Book Review: Paved Paradise

This is a guest post from George Weeks reviewing the book Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar (Penguin, 2023)

To the uninitiated, a book on car parking sounds like the dullest, greyest topic in the entire world. Trust me: It isn’t. This is a serious page-turner, with forays into architecture, psychology, economics, city management and organised crime.

Taking its title from every urbanist’s favourite Joni Mitchell lyric, Paved Paradise proclaims to explain “how parking explains the world”. A bold promise? Yes. But it’s accurate. Author Henry Grabar is American and this book’s world is firmly centred on the USA. But that’s OK. Mass motorisation was largely an American export, and so were its accompanying public policies.

New Zealand’s post-war transport plans paid copious tribute to contemporary Californian cultural hegemony. While its grandest gestures are our urban motorways (East Los Angeles Interchange becomes Auckland’s Spaghetti Junction), other subtler factors do more. Auckland’s post-war urban form has, like America’s, overwhelmingly been shaped by rules around car parking. Don’t believe me? Visit a pre-1940 suburb in Auckland…and then compare it with Botany.

Grabar explains how mass car ownership in the USA led to intense competition for kerbside space. Parking meters (first introduced in 1936 in Oklahoma City) introduced the concept of “renting” a parking spot; however, from the 1950s, a developer-provided parking model became the norm. It became normal to link planning permission to on-site car parking provision. If your development generates car trips, then it should provide the parking. Reasonable, no?

Actually, no. Intellectually consistent with Professor Donald Shoup’s doorstop on this topic, Paved Paradise articulates how this ostensibly well-meaning approach de-legitimised proven, successful urban design.

The densest, most adaptable type of urban development is the mixed-use perimeter block, beloved of Chicago, Glasgow, Paris, Melbourne et al, but this is impossible to build with parking minimums. If every deli, dairy, bakery and apartment is compelled to provide on-site parking, your “urban” block will never work.

The ultimate outcome of car parking minimums is a small fast-food outlet sitting sadly in a sea of asphalt. It’s ugly, isolated and (crucially) legal to build. This is the architecture of sprawl.

Minimum parking standards lead to acres of space that are simply not worth caring about. It’s all down to the rules. No-one would build the rubbish on the bottom right if they didn’t have to, but parking rules preclude any other outcome.

Back in the 1990s, James Howard Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere decried American suburban sprawl as “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. True, maybe. But if it’s the only thing that’s legal to build, then it’s all you’re gonna get.

“…all the [parking] requirements were pseudoscience…copied from other cities, distorted by misleading evidence and implemented without examination.”

Grabar lays bare the bizarre parking minima that shape cities. Did you know that every table in a Detroit pool hall needs its own off-street parking space? The hundreds of arcane stipulations could fill a book…and they do; the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Parking Generation Manual and Trip Generation Manual which only acknowledged walking for transport in 2020.   

Parking is very space hungry. To park one car requires 400 square feet (37 square metres). To provide parking, demolish one building for your development site; then knock down two more for the parking. Then repeat.

The outcome is “like moths devouring a lace wedding gown”. By 1972, 74 per cent of central Detroit was dedicated to roads and car parking. A similar story emerges from 1920s and 1970s Denver, or Houston.

The tragedy of car parking minima is that they make well-functioning cities illegal. In virtually every US city, the most expensive neighbourhood is a prewar, mixed-use streetcar suburban that would be illegal to build today (p. 195). Much of Chicago BP (before parking) fits this pattern. By contrast, Chicago AP (after parking) is the much same as anywhere else in the USA. You can see the same pattern in New Zealand – just compare Dunedin and Tauranga. Minimum parking requirements push a city apart, smearing it out like margarine.

Grabar points out that this spatial relationship is not a new discovery. Back in 1952, Cleveland Transit Manager DC Hyde stated that “Destroying buildings and using valuable land for more and more parking lots and garages hastens decentralisation”. In other words, trams, trains and buses are the best way to bring a city together.

It’s interesting to note that some of America’s most dynamic, prosperous cities did realise this, introducing downtown parking maximums in the 1970s. Portland, Boston, San Francisco and New York all realised that cities should compete as cities, not with new suburbs. A growing network of transport professionals realises that parking reform is crucial to enable better cities.

We learn how parking requirements make homes more expensive and deter other would-be developers from even getting started. Each parking space in the USA costs $35,000 to build; $59,000 in New Zealand dollars. That’s $59,000 which, thanks to minimum parking, cannot be invested in anything else. Building 100 flats? One parking space per unit? You’re down almost six mill before you’ve laid a single brick.

