Today, Explained - Parking is a lot

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

In our quest to accommodate parked cars, we’ve paved over downtowns, polluted the planet, and made it near impossible to get anywhere without driving. Slate’s Henry Grabar explains Big Parking — and how electric cars might offer an opportunity to finally try something new. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Michael Raphael, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The summer blockbuster season kicks off in earnest today with a big, dumb movie about cars. You might want to buckle up. Cars getting hit by missiles. Cars driving off the Hoover Dam. Cannon cars. Cannon cars. That was awesome! But here at Today Explained, we'd like to talk about parked cars. The Fast and Furious movies, much like the rest of us, take parking for granted because it's mostly free and easy, but there is a cost.

That free and easy parking makes it hard to create affordable housing, create walkable neighborhoods. It has deleterious effects on the environment, both locally and globally. And so those are just some of the consequences of not really thinking hard about parking. On the show today, we're gonna think hard about parking so Vin Diesel doesn't have to. The all new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. We'll see you next time. Call off quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600.

Visit connectsontario.ca. Henry Grabar is a reporter at Slate, but in his free time, he went and wrote a whole dang book about parking. I think people rarely think about parking until they have a problem with it. But anyone who has ever tried to build anything in an American city will tell you that parking is an absolutely unnegotiable subject at the heart of everything you could ever want to construct. So I'll give you an example of this. I talked to a Baptist pastor in Chicago who was trying to start a neighborhood church, right? So he found this building on the west side of Chicago and he thought, I'm going to start a neighborhood church, right? So he found this building on the west side of Chicago, and he thought, I'm going to start a neighborhood church here for some 25 families. And this guy, his name is Nathan Carter.

Over half our church live within a bike ride. So when people walk, it's very easy to be in our church without a car. So he rents this church space, and time comes where he's ready to buy it. The week before closing our lender called our contact at zoning just to confirm that we were okay. And that person was out of the country and it got kicked up to another person. That person said, whoa, whoa, whoa. And he cannot buy the church because the church does not have enough parking spaces, according to the city of Chicago code. The city of Chicago says you need one parking space

for every eight spots in a pew. So Nathan Carter's got this beautiful little church. It's everything him and his congregation have dreamed of, and they cannot buy the building because they do not have enough parking. We tried everything we could to find a space, but it had to be within 600 feet. It had to be paved, landscaped, lighted. There was nothing that we could find. So they spent literally years looking for 18 parking spots to satisfy the city of Chicago. And by the time they finally rent a parking lot 10 blocks away, the buildings had become so expensive that he's only able to buy half of the original property that he had planned to. At some point, one of his parishioners said to him, you know, Pastor Carter,

maybe this is a sign from God. Maybe this is a sign from God that this is not the church that we were meant to be in. Brutal. But it's not a sign from God. It's just the city of Chicago's parking requirements. It wasn't like God created parking on the sixth day or anything like that.

No, no, no. God never created parking. In fact, you might even say that's part of the problem. How much parking do we have in the United States? Most estimates say we have between one and two billion spaces. Holy smokes. And that probably seems pretty abstract. But I guess one way to think of that is there are about 300 million vehicles in this country.

Right. So, you know, we're talking between three and seven spots per car. So parking is mostly empty. How did we get to one to two billion spaces that are always 75%-ish empty? I think it was actually well-meaning city planners. Put yourself in their shoes. It's the middle of the 20th century Your bustling downtown is plagued by a parking shortage Good God, this is awful

I've been circling for 10 minutes At this rate, I'll be late to my tailoring appointment at Bloomingdale's No one has anywhere to park Your stores are moving to the suburbs You're not sure what to do And so you decide that from now on, every new business or renovated building or any type of land use at all, from housing to nunneries to bowling alleys to tennis courts, will require a certain number of parking spaces.

