Paved Paradise
by Henry Grabar · first published 2023
7mentions
4recommended by
6HN commenters
2023–2025first – last mentioned
67% recommend17% neutral17% critical
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 building and the fate of old ones, traffic patters and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municip
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That explains why this appeared on HN the day after I'd listened to it! The book "Paved Paradise" by Henry Gubar that was the source of the podcast, looks an interesting read: https://www.amazon.com/Paved-Paradise-Parking-Explains-World...
on “There is no way out of Chicago’s parking meter disaster” ↗For folks who don't want to read a tome like The High Cost of Free Parking, give Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar a shot. It's a lot of the same content, but punchier with a lot fewer facts and figures making much the same point.
on “The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup” ↗There is a thorough book on this topic, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Highly recommend it if you're interested in the causes of so much of our dysfunction in housing costs. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634461/paved-paradi...
on “U.S. cities opt to ditch their off-street parking minimums” ↗The book mentioned in this article (Paved Paradise) is eye-opening. I'm nearly done reading it and have a whole new perspective on the matter.
on “Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees” ↗…this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that…
on “Tear up unused parking lots, plant trees” ↗I just read Paved Paradise as well as The High Cost of Free Parking. This seems like the current gradual trend towards reversing the hidden subsidy for drivers, first by giving them less affordances at remarkably low prices or…
on “In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them” ↗…read books. Even if the queue stays the same length, we have more throughput, more kids get the benefit. Now if we translate that to cars, of course, we see the difference. People who write books like "Paved Paradise" or "The High Cost of Free Parking" hate cars. They really do. They hate the suburbs too. So when they see something that would enable people who don't currently drive cars to drive cars, or for people…
on “In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them” ↗