A simple combination of development economics and parking rules killed the Los Angeles bungalow court and pretty much all mid-rise masonry buildings in LA. Loadsaparking became the norm, and deviations attracted opprobrium. Who remembers 2018’s “Radical, anti-car Auckland apartment block”? Decades of parking minimums had inured planners, financiers and the public to any other outcome.

We saw this in Auckland in 2018, when the resource consent for the Grey Lynn Cohaus was recommended for refusal because of car parking minimums, despite providing six shared cars, a bike parking garage and proximity to frequent bus services. Car parking minimums recognise no such nuance. If the rules say you need 20 spaces then that’s what you “need”. Cohaus eventually did receive permission with a below-standard number of car parks, but only after a lot of effort to overturn the planners’ recommendation for refusal.

There’s an interesting foray into the underworld in “How to Use Parking for Money Laundering, Tax Evasion and Theft.” The scams and violence make this chapter read like the script for Goodfellas. No-one likes paying for off-street parking, but it certainly brings in the cash…and unsavoury characters. New York gangsters flocked to car parking; a barely audited cash business was the perfect way to launder millions, or simply steal money. A car parking attendant could under-report the numbers of cars per day, stuffing hundreds of dollars into a cigar box. A systematic parking scam at Philadelphia Airport in the 1990s may have netted its conspirators more than $7m per year. Not a bad return from clipping the ticket.

A consistent theme in the book is that it’s more efficient to control demand for car parking than it is to increase supply. Demand management also shapes travel behaviour. A $120 monthly parking fee for staff at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle reduced the drive-to-work mode share from 90 per cent in 2011 to 34 per cent in 2012.

Entitlement is a recurring theme. Over and over again, we learn about coveted parking spaces, the “right” to park and the sheer relentless determination of car-owners to preserve their parking space at any cost; more so if it is free to use.

Free kerbside parking induces irrational behaviour, including circulating endlessly for a free spot. Kerbside space is valuable, so price it appropriately. Want to reduce traffic in a city? Charge a higher price for on-street parking, limit the length of stay and enforce it rigorously.

Graber identifies kerbside management as crucial for well-functioning cities. Kerbs connect one street to many buildings and this space has many uses: drop-offs, delivery, and – yes, where appropriate – accommodating parking. Twenty-four-hour efficiencies occur when the same kerbside space can fulfil many different functions.

Chicago’s privatisation of its on-street parking meters is a spectacular example of how not to do it. The city relinquished billions of dollars in parking meter revenue to a slick consortium, losing control of its kerbsides in the process. Changes like cycle lanes, parklets, loading zones or wider footways are now much more difficult and/or carry heavy penalty fees, payable to the private parking meter consortium. It’s now much harder for Chicago to manage public streets for public benefit.

Paved Paradise emphasises the need to manage car parking, not as a supply problem, nor a solving-congestion problem, but as a component of the overall vision for the city.

Parking stands for a primitive kind of access that both overshadows and impedes a more profound and widely held right to the city. (Paved Paradise, p. 284).

While USA-focussed, the lessons of Paved Paradise are transferrable to anywhere seeking to rebalance its transport system, such as New Zealand. We had parking minimums here for decades until they were abolished decisively by the NPS-UD, with the last few leaving the statute books in 2022 to widespread acclaim. No longer must a developer subsidise car use as part of their business case.

The ongoing spat around removing on-street parking from Wellington’s Golden Mile is a case in point. People flock to city centres because they concentrate many attractions and destinations in close proximity to one another. It’s geometrically impossible to deliver this rich density if it’s predicated on most people expecting to be able to drive in and park at zero cost.

Looking to the future, Paved Paradise examines the possibilities of self-driving cars which will never need parking, at least not as is currently understood. While worthy of examination, moving vehicles still require disproportionate amounts of space; they may be part of the answer, but are not the answer themselves.

Car parking is a highly emotive topic, and it has huge spatial consequences. If we are to have sensible conversations about the future of our cities, we need to understand the role of transport systems and policies. Paved Paradise tackles much of the received wisdom and anecdata that led to multiple mistakes in parking policies, and the subsequent efforts to correct these errors. Maybe Grabar could be tempted to examine the effects of removing New Zealand’s car parking minimums in a follow-up book?

Paved Paradise combines rigorous academic and professional sources into a compelling, readable narrative. While many people’s instincts might be to flinch from a hefty-looking hardback, the fact remains that Paved Paradise could – and should – appeal equally to professional and general audience. Simultaneously enlightening, engaging and thought-provoking, it’s a treat for practitioners, politicians and the public.

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