Uh-huh. I foresee this solving the problem completely with no unexpected consequences. And it turns out they were actually extremely successful at creating more parking spaces. And it was viewed as a good thing. I think for a time it was. You know, I looked up like newspaper headlines in the 1950s, and they actually thought the parking shortage was the greatest problem facing downtown. To be fully dynamic, the American city must now accommodate the automobile. This is the vital factor of our new age. I think what that shows you is that it was hard to imagine from the sidewalk on a bustling downtown street in 1955 that one day, in fact, one day soon, within a couple decades,

there would be so much parking downtown that in Buffalo, a planner could joke, it looks like instead of creating space for cars to park, we have created spaces for airplanes to land. But that is indeed what many American cities came to look like in the 1970s and 80s as a result of all this parking that was created. The red ribbon has been cut on the newly completed Hamilton County garage, hoped to be the solution to Chattanooga's parking dilemma. The garage is a result of studies in 1975 showing inadequate parking as the primary reason for slackening business in downtown stores. What is the upshot of how much space we dedicated in our downtowns to parking? Well, we've created some really great space for roller hockey. That's something we have accomplished.

He shoots, he scores! One for one! That is going wild! Score! We think that most American downtowns are between a quarter and half parking by surface area. And, you know, even like so Portland, Oregon, right, seems like a pretty bike friendly and lively place, right? Like not a place that you associate with acres and acres of parking lots. But I just saw an analysis that Portland, Oregon, if you were to put all that parking flat, it would occupy one fifth of the city. So 20% of the entire city is made up of

parking. You know something? I've never paid full price for a parking spot. I can actually feel the street and I know where not to park, where to park. I'm just not one of those people who just goes into a lot or pays some valet. I think the most obvious thing is that parking is the greatest determinant of whether or not Americans will drive. And I think when we look at the fact that America is such an outlier in the degree to which people here drive all the time compared to pure countries like Australia or Canada or something like that, I think parking plays a great role in that. And the reason is not just because parking is a great subsidy for driving, right? If you're going to require that every home have two parking spaces, you are essentially making the down payment on the storage of that car for the person buying that home, and they don't even have any say in the matter. So that's part of it. It's a subsidy for car ownership. Building parking is really expensive. So when we require parking with every new unit, we are essentially levying a pretty large tax on the cost of that apartment. I mean, we're talking

like a study of low-income housing in California and Arizona on the new parking added tens of thousands of dollars onto the cost of every unit. So multiply that over how many low-income housing units do we need to build in this country to give everybody a place to live, several million. You're talking about a lot of money being spent on parking. But the bigger part perhaps is that the provision of all this parking creates environments in which it is difficult or unpleasant or dangerous to walk or ride a bike or use mass transit. You go to a place that is full of parking lots, and it has reached a density that is so low, a density of sort of attractions and amenities

and things to do that's so low that you, frankly, you need to drive. And so in that way, parking, it's not just a question of induced demand, creating more parking creates more driving, but also the fact that an environment that is rich in parking will be poor in everything that you came to park for. Okay, so Henry clearly has a lot of beef with parking. And up to this point, I feel like for people who love driving everywhere, you could maybe argue that it's worth the amount of space we've dedicated to it. It's worth jacking up the cost of housing.

Waiting for the bus sucks, whatever. But then Henry told me about his Google alert. I have a Google alert set up for parking space murder. A man ended up fighting for his life after being shot at close range. And you won't believe what cops say. The violent clash was over. You're looking at surveillance video of a fight over a parking space that ended with an unarmed 28-year-old father of three killed. A dispute between neighbors escalates to gunshots, and witnesses say confusion over a parking spot is to blame. There's a couple dozen parking space killings every year, and I don't think that necessarily

indicates that there is something particularly contentious about parking, so much as that the American populace is armed to the teeth and needs better access to mental health services. But one way or another, what we can say is that the provision of parking is pretty messy, right? People talk about fighting over parking as if it's some tragic accident, like, oh, how could this happen? It's like's like no this is a policy choice you created a system in which you know 500 drivers are fighting over the same 300 parking spaces multiply that by your boston philadelphia chicago new york la like all these cities that have the situation and you wonder why people fight no i mean I mean, it's pretty obvious, I think. Henry has some ideas about how we can fix parking.

We're going to hear those in a minute on Today Explained. What's parking like? It sucks. Say it again. It sucks. Today, I explained back with Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise, how parking explains the world. Henry, towards the end of the first half of our conversation there, we got into the real mess that is parking in the United States. We got into your Google alerts. People are killing each other. It sounds bleak.

