SYNOPSIS
What book are we doing?
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, by Henry Grabar
Why are we doing it?
Because parking can help solve some of the large societal problems we face currently, like the affordable housing crisis.
How can we use it?
As a resource for specific issues that parking can help resolve (e.g., housing, traffic flow, climate change).
To remind us of the snowballing negative effect of flawed data and best practices.
To inspire us to keep questioning.
On May 1, the Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act came into effect in British Columbia, outlawing many forms of AirBNB ownership to free up housing supply for residents of the province. Premier David Eby previously announced that, ““(W)e’re taking strong action to rein in profit-driven mini-hotel operators, create new enforcement tools and return homes to the people who need them,” because “anyone who’s looking for an affordable place to live knows how hard it is, and short-term rentals are making it even more challenging.”1
So is our approach to parking.
In 2005, Donald Shoup released The High Cost of Free Parking – a 733-page bible of car storage.2 Shoup presented a simple premise: there’s too much parking, and it’s too cheap; he proposed three reforms:
- Remove off-street parking requirements.
- We’re over-supplying parking and driving up home and office construction costs unnecessarily.
- Charge the right prices for on-street parking.
- There’s currently too much incentive for people to park on the street. Leverage the simple economic laws of supply and demand.
- Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets.
- Give residents a direct benefit for revenue from cars parking on their streets.
In Paved Paradise, Henry Grabar revisits our counter-productive approach to parking regulation, how it shapes our cities, the far-reaching affect it has, and some of the reasons why there are relatively few cases of significant progress since Shoup’s ground-breaking work.
There’s a strong rational argument for changing the way we demand, build, and regulate parking.
- We already have a significant oversupply of parking
- In the US, there are six parking spaces for every vehicle (so no more that 17 percent of the parking stock is used at any given moment)
- There are 3.2 to 4.4 parking spots for every vehicle in Canada3
- It’s expensive to build, which drives up the cost of housing in the buildings it’s attached to
- Some estimates of parking construction cited by Grabar are $30-40K per stall
- Estimates by the City of Vancouver are as much as $100K per stall4
- It consumes space that could be used for other things (like more housing)
But as Donald Shoup points out, parking isn’t rational – it’s human behaviour. “Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain, said to govern instinctive behavior involved in aggression, dominance, territoriality, and ritual display.” Maybe his next book will be Parking Fast and Slow.5
Grabar’s observation about the emotional and subconscious elements of the act of parking raises more questions. “We expect parking to be immediately available, directly in front of our destination, and most important, free.” What other service (other than online) do we expect to never have to wait in line for? What other possession do we expect to be able to store for free? These are unreasonable expectations, held uniquely for parking.
Parking, it seems, has a deeper meaning. Parking is power. This may help explain where some of the unreasonable expectations noted above come from. It also explains Grabar’s description of a more uncharitable practice that permeates the development discussion. “At a time when the country desperately needs more housing, the debate over whether to admit new people into the neighborhood often boils down to a question that’s easier to say with a clean conscience: Is there enough parking?”
The policies and mandates for parking across much of North America are rooted in data from as early as the 1950s and were first codified in 1985 by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) in the Parking Generation Manual. Shoup called parking minimums presented in this and other documents pseudo-science. But for several decades, these guidelines, based on flawed assumptions, have led to flawed municipal regulations and bylaws, which in turn have resulted in unreasonable expectations and perceptions by residents about what parking should be.
Paved Paradise is a reminder of the dangers of following weak evidence, of failing to question and validate (or disprove) continually, and of relying on broadly accepted “best practices” when, in fact, they should never have been practiced at all.
- https://globalnews.ca/news/10027665/bc-short-term-rental-market-legislation/ ↩︎
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101843.The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking ↩︎
- Canadian Energy Systems Analysis Research initiative at the University of Calgary in 2021 ↩︎
- https://globalnews.ca/news/10590288/vancouver-parking-minimums/ ↩︎
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11468377-thinking-fast-and-slow ↩︎
