PAVED PARADISE

A deep dive into how the complex rules of parking are affecting us all and what we can do about it.

Grabar, a staff writer for Slate who covers housing, transportation, and urban policy, introduces us to the issues surrounding parking with an example that begins with a dispute and ends with assault and arrest. “You may feel…shocked to learn that disputes over parking spaces can and do lead to violence,” he writes. “In a few dozen incidents each year, they even lead to death.” Examining the development of cultural rules involved with parking (not all of them are actually laws), the author illuminates a variety of related, interconnected issues, including the nation’s lack of low-income housing; how the downtown cores of major cities are effectively blocked from development due to efforts to increase parking areas; and how parking and urban development rules are being manipulated to aid money laundering, tax evasion, and theft. Grabar investigates the problems from the points of view of housing developers, architects, parking enforcement officers, garage owners, city councils, app developers, and analysts and consultants who think they have solutions. The author highlights both success stories and failures—e.g., when the city of Chicago signed away the rights to their own parking meters to a Wall Street firm for a century, costing the city billions of dollars in unexpected costs. Although we all understand what ideal parking means—“immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most important, free”—attempting to figure out where it exists and who is responsible can be overwhelming. "Parking lies at the intersection of transportation and land use, a bastard field of study shunned by both architects and traffic engineers,” writes the author, who proves to be an adept guide to this knotty topic.

An engrossing examination of parking and the many other issues that intersect with it.