Is there hope? Yes, I feel some degree of hope. Yes. Tell me why. It turns out there are a minority, but a very active, busy, and increasingly influential minority of people who are obsessed with the idea that parking, in fact, does explain the world. And then if you create better parking, you make it possible to create better cities. The leader of this movement is indisputably the 84-year-old urban planning professor Donald Shoup, who in 2005 wrote a book called The High Cost of Free Parking. I think parking is important because the average car is parked 95% of the time. He's like the pope of parking studies. And in an audience this large, some of you were probably even conceived in a parked car.

His book is the Bible of people who are interested in parking reform. He's funny, he's charismatic, and he has been absolutely happy, thrilled even, to see this book make its way out into the world and see these parking reformers start to invade city councils and community meetings and work their way into politics and development and begin to build a little less parking. Does his movement have a name? Well, the movement is called the Shoopistas. The Shoopistas?

The Shoopistas. Yes, in fact, like if you are by a computer and you go to Facebook, you can look up the Shoopistas group. And I kid you not, there are thousands of people who go there to discuss parking. What are the Shoopistas pushing though? There's three tenets of Shoopism, right?

That Donald Shoop proposes in his book. And those are, stop the parking minimum. There's three tenets of Shoopism, right, that Donald Shoop proposes in his book. And those are stop the parking minimum. So if a developer wants to build parking with her apartments, she can do that. If she doesn't want to build parking, she doesn't have to. I'm down with that idea, especially if it forces people to use public transportation. I'm just interested to know then where all of those people would end up parking. It sounds reasonable, you know what I mean? You're trying to get rid of one thing to make something else work.

Second tenet of Shoopism is to charge a market price for street parking. So if you have a place where there are more cars that want to park than there are parking spaces available, instead of adding millions of miles of driving to the road every year, creating greenhouse gas emissions, other externalities of driving, you just charge enough for the parking that there's always a spot available. I don't know. Here, there are people that have plenty of money that will pay anything to just park.

Everything is charged more. Where's the charge less at? And the third one is to spend that money locally. Because obviously everybody hates paying for parking. But in the places that have managed to implement such a program successfully and convince people that it's worth it, they spend that money in the neighborhood. I like that idea. I'm okay with paying more if I know the money's going to a good cause. I don't believe it. If you knew the money was going to go into our parking.

Highly skeptical. Right. What about all the parking we already have in this country? These sound like great reforms for the future, but what about the stuff that we've got? It depends where you are, really. I mean, I think a lot of the reform is about finding better ways to manage the parking that we have, which means charging the right price so that people will stop fighting over it. It means finding ways to share parking between buildings that need it at different times. Like a church, for example, might have a parking lot that they use on a Sunday morning,

but they don't use it the rest of the week. And there might be a restaurant next door that's open only at night, and then they need a parking lot. And maybe the restaurant and the church could work together and just use one parking lot instead of each having two. That doesn't seem like much, but like multiply that out at scale and you've halved the number of parking spaces in the country. So that's a lot of land that could be put towards other things, such as planting trees or building affordable housing. It sounds promising, but also what we're doing in a lot of smarter cities. I want to hear how electric vehicles are going to shake up this whole situation.

They are going to seriously shake up this situation because, I mean, think about it. The whole function of a parking space is about to change. For 100 years, a parking space has been a place where you store your car and you leave it and you walk away for days or even weeks at a time. But now, with electric vehicles, a parking space is suddenly going to become a much more valuable asset because it's going to be the place where you charge your car as well. Whether you're new or a veteran, even the best EV owners can sometimes forget the basic rules of charging etiquette. I think we're just learning the basic rules of charging it. We haven't forgotten it. We're still hammering it out, I think.

