That we are running into every day and wonder to fix them. And we wonder, is this solution causing another problem down . And its its very complex and its very convoluted and everything connected. Henrys new book paved paradise offers compelling exploration of the forces that shaped our cities from the rise, the automobile, to the challenges of Housing Affordability and the urgent need for climate conscious urban planning. Please help me welcome the man can write sentences like this and really love this sentence you like. You wonder why parking is so important. Youre driving around and you just start getting so. Its like youre sweating. You want a parking so bad. He writes a parking space is nothing less than the link between driving and life itself. Please help me welcome. Tonights final. Its time we get a drink. Good evening. Thanks for that introduction. And thanks for upstaging me with these falcons. I we all just want to spend the next hour watching the falcons feeding. But this wont take long. Im just going to explain the entire of the american urban environment. You and i thank you for coming and really proud to be giving the albert pile urban lecture today. Everything ive heard, albert suggests that he have loved this topic and would have been just so ready to jump into a conversation and argue with all of us about parking all night. And i have no doubt that we could that we could do that so want to start with something that will break i think with the elevated theme that characterize the intellectual life of the Mercantile Library. And these seven season reality bonanza parking wars if you havent seen it for the most part this show follows the workers of the Philadelphia Parking Authority as theyve ticket and tow philadelphians cars and generally provoke and sometimes experience an extraordinarily excuse me, an extraordinary level of mental anguish. As you can probably imagine. When i started writing a book about parking status as a psychic third rail, i felt blessed to learn there were dozens of hours of footage, this kind of thing at its the tension in this show revolves around an unresolved question at the heart of the american urban experience to whom parking belong, who it and on what conditions cannot change hands. Two decades ago, donald shoup, the pope of parking studies and the first albert pilot irvin lecture speaker, observed that thinking about parking takes place in the reptilian cortex. The part of the brain said to govern aggression, territory reality and ritual display. And i believe that cognitive science has moved on from this concept, but it holds for parking sitting here in this Beautiful Library removed from the stress of the road. Your answer to the question of parking ownership may be simple. Let me say its public. It belongs to all of us. But from the behind, from the wheel of your car, you might see it. Otherwise you might say it, belongs to me. You see this assumption on on like neighborhood forums such as next door, where an unfamiliar parked car at a suburban curb can become the days subject of conversation in many cities, including cincinnati issue local parking permits as a way of legitimizing this claim. The parking belongs only to the people who live here, even your run of the mill Single Family home driveway plays a similar role. It offers access to a private garage course, but it also reserves piece of the curb for you you. After a snowstorm, a more fine grained system of curb ownership takes place in the person who shovels the spot, gets to keep it. Theres a blog, chicago, that catalogs the fantastic array of objects used in this practice folding chairs, children, toys, heavy machinery, nativity figurines. Ive always imagined the implication is that you or your car would be beaten with the object in question if you were to take the spot. Perhaps some of you have experienced this on one side or the other. I dont need to know which its hard to imagine. Another domain in which the City Government implicitly endorses vigilante justice. But thats what dibs or saves is when boss stern tried to limit this practice to 8 hours after a snowfall, a city councilman protested. The issue speaks to the basic principle what it means to be an american, he said. Like the gold miner and the pioneers, residents have a right to stake their claims. Will not surprise you to learn that dozens of american are killed over parking disputes every. I submit to you that the most important driver of parking is a deep sense of confusion over ownership and following from conflicting standards, entitlement and behavior. Its parking public private, somewhere in between. Conceived. There are some other maddening things about parking. Its not in driving directions, so it feels like a time penalty. The rules are confusing and so rarely enforced that getting a parking ticket feels both unlucky, unfair. Why me . Finally, parking is maddening because we have no choice but to drive the car. Maybe freedom, but not being able to park it turns it into a kind of a cage. But youre probably thinking of figuring out the source of this irritation is. Easy. Theres just not enough parking. Well, fair enough. Sometimes someplace there isnt enough for a driver to find a spot immediately in front of their destination immediately upon arrival. Parking people like to say drivers want parking to be free, convenient and, available. Think of it as a venn you can often hit of those three free and convenient but not available. Well, thats