money on a giant garagethat nobody uses.
And those are all effectiveways of kind of raising
awareness about this issue.
One of the counterarguments youoften hear is well, I'll just
park for free out at thesuburban X or Y rather than
continuing to patronize theselocal businesses.
(41:20):
And people will say that andthey might do it.
But I think the truth is ifyour downtown or your commercial
strip is, if free parking isthe only thing that's keeping it
going, then you you have biggerproblems.
And that you're never going todo better than the suburbs on
free parking.
You're never going to do betterthan them all, right?
And uh, and so I think that'sthat's important to reckon with.
(41:40):
And then the last thing I'd sayis there probably will still be
free parking, even if someparking is paid.
It's really about making surethat the free parking is a
little further away so that thepeople who are arriving and need
to run a quick errand or make adelivery or something like
that, they have access to thesepaid parking spots.
So almost everywhere that itestablishes parking meters,
(42:01):
there's a lower cost option.
It's just a couple blocksfurther away.
Stephanie Rouse (42:04):
Thank you, Henry, for joining us on the
podcast to talk about your book,Paved Paradise.
Henry Graber (42:09):
Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Hiatt (42:11):
We hope you enjoyed this conversation with
author Henry Gravar on his book,Paved Paradise: How Parking
Explains the World.
You can get your own copythrough the publisher at Penguin
Random House by supporting yourlocal bookstore or online at
bookshop.org.
Remember to subscribe to theshow wherever you listen to
podcasts, and please rate,review, and share the show.
Thank you for listening andtalking to me on the front.
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