And that means access to parking is about to become, ironically, a key tenet of helping the country meet its climate goals and helping wean us off fossil fuels. Because transportation is, of course, the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in this country. So if parking is the way that people charge their cars and we need everybody to start charging their cars and buying electric vehicles, we unfortunately must make sure that everyone has access to a parking space where they can charge their car. Research from the U.S. Department of Energy shows up to 90 percent of charging happens at home, but in older neighborhoods like Seattle's Central District, residents could be stuck on roads with no outlet. I think if you look at electric vehicle distribution right now,

it tends to be concentrated in high-income areas, which is no surprise because EVs are expensive and the used car market is pretty thin. And the way people buy them is that they tend to buy them as their second or third car to go alongside a gas-powered car that you would take if you were going on a cross-country road trip or something like that. You know, that's why today I'm signing an executive order setting out a target of 50% of all passenger vehicles sold by 2030 will be electric. And what that means is that we are going to see the profile of electric vehicle owners shift. So instead of just being rich people who own EVs and money being the great determinant of who owns an electric vehicle, we're going to see that change. And I think in the next

10 years, the determinant of who owns an electric vehicle is not going to be money, but it's going to be parking. How come? Because if the convenience of where you can charge your car is going to be the deciding factor? I mean, that's what the surveys show. People buy electric vehicles when they have a place to charge them at home. Two-thirds of Americans have their own home garage. No surprise, it's often the largest room in the house, the biggest architectural feature in the facade.

Everybody loves their garage. And if you're buying an electric vehicle, you can spend between a couple hundred and a couple thousand dollars and get a nice level two EV charger installed in your garage. No problem for you. However, one third of American households,

which is to say tens of millions of households, do not have a personal private garage at home. They either share garages in their condo or apartment buildings, or they park on the street. And so for those people, the question is, how are they going to charge their cars? And so it's become increasingly urgent, this idea that we have to find a way to make charging accessible for those people, because otherwise they're not going to buy EVs. And otherwise we're going to end up with a two-tiered system in which people with home garages own electric vehicles

and people who don't get stuck driving gas-powered vehicles. I feel like when I watch TV, every other car commercial I see is for an electric car. That could be wrong, but that's definitely the vibe I get, especially big moments like the Super Bowl or whatever. General Motors is going electric. And Netflix is joining in by including more EVs in their movies and shows. Believe they can do it. It feels like car companies have rethought their entire inventory as a result of these government initiatives and obviously consumer demand. It feels like consumers are starting to rethink the vehicle because of EVs.

Do cities have a golden opportunity here to rethink parking with electric vehicles? One option is just electrify every single parking space. That's going to be insanely expensive. It's going to take forever. Frankly, it's beyond, I think, the capacity of most cities. So then the decision is, okay, where are we going to put the chargers and how are we going to make sure that people share them? Ultimately, what's required here is installing some public charging and then rethinking the way that people think about parking and charging because the place where these chargers are installed is not going to be a place where you can go and leave your car for days at a time. People are going to have to shuffle in and out.

That poses perhaps the greatest rethinking in terms of people's relationship with parking that we will have seen in quite some time. I think that's the positive side. And then the negative side, perhaps, is that in many cities, we are just beginning to think about all the other ways we could potentially use this public space that has, for decades, for a century, been allocated exclusively for the free storage of private automobiles. And right at that moment, we are going to install a bunch of super expensive infrastructure along the curb that ensures that for decades to come, all that space will be used exclusively for parking cars.

And I think that would be a shame. So we've got an opportunity to hit this out of the park right now or just stumble and make the same mistakes we've been making for 100 years? No pressure. Henry Grabar's book all about parking is called Paved Paradise. How parking explains the world. It is out now. As is Fast 10, a movie mostly about driving,

but I saw at least one car slowing down to park in the trailer. Our show today was produced by Miles Bryan. It was fact-checked by Siona Petros, Amanda Llewellyn, and Laura Bullard. It was mixed by Michael Rayfield. It was edited by Matthew Collette, who's still trying to figure out how they didn't call Fast 10 Fast 10 your seatbelts. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

The rest of the team includes my co-host, Noelle King, Halima Shah, Avishai Artsy, Hadi Mawagdi, and Victoria Chamberlain. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi. We got extra help this week from Jolie Myers and Patrick Boyd. We used music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Paul Robert Mounsey found a new parking spot this week, and we are going to miss him. It's sometimes kind of difficult because if you need to find a park, you're spotting a park. Every whole building is around, circle around the park.

Wherever you park on the road or inside, beside the mini playground.