parking when you show up to a hot restaurant downtown at 8 p. M. And all the spots are taken convenient and available, not free. Thats parking front of a hot restaurant downtown that has parking meters free and available but not convenient is where many of us wind up parking because we dont want to pay for it, myself included. In other words, a standard for parking are very, very high. We dont want to pay we dont want to wait. We dont want walk. Universities. The best parking is doled out along a stop status hierarchy at uc berkeley, for example to win a reserved parking place must win a nobel prize. So i dont know what what what what is required here at the library and it would be unimaginable for us to hold other good to this standard but the problem certainly not that we dont have enough parking in fact there is astounding amount of parking in this country as many as eight spots for every car. And of course, not all of the cars are parked at the same time. Even as someone who set out to write a book about how much for parking there is in this country. I was a bit shocked by these numbers, so i will digress momentarily from the difficulty of finding a parking space and give you a sense of just how much parking there is in los geles county. You see it right. There are 19 million Parking Spaces. Its five for every household. Its percent of the incorporated in the county. Its more land than the moving lanes on the streets. The freeways put together in silicon valley, the wealthiest region of the United States, parking is 13 of the land. There are 15 million spots in the bay area, enough to wrap a parking lane around the twice smaller the city. The more parking there is. Generally speaking, seattle has five spots per household. Des moines, iowa has 24 household peer parls. In other words, properties devoted exclusively parking make up 28 of the land in louisville29 of downtown kansas city. And that doesnt include garages or underneath buildings or curb parking. You can also see atlanta and philadelphia here. Also, plenty of parking in buffalo, new york, where over half of downtown property was devoted to storing cars. The reformer, patrick mcnichol, joked, quote, if our master plan is to demolish all of downtown, then were only halfway there. If you look very closely, there are still some buildings that are standing standing in the way. Parking, progress. And its not just buffalo. There is more land used for storing each car in this country than there is for each person in the midaughts. When the team of programmers at maxus were on the first new simcity game in a decade, they studied american municipal architecture, politics and urban design to try to produce a compelling similac room lead designer still in the brand used google earth to measure his surroundings. The Biggest Surprise he found was the size of the parking lots. When i started measuring out our local grocery store, which i dont think of as being that big i was blown away by how much more space there was for parking lot rather than actual store. He that was kind of a problem because we were originally just going to model cities, real cities but we quickly realized that there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots in the game. He said they to imagine that the parking was underground, we had to do the best we could and still make the game look attractive. So if theres so much parking then is it so hard to find a spot . The answer lies in this question of ownership. The. The parking problem is old as the road itself. In the seventh century b. C. , the assyrian king sennacherib posted signs that read royal road, let man decrease it under penalty of death and public impalement. So you can stop complaining about your parking tickets. Julius introduced off street chariot parking in rome to reduce traffic. 17th century new york established a towing service to clear the streets of animals. You could get your pig back from the pound for a florin or your horse for two and a half. And in fact, the terms dog pound and tow pound both come from this shared history of unclaimed property up until the invention, the automobile. However, the temple temperamental nature of horses was its own form of regulation. The advent of the car and especially cars that could be left outside in all weather for days or weeks. A time turned the problem into a major dilemma. Not only did merchants country folk quickly abandon horsepower in the first few decades of the 20th century, wealthy commuters could drive themselves ditching the unwashed, the pickpockets and the bustle pinchers on the trolleys americans enthusiasm. For this new mode of transport was overwhelming and immediate. In 1920s, muncie, indiana, one woman spoke for a nation when she said she had bought a car before installing indoor plumbing. Because you cant go to town in a bathtub. What followed were . Four decades of interminable traffic jams as cars swarmed downtown streets. Observers believe the root of the traffic problem was parking a large share of the traffic was caused by looking for parking. And another share was caused by people who up. And double or even triple parked. And so by the time the end World War Two cleared the way for the of the nations cities, everyone was convinced that parking was a crisis. In a postwar report on decentral the flow of Business People and money to the suburbs, the urban land institute, the National Organization of Real Estate Developers concluded that parking was the