"The incentives are all wrong"

On Tuesday we held the April edition of the Curious Reading Club live interview series, featuring Henry Grabar, the author of our most recent book of the month, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (AKA CUR012.)

Henry was such a clear and thoughtful speaker on the question of why we give so much of our living space over to the storage of vehicles—and I thought it was a fascinating conversation to be part of. I hope the club members who dialed in and joined us live agree!

Over the course of an hour, we discussed the ideas in Paved Paradise, dissected some of the parking-related travesties he documented in the book, and heard how the whole effort to write about such a specific subject came about. And along the way Henry talked about where society went wrong, how we could make our cities and streets better… and even gave everyone a couple of stellar reading recommendations.

I’ll post the full video recording for club members soon (in fact, I’ll be updating our entire video archive) but in the meantime, here are the highlights of our chat.

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To summarize the argument of Paved Paradise: America is obsessed with free or cheap parking to an insane degree, and not only has this blighted the country with huge, mainly empty parking structures and ugly garages, but it has also deeply perverted the course of our cities, our politics, and our homes—and we'd all be much better off if there was much less space to park vehicles that are not in use. Is that how you see it?

“When I talk about this book with people, I try not to say that America is worse because we made these choices, but rather ask people to recognize the trade-offs. I can understand that, for many people, they feel like free parking is the only way they have access to a place, the only way they can get around, because they can't afford to live in a place that's walkable. There's complicated politics around this, but I think if we can at least recognize the trade-offs that are made when we insist on the provision of all this parking everywhere, then we can begin to decide if this is something we really want to do.”

“I think up to this point, people don't realize that asking for more parking, asking for free parking, asking for every new project to include parking, means that you will get an urban environment where every apartment costs $60,000 more than it did before, and there's 50% more empty space between all the buildings, and the share of people who use mass transit or walk or bike starts to fall. And so all of these things are sort of knock-on effects from that preference. And I think if we can recognize that, then we can begin to sort of openly and honestly discuss the the trade-offs that we make.”

And people can get very selfish about their right to parking—arguing over spots, or putting cones out to claim these bits of street that are actually public goods.

“Not to get too philosophical about it, but it's always important to ask the question What if everybody else did exactly the thing that I'm doing right now? When it comes to parking, I don't think it takes very long to recognize that the thing that you want—which is free parking, directly in front of the door of the restaurant or whatever—cannot be had by every single person who is in that restaurant. And to recognize how granting that sort of parking privilege to everybody in the restaurant would require a substantial change in the whole urban form around the restaurant, and not just that restaurant, but every business and shop and so on.”

“That may not be a thought that comes up that often, since so many of us live in places where that's been baked into the policy for so long. What seems reasonable when it comes to my expectations of how I get around quickly becomes unreasonable when applied to everybody. And of course, that's true of parking tickets and parking meters as well, which is perhaps the place where you see this feeling expressed most vociferously; the sense of Well, OK, I understand that all these people paid to park, but for me right now? I really have got to park here, even if that parking space is illegal. So, you know, parking in front of hydrants, all that stuff.”

“The purpose of the parking meter is pretty simple, really: It's just to say the parts of that space that are in the highest demand need to have the highest prices, just to organize people, just to sort them by how long they're parking for and how long they need to be parked. Parking meters can work miracles in places that otherwise appear to be impossibly congested, by simply directing people away from a place where the parking is too expensive for their taste and to a place a few blocks away where the parking is free.”

“But the incentives are wrong because curb parking tends to be under-priced relative to how valuable it is and how much people want to park there, whereas lots and garages that might be three or four blocks away often charge more money per hour. So as a driver, it’s no wonder you're all circling around, fighting over who got to the spot first and so on, because the pricing systems are just telling you that this is obviously a much better deal.”

Let’s talk about the book in general. Why did you choose to focus on the narrower topic of parking instead of, say, the broader issue with cars?

