Gideon Lichfield: OK, so what is his argument?

Lauren Goode: Well, he says we need to rethink the idea that parking must be so plentiful because cities aren’t suburbs, so we shouldn’t treat them that way.

Gideon Lichfield: It’s revolutionary, isn’t it?

[Chuckle]

Lauren Goode: You’re joking, but if something changed in the parking area, it would be truly revolutionary. And I’m convinced after this interview that we really need to rethink parking, and I hope you’ll be convinced too. We’ll talk about that right after the break.

[music]

Lauren Goode: Hi Henry, welcome to Have a bright future. Thanks for joining me on the show today.

Henri Grabar: Thank you for inviting me.

Lauren Goode: You write that there are about a billion parking spaces in the United States, or more than four spaces for every car. It’s crazy. How did we get to this point where there is this blatant overabundance of parking spaces?

Henri Grabar: Parking space is of course a mandatory part of the driving experience, so if you have to drive, you need parking. And for the past 100 years, we’ve taken it for granted that parking should be free, available and convenient. So over the last 100 years we have pretty much succeeded in making parking free, available, and convenient for most drivers in this country, and the result is that we have paved enough land to cover the state of Connecticut.

Lauren Goode: Can you tell us how the mistakes or lack of foresight of city planners and America’s general enthusiasm when introducing the car led to this?

Henri Grabar: So by the 1920s, cities were already overwhelmed by the volume of traffic caused by everyone buying cars and driving them downtown. They don’t have enough parking. After World War II, cities began to find a solution to this problem. So one option is to build public garages, but they also do something smart, which is they include parking in the zoning code, and that means that every time you want build something new, or whenever you want to renovate an existing building. and modify its use, you are required to provide a certain number of parking spaces, and in fact, a very large number of parking spaces. Because the way these codes are designed is they are designed to provide enough parking as if you were building in the suburbs, so they are designed to park urban buildings to suburban standards, and the suburbs are defined by these establishments retail like shopping centers with ample free parking. And that seems to be the biggest worry downtown right now. You imagine the American city in the 1940s and 1950s and you think there are so many challenges — substandard housing, deindustrialization, racial strife, pollution — that all of this is happening, and yet city leaders are obsessed by parking? But in fact, they are. And that’s because they think if they provide enough parking, they’ll finally be able to find a place for all this traffic to go and they’ll be able to compete with the suburbs.