important single problem facing Central Business districts of large cities. When i first came across this accounts of the midcentury, like this cartoon you see here, which in case you cant see the label on the gorilla, says Downtown Parking problem, i could barely believe it because between crises of racial inequality, endemic pollution, ramshackle housing, job loss and crime that characterized the urban trajectory after the Second World War newspaper editorials and conference keynotes focused on parking yes, a General Motors video from the 1950s. Give yourself the green light. Neatly represents the conventional wisdom of the postwar era. Build more parking and what brings up store today is parking space. One merchant says it is important to volume as shelf space and display. Best investment a town can make lots of parking and the rise of the suburbs gave this problem new urgency. Fix your parking. The thinking went or become obsolete. The idea that parking was an elixir to fight suburbs sapping urban population and tax revenue was commonplace. At this point, cities had two choices. They could try to manage parking demand by charging for parking, sprucing up Transit Service, encouraging carpooling and building walkable places, jobs, homes and amenities were close by. They had a new the parking meter invented in 1935 by an oklahoma newspaper editor. Noticed that all the best parking spots were taken by employees. They would write, they would arrive in the morning and park all day. And then there was nothing free during the day. Charge even a little for parking and the all day. Parkers would park a five minute walk away, leaving the premium spaces. This interface between the street and the buildings free for shoppers. Clients and deliveries. Parking meters were held in their time as a miracle. But of course, cities chose another path. They chose to focus parking supply. Parking lots settled into the wreckage of urban renewal. Publicly funded garages were put up downtown. Parking meters fell out of favor. And Transit Service began to disintegrate. Mixed use. Midrise development was redlined out of existence. Most importantly cities began requiring every new or renovated building to have its own parking supply. In this, they began a long transfer of parking from a public on streets or in municipal garages to a private one, required every home and business incapable of managing their streets and curbs. Cities. The private sector to take care of car parking. This decision would have serious consequences. Cities were about to come up with a very complicated and unwieldy answer to the question who owns that parking space. Chronologically speaking, we now in 1970, curbs are made free or cleared for faster, and their critical as urban access is limited by either decision. For builders zoning parking is ubiquitous. You can understand what planners were thinking when they established these rules. They could have the private fix the parking problem instead of city tax dollars funding tax exempt garages. Developers be forced to build the parking themselves. Nearly every city adopted a long complex that dictated how many parking spots had to accompany every single use from Apartment Buildings and schools to donut shops, nail salons, notaries Funeral Homes . Yes, they really are that specific. In fact, youre looking at a popular parking manual on screen. Tag yourself. I am a coffee donut shop with a drive thru window. But theyre so specific. I mean look at some of these Marijuana Dispensary store Building Materials and lumber supply judicial complex. Goes on and on. Here in cincinnati, for example. The code includes the following rules. One spot for every 250 square feet of a pool room, one for every 150 square feet of a bingo parlor, five for every lane and a bowling alley, one for every two berths in a marina, one for every 250 square feet of a quote, sexually oriented business. And no, i understand why that needs its own parking regulation either. I dont think planners could have imagined how effective these policies would be going to run through some of the consequences of this misguided approach to parking. The. Most dramatic consequence of asking the private sector to take care of car storage is in housing. Anyone wants to build a small Apartment Building in the United States must first confront a multivariate financial geometry problem that begins with how many Parking Spaces can fit on the lot. The size, quantity and shape of the housing. Not to mention its price, follows from their sometimes with just one parcel. It can be hard to make work at all by lot next door, and you could unlock some economies of scale like a driveway with stalls on either side by four parcels and well. Most small Time Developers cant afford four. Even if they could find four. Adjacent properties. Sale. Parking is immovable. Object at the heart of neighborhood architecture. As a result of these rules, we have simply stopped building small buildings. Parking requirements have helped to trigger an level event for. The bite sized infill apartment like row houses, brownstone urns and triple deckers that made the American City in the early 20th century. The production of buildings with between two and four units fell, but fell by more than 90 between 1971 and 2021. More means less housing because, parking takes up space and costs money to build. Quite a lot of money, in fact, building a standalone garage is rarely profitable. Required parking adds tens of