“There are a lot of books about cars. I've always been interested in how automobiles have changed the shape of society, but that didn't strike me as the most original premise. Not that it couldn't be well executed: I think Daniel Knowles’s book Carmageddon [see last week’s newsletter] is a great book about the evils of cars. But this idea came out of my reporting.”

“I write a column about cities, and so I would be writing about affordable housing creation or mass transit infrastructure or public space or bike lanes or municipal finance and policing, and it just struck me that in every one of these topics, I kept running into parking. Architects were saying, Oh, why does that building look the way it does? Well, it's because of parking, of course. And so for me, the book really came out of that.” 

“There was never really a question of ‘does this subject need to be expanded to include the entire industrial system of automobile production and use and everything else?’ There was more than enough there. There were people before me who had written about this, but they were mostly academics and planners. I don't think anybody had ever tried to convey the importance of this topic to a mass audience.”

One of the most astounding episodes in the book was Chicago’s sale of its parking meter infrastructure to private business. It just seemed so utterly, baffingly badly done and corrupt. What was going on there?

‘So in 2008 the mayor of Chicago decided to seek bids on the city's 36,000 parking meters. The premise of this deal, which was very much in tune with a strain of thinking in urban politics at the time, was let's privatize these public works, because the city is not the best entity to be managing this. We can get a big upfront check right now, and if we're forfeiting money down the road, well, that's somebody else's problem. This is a relatively popular thing we've seen in urban politics since the 1970s when you start to see fiscal problems start to emerge in American cities, but Chicago was kind of unprecedented, because parking meters had not typically been considered.”

“When they put out the bids, it was for a 75-year contract, and the winning bid was over a billion dollars. It probably looked at the time like, boy, that is a lot of money right here on the precipice of the great financial crisis, compared to 75 years of basically people dropping quarters in these little machines. So that was the decision they made, to sell off those parking meters for a 75-year lease to a consortium of investors led by Morgan Stanley.” 

“I think there were dissenting voices who said, Well, how do you think they're going to make back this billion dollars? They're obviously going to raise the parking meter rates. They've studied this issue. You're not going to outsmart a bunch of Wall Street bankers in terms of appraising the value of a municipal asset.”

“The investors have already made back the money that they paid Chicago 15 years ago, and of course, the deal is on for another 60 years. So from that point on, every time you pay a parking meter in Chicago, you're just dropping money in the pockets of these investors. The result of this is not only that Chicago is forfeiting what would otherwise be a source of revenue for schools or streets or mass transit or whatever, but also that they have limited ability to actually modify the design of their streets, because they can't really move these parking meters without seeking permission from the investor group.”

“Unfortunately, it serves as a cautionary tale for cities that are doing these kinds of deals. I think we've only seen a couple examples of this kind of parking meter deal since. I don't think that it's an unacceptable trade to say we need money now and we're willing to trade money now for money later. But you’ve got to do your research, right? You got to understand why things are worth, what they're worth, and you got to put conditions in the contract to make sure you don't wind up in a situation like they're in right now. So, yeah, definitely a cautionary tale.”

And to your earlier point, it’s not a bad thing if parking prices increase to actually reflect the way people use that public space.

“It's certainly the case that previously the meters were very under priced: I think the prices hadn't been raised in decades, and that meant that there were many busy commercial corridors where you would show up and you just couldn't find a parking spot, because people would park there for hours and hours and hours. That's no longer the case.” 

“The downside of it from a management perspective is that if the city were in charge, they would want to maximize the utility of that space: You want to make sure that as many people as possible are able to access the businesses, shops, and offices that exist in those busy locations. My understanding is that since the investor takeover, they've just maximized for the revenue of the spots, but not necessarily tried to maximize the utility of the space. And there is this sort of a difference there. And so you wind up in some cases where you have commercial blocks in Chicago that even on a Saturday afternoon are only half full because the rates are so high.”

So where should we look to for positive examples of change?

