Book Review: Paved Paradise
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar is a more accessible and entertaining version of Donald Shoup’s classic tome The High Cost of Free Parking. Paved Paradise cover the problem with giving our cities over to parking, why we did it in the first place, and how cities are working to reverse the tide of parking overtaking our cities. However, by focusing entirely on parking, it doesn’t address the many other ways cars are given preference in our cities and the need cars fill in our lives.
As I’ve written about before, parking is not the only, or even the first, problem we should be focusing on in our transportation system. Paved Paradise, like most any book that look at urban transit through the lens of parking, presents parking reform as the primary policy change to reform the way our cities work. Unfortunately, the reality is not that simple.
Paved Paradise provides a detailed history of how American abandoned its urban transit systems in favor of the car, and then adapted its cities to make way for the ever increasing number of cars. This, in turn, make walking and use the remaining transit more difficult, furthering their decline. In other words, cars replaced other modes of transportation, they did not reduce the amount that people traveled (in fact, they did the opposite.)
The main argument for the elimination of parking spaces is that it will reduce driving. As Grabar argues in chapter 5 of Paved Paradise, “Control over the availability of parking spaces is a key policy instrument in reducing car trips.” But this completely misunderstands the history that hi spent four chapters laying out. Cars did not replace transit and walking in cities through minimizing transportation, cars simply became an easier form of getting around. We cannot move away from the car as our primary means of transportation on the assumption that people will travel less if it’s simply more difficult to park. Reductions in travel in this way would reduce people’s quality of life in very real ways. Instead, we need to provide transportation options that make getting around easier than using the car. We need transportation options that, just like the car had done, increase the amount people travel.
A great example of this is the examination of parking pricing in cities. The entire idea behind The High Cost of Free Parking is that cities should eliminate parking minimums and price parking so that it’s 80% full all of the time, and allow the free market to dictate how much parking is produced. Paved Paradise builds on this and provides examples of cities that have pursued this approach since the release of High Cost. What Paved Paradise shows is that cities that have priced parking have simply moved where cars are parked, often from the curb into lots or structures. Pricing parking appropriately does not eliminate the need to travel, or even the number of trips taken by car, it simply rearranges where the cars end up. That is not to say that pricing parking is bad policy, it still minimizes many of the negative externalities of parking, but it does not reduce driving.
In fact, there are many ways to reduce the impact on cars in cities that do not do much to reduce driving by themselves, but are an important step to enable alternative modes of transportation in the future. Designing communities using the principles of New Urbanism is a great way to reduce the impact of the car on the city. The primary difference between traditional urbanism and New Urbanism is that New Urbanism accommodates the car while hiding them from view and reducing their impact on the streetscape. This ensures walkable communities can be walkable, and provide an alterative to the car on the block scale. These walkable blocks can then be linked together using bike lanes and transit, ensuring transportation options that are as good as or better than the car.
Overall, the focus of Paved Paradise is misplaced. Parking is a symptom of a larger transportation system that needs to be reformed, and that cannot happen based on the idea that people will travel less. Even the book’s focus on cities is misplaced. In chapter 13, which was my favorite because it featured my friend Jose Trinidad Castaneda, the author states that our housing and climate crises will be solved in the suburbs. However, most of the book is focused on Manhattan (not even the rest of NYC), with a little Chicago and Los Angeles thrown in. If the housing and climate crises are going to be solved in the suburbs, how will parking reform in these places help when people’s only options to get around is by car? By focusing monomaniacally on parking, the author misses the broader question of how we can remake our car-dependent cities to move people around without a car.