thousands of dollars onto the cost of every single american apartment or home, imposing a half 1,000,000,000 penalty annually on tenants who dont drive because pay for that parking in their rent regardless. And for every completed building with a bunch of parking included, there is a blueprint for an unbuilt structure that pencil out. So this is the valley of the high parking requirements. On one side, on the right, you see properties in expensive areas like downtown cincinnati to justify costly, structured or even subterranean parking, which can cost 100,000 a space. On the left, you see a low density urbanism with ample room to park. You dont see much in between the valley of the high parking is not a fertile place. Our laws limit housing and require parking. And as a result we have a parking and a housing shortage. A second consequence of making a parking spot as mandatory as the front door has in architecture. For a century american, architecture has evolved in tandem with parking laws as increasing quantities of required parking have developers to move from the 20th century vernacular. I just mentioned corner taverns storefront groceries, row houses, flats, triple deckers, bungalow, etc. To fast food chains, Big Box Stores and houses where the primary architectural is, the garage door where land values are high enough. You get the parking podium building. The most famous example might be marina city in chicago, which you can on the left. But there are also plenty of examples here in downtown cincinnati where when the land values are not so high, you get something that looks more like Dodger Stadium in los angeles right. This system has made it impossible to maintain the american main street central parcels on main street were originally developed as commercial storefronts facing the sidewalk with offices or even housing above. Put 20 or 30 of them side by side and voila, main street. Thats what you see on the upper left here. But if you wanted to open a shop, one of those lots in an American City today, you would need to provide 1200 square feet of parking for every thousand square feet of interior commercial space. More than half of your lot is parking now. If you want to build a two storey shop, two thirds of your lot has to be parking. If you want to build three stories, the of your building shrinks to than two barely more than a quarter of your lot. A totem in a field of asphalt. This also makes it impossible to renovate historic structures. One architect described buildings in her town as locked up behind a parking padlock. They didnt enough parking to be given new life life and the math is even worse for in most cities, ten Parking Spaces are required for every thousand square feet of restaurant. So your classic main street lot of 7500 square feet can support a restaurant, a 1500 square feet. 80 of your lot is parking. The developer, matt smith, who works in los angeles, told about his trips to present new projects at community meetings, had some architect friends, and wed the neighbors a picture from the community of some beautiful zero lot line 1930 building with a cafe and a caption saying what you want. Then wed spend the next hour explaining why the requirements make it so unless youre building a taco bell. You need not apply fast food architecture, low slung, compact on huge lots, which you see at the bottom. Right. Thats really the architecture of parking requirements. The american architect, Louis Sullivan said form followed. Parking scholar don said form followed. Parking requirements. Which brings to a third consequence of the postwar parking status quo. Transportation all this required parking is a dish that only makes us for more parking. Parking forces us to drive more. The more we drive, the more parking we crave. In the early days, certainly Parking Facilities arose in response to demand. But later, thwarting the hopes of the planners who decided to require parking in every new building they began to create demand. Research shown that parking growth between 1960 and 1980 was a powerful predictor of car use in the following two decades. More parking appeared to cause more traffic. Not not as planners originally hoped. Vacuum cars off the street. I spoke to a guy in chicago whos the chief staff for an alderman there and he said if your one concern is traffic and your number one demand is parking. Youve got to understand that those are at crosspurposes. He said. He told me there are two things you must never discuss in a community meeting. If you dont want to build. If you dont want to be there all night, anyone have to guess what they are. One of them is, of course, parking. The other one is rats. Parking in rats. Other studies have confirmed this cause and effect relationship between parking and driving. At the level of homes, offices or commercial districts. Its not hard to see why free parking isnt just an incentive. It also degrades the urban environment to the extent that walking, biking, transit, use becomes difficult or dangerous. Buildings that repel other like magnets of the same pool are hard to walk between. Parking minimums are like some mutant of yeast in the city, though inflating and expanding architecture and urbanism with bubbles of asphalt. Fourth, after affordability, architecture and transportation are parking decisions have also. Needless to say, how a terrible effect on the environment. There are the Carbon Emissions from all the driving local particulate pollution. Stormwater