“I come back again and again to the example of Seaside, Florida, which is a basically vacation town on the Florida Panhandle. Architects may know it because it's kind of the pioneering example of the New Urbanist school of neo-traditional design: the houses all have front porches, they're pretty close together, people park the cars on the street. It’s supposed to look like the place your grandparents grew up.”

“But they kind of chickened out at the beginning when it came to parking, and they were very concerned that the downtown core could not survive if they didn't dedicate the whole central plaza to just be a giant free parking lot. And that's the way it was for many years.” 

“During Covid, they looked at that and they decided that nobody was visiting, and so they temporarily turned it into a big public plaza. And they liked it so much that they kept it that way. And what did they do with all the people who used to park there? Well, they just started charging for the rest of the parking that they had. And I think that what's cool about that is that is not a transit friendly environment where people are coming on busses, right? Everybody's basically driving to get there. It shows that even in a place like that, you can really manage the demand for parking with pricing and other cues. There is not some fixed existing demand for parking that must be satisfied by some algorithmic function that spits out a number of parking spaces. It actually can be negotiated,”

“And I think everybody there is pretty happy with the solution they have now, which is they have a now a paid parking lot and they have free parking that's further away along the side of the road, and they have this beautiful public plaza at the center of town that's no longer full of slowly circling Cadillac Escalades. It’s now a place where there's little kids playing soccer and people eating ice cream outside.”

What do you think about the move away from private vehicles to self-driving taxis like Waymo [and taxis and rideshares before that]. If they are constantly driving instead of parking, does that reduce the parking problem overall?

“I think it's possible to imagine a future in which trips that are made by private car and that require a parking space at the end of the journey are now made by self-driving car and do not require a parking space at the end of the journey. And I think that's obviously a very fundamental shift if that happens.”

“But the question to me is which trips are being replaced with self driving trips. My understanding from hearing from Jeffrey Tumlin [the former head of San Francisco’s Municipal Transport Agency], was that they think a lot of public transit and otherwise like walking and biking trips that are getting swallowed up by self-driving cars. And I think this was also the case with Uber: Uber didn't actually take the place of people's trips that they were making with their private car.”

“If that's the case, then instead of seeing a reduction in demand for parking, you just get a ton more traffic. And I think probably a more plausible scenario, at least in the short term. Maybe in the long term, self-driving cars become so cheap that they really do start to substitute for the daily trip you make with your own car, and cause people to give up their cars. But I'm concerned that in the short term at least, what you're going to see is just a whole lot more traffic.”

OK. Tell us one book that provided inspiration for Paved Paradise.

“When it comes to taking urban planning issues and making people understand the connection between the design of the environment that they occupy and the way they feel, and the laws and the systems, I think nobody, nobody does better than Jane Jacobs.”

“It's not a particularly original recommendation, but I do think that The Death and Life of Great American Cities is just an incredibly eye-opening book. If you've never read it before, it’s so much a part of the canon that you might feel like you've absorbed it by osmosis, but I guarantee you haven't. It's more original and interesting than you might imagine. Reading Jacobs in high school was the first moment that I was like, oh, there are people who study the way cities look and think about the way that affects our behavior and the way that that shapes our culture. And so, you know, I think that's kind of the ur-inspiration for all my work, really, not just this book.”

And what’s one book that you turn to again and again, for joy, for solace, for nourishment?

“A book that blew my mind and that I think about constantly is Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. One of the people that I've talked to regularly in my reporting over the years is a bus network planner named Jared Walker, and he used to read my newsletter where I write about the books that I'm reading, and he would say too much non-fiction. You need to read more fiction. And I try to take his advice! But Pale Fire is unreal. It is just a work of such astonishing creativity that it just makes you want to do something creative.”

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Thanks to Henry for his time, and for his book. We’re getting close to announcing May’s pick, so get ready for that announcement on Thursday. In the meantime…

Onwards

Bobbie