It is the exciting time of year (at least it is for me) - time to announce the 2024 Pontification Book Club title: Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar
No, the book is not an exploration of the Joni Mitchell Song - it is an exploration of parking in our contemporary world. Parking may not sound like a sexy topic - as I have already heard from a few folks - but I think understanding parking is essential and crucial to understanding the places we live. Parking is especially true here in Los Angeles, a city shaped by parking like few other cities. There is an archetypical scene in the movie Swingers where the five guys leave a Hollywood bar to go to another party nearby. As they leave, each of the five guys gets into their individual car, all parked immediately out front of the bar:
This scene perfectly distills the idealized version of life in LA, where people drive their cars separately into the city's densest area and can park perfectly in front of the venue at peak hours before leaving and presumably finding convenient parking at their next destination (for now we will consume the fact that alcohol is consumed by the guys in the previous scene immediately before driving). Of course, real life in LA has never been like this - it is more often that you spend 20 minutes driving around in traffic, desperately hoping to find free parking before you finally cave and park in a paid lot. But in my experience, many Angelinos are under the impression that if we could build a little more parking, we could return to some golden era where such a life was possible.
Wherever you live - parking impacts your life more than you think. Parking is often hidden and assumed to be free - I would guess most people neither have a line item for parking in their personal budget nor do a great job of anticipating how parking will impact the time they need to budget as they spend each day driving to various meetings and appointments.
I have a friend who often quips (rightly) that "money makes people funny" to articulate how injecting money into a relationship that did not involve money often fundamentally changes that relationship. But economists have also observed the opposite, which has the less cool description of "the zero price effect," which happens when you take an economic good off the market and make it "free" to the end user. The zero price effect is the reason I used to dress up like a cow in late high school and spent a couple of hours driving around to 3 or 4 chic- fil-a restaurants to collect my free chicken sandwich meal on "cow day" (I recall not being particularly thoughtful about reimbursing my parents for the gas expended). But on a higher level, the zero price effect is also one of the reasons observed why healthcare has become such a distorted market. In most cases, health insurance or government mandates (like the mandate to treat in emergency rooms) mean that many people can consume resources without direct cost, escalating system-level costs without necessarily better health.
The "zero price effect" is the primary reason parking as a topic is so underrated: we have come to expect that parking will always be free, which severely distorts our behavior and urban planning. As I have written before, the need to provide parking for "free" is responsible for 15-20% of the cost of rent in the US. Free Parking is also a massive subsidy to air pollution, which has substantial health impacts on neighborhoods like mine, and a considerable subsidy for carbon emissions. It even led to the whole-scale demolition of whole city blocks, like in Denver's historic downtown, to put surface parking lots in their place.
Those in the housing and/or urban planning world probably know that much of this was initially written about by Donald Shoup, an electrical engineer and Ph.D. economist who later became an urban planning professor at UCLA. Shoup's book, The High Cost Of Free Parking, is a cult classic, but many folks find it long and inaccessible (including myself, who have only been able to read it in sections). Graber's book adds plenty of original insights, but he also does an excellent job taking some of Shoup's key insights and presenting them in a more narrative context.
And the truth is, whether you like it or not, addressing parking will only get more pressing in the coming years. The prospect of self-driving cars finally becoming viable and the proliferation of e-bikes will make If you live in big, expensive states like California and New York, forms of parking reform are on the agenda (I just spent one hour two days ago on Zoom waiting to give public comment on a parking reform measure on the docket in LA County). But reform has also been on the agenda in less prominent cities, like Austin, Texas, Buffalo, New York, and Richmond, Virginia. The Parking Reform Network tracks these measures, and the map has gotten FAR more populated in the last year. However you feel about parking, you should take the time to read the book and join in the conversation.
Also, I would be remiss to point out, for those unfamiliar, that the pontification book club was initially conceived as a fun way to have discussions with books that I was already buying for those that give the day job of trying to catalyze economic development efforts on the Eastside of Los Angeles. If you want a free copy of the book from me while supporting a good cause, consider giving before the end of the year (and make sure to put my name in the staff box when you do!)