flooding during heavy rain because all this impervious surface has sealed over prairie farmland and forest. A lack of groundwater replenishment for the same reason. Parking is a huge contributor to excuse me, a huge contributor to the urban heat island effect. And obviously a hostile environment. Birds and bugs. Present company excepted. So all this mandatory private parking awful consequences for our Housing Affordability, architecture, transportation choices and the environment. But heres the crazy thing. All that private parking didnt even make it that easy to park. One reason parking has had such a determinative effect on our transportation. And is that all that parking is private. It is balkanized between offices and shops and rarely if ever, shared. That means clients must drive from one business to the next or risk getting towed. It means that complimentary parking uses like an office and an Apartment Building or a bank and a restaurant or a school and a theater exist side by one empty, while the other full. And then later at night, vice versa. This balkanization makes parking less efficient and creates the paradoxical, which im sure you are all familiar with. Parking can be both plentiful and. The fact. That all this parking isnt shared helps why there can simultaneously be much parking and so little space park. Water. Water. Everywhere. And not a drop to drink this not just because its shared, but because the best parking is free. Free parking in popular destinations will become scarce. Parking absorbed by residents and employees who all day. Studies estimate about a third of downtown traffic is made up of people looking for parking in just one neighborhood. Can put an extra million miles on the road each year hunting for Parking Spaces, garages no ones first choice are expensive while Street Parking is free. Its backwards. Remember why we decided to mandate all this private parking with parking required . Its because no one wanted to manage the public curb. And this separately has also had enormous effects on the day to day experience of an american street. One of the safest changes for pedestrians city officials can make to streets is to bump out curbs around intersection, removing the parked cars adjacent to the to the crosswalk. This forces drivers make slower and more precise turns and improves their sightlines so they can see from far away if a child is about to cross the street. But most cities dont do this because they dont want to touch Street Parking. Similarly, cities can build lanes for scooters and other to the private automobile. But most cities dont do this because they dont want to touch Street Parking. And so thousands of people are killed each year riding their bikes. Zoom out a little bit more. And this wild west parking has had even more pernicious effect. It has residents to see change growth in their communities, whether in the form of new businesses or new neighbors. As a loss of Parking Spaces, this antisocial tendency is the natural result of prior parking over people. If you view your fellow humans as coming in £2,000 packages, you will naturally a malthusian view of the city. Finally there is the question of public space by consigning so much our most valuable land to one use and one use only the free storage of private automobiles. We have so thoroughly foreclosed the prospect of a rich public life that it can be to even imagine what might been. This the part where i tell you not to despair. It sounds bad. I know. Parking has wrecked our urbanism, our housing typologies, our architects heritage, our environment, our transportation choices. But things are changing for the better. Shortly after i started writing this book, i read an article about a dangerous new respiratory virus going around wuhan, china. I wont tell you what happened next, but in the months that followed, i felt like i had wished the monkeys part. Do know this story where a man granted three wishes that come true in the worst possible way . I chose this topic in part because i had experienced sudden revelation all along the streets of our cities and in a good many public plazas and parks as well. We had consigned a vast amount of public space to the long storage of cars. Sometime ago, in the murky past, we had decided that the best use of this space was for cars to rest and recuperate before their next. In big cities like york and los angeles, where real estate is incredibly expensive. The twin ribbons of asphalt along each curb hold immense value. This is some of the most expensive land the world, and you can have it for, provided you use it for just one thing. I wished for others to share this epiphany. To recognize the tremendous potential of all the land that lay hidden beneath the traces. A thousand parked cars and then the monkeys pot part. In the spring of 2020. City planners and restaurants came to the realization that all that parking that had previously been considered essential to Small Business survival actually wasnt necessary. Seating areas blossomed in parking lots and curb spaces. And for a moment you could begin to imagine what else we might do with all this land. The street is too much a free for all. Anything goes. There are no. Only the stubborn willpower of neighbors fighting it out with deck or baseball bats. Or in a community meeting. Enforcing an unwritten code of conduct at the street is perceived as an open territory ready for american to stake their claims. Though contrary to what this photo