Paved Paradise
How Parking Explains the World
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Zócalo Book Prize
Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New Republic
“Consistently entertaining and often downright funny.” —The New Yorker
“Wry and revelatory.” —The New York Times
"A romp, packed with tales of anger, violence, theft, lust, greed, political chicanery and transportation policy gone wrong . . . highly entertaining." —The Los Angeles Times
An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life—the humble parking spot
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a shocking number of Americans kill one another over parking spots, and we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Since the advent of the car, we have deformed our cities in a Sisyphean quest for car storage, and as a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted to empty vehicles. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, traffic patterns and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, and the overall quality of public space. Is this really the best use of our finite resources? Is parking really more important than everything else?
In a beguiling and absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Slate staff writer Henry Grabar brilliantly surveys the nation’s parking crisis, revealing how the compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems— from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—and, ultimately, how we can free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.
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"In our quest to make it as easy as possible to park, we've made it awfully hard to do anything else," according to this eye-opening jeremiad from Slate columnist Grabar (editor, The Future of Transportation). Noting that, in the U.S., "more square footage is dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person," Grabar explains how mandatory parking minimums, which require a disproportionate number of parking spaces for new construction projects, severely limit options for building more housing and improving public transit and traffic patterns. Using vivid examples and illustrations, Grabar sketches the history of parking in the U.S., demonstrates the inefficiencies baked into parking minimums, and examines how their elimination or reduction has improved the quality of life in Chicago, L.A., and other cities. Throughout, Grabar grounds his astute analyses in empathetic profiles of reformers and activists like Baptist pastor Nathan Carter, whose desire to build a neighborhood church in Chicago was complicated by regulations mandating that he "needed one parking spot for every eight seats." Contending that parking "is access of the most superficial sort, one that often papers over deeper inequities we're unwilling to address," Graber builds a powerful case that making parking a little more scarce will make Americans' lives a lot better. This deep dive into an overlooked aspect of the modern world delivers.