shows. This only applies if arrive behind the wheel. The rest of parking. Wh has been required of every home Office Bowling alley nunnery, funeral home, dirty bookshop and so on is the opposite. It is so bound, so finely partitioned and regulated that it is holding us back from better things. When i was living in chicago, i met mark lawrence, whos the founder of the parking app spot hero. You might know this app. It lets you book a parking spot in advance in a downtown lock or garage. When mark started company, he thought, theres not enough parking, but no, its not that theres not enough parking, he realized. Its that theres too much. But you dont know where it is because it is all reserved. This condo or that restaurant or this courthouse. Churches. Huge, huge parking lots tend to be full just once a week are particularly egregious examples of this. Feed the hungry, clothed the needy, but dont the parking Smart Developers have started to challenge this situation sharing parking between offices and homes and thereby lowering and rents for both. Smart cities have tried to do similar. Instead of making each business build its own parking. Santa monica, california has them pay into a public garage which allows which allows visitors to park once and then walk an uninjured, emptied stretch of lively street life. Cincinnati is trying to use its stock of Public Parking lots to build Affordable Housing. A parks many towns and even a few states have now realized that it does not make sense to parking of new homes or new businesses. So what happens when they stop requiring it . When i start up, when i set out to write this book just to americans cities, had repealed their parking minimums. Hartford, connecticut and buffalo new york over the past five years, the reform has caught fire. Cincinnati, for example stopped requiring parking in the urban core in 2008. So was all this parking really built only to comply the law . Or was it simply the result of preference . A nation of drivers manifesting environment that reflects our priorities. With a few experiments under, our belts, we can now say that these laws did force builders to more parking than they would otherwise have built in seattle, for example. Builders mostly did to build parking once they were freed from requirements. No surprise. Its america. Everybody drives. But they built 18,000 fewer Parking Spaces than the old laws would have required. Thats savings of half a billion dollars that could then be passed on in the form of lower construction to tenants and homebuyers in los angeles. Youre looking at a photo, by the way, of Downtown Los Angeles and some of the beautiful old art deco architecture there in los angeles. Builders were given the option to convert old Office Buildings like this turquoise building youre looking at. They were given the option to convert old Office Buildings to apartments and condos without parking. And they used it to create 7000 new Housing Units downtown in one decade. That was more than had been built in the previous three decades in downtown l. A. Combined. One third of those units would not have been if parking had been constructed to the old standard. Many of the new residents did own cars, but they parked them in downtowns many commercial garages, which were mostly empty at night. I had some friends the way who lived in this blue building and it turns out they just parked their car in the garage across the street. No big deal. Just as cities relax their rules about off Street Parking, theyre beginning to recognize that on Street Parking. Could use a few more parking meters, believe it. Or not are making a comeback. San francisco, for example, has repriced its streets with the goal of ensuring that drivers can always find an open space. This has resulted in more expensive Street Parking in certain locations but cheaper Street Parking elsewhere and cheaper garages as less cruising and excuse and less cruising for parking as parking spots open up more quickly. Revenue from parking violations gone down as legal parking spots open up and residents spending much less time looking them. Too often, cities have forgotten the original purpose of the parking meter to manage and this precious zone that connects our streets and our buildings. They have instead parking regulations as a way to make money and not even primarily, by the way, for meters. But from the cycle of fines and tickets that ensue when theres not enough room for everyone to park. Most cities make more money from tickets than they do from meters, and thats backwards. Of course, meters do bring in some money and some cities are using money to fund public improvements, to give out transit passes. Cities are trying out special for delivery trucks, but currently rack up tens of thousands of dollars in illegal parking fines. Truck per year trying to do their job in places like boston or new york. Tens of thousands of dollars. Compare that to the 275 you might pay for a parking meter and suddenly free starts to seem kind of expensive. Like urban fronts in the 1990s the curb is being reassessed as place with lots of potential. Nobody likes paying for parking. I get it. Cities are becoming more and more expensive. There is an egalitarian in cachet to the idea that can drive right to the center of town and leave your car there for free. But if you give something away for you will soon run out of it. And down that road, lies mistakes from which Many American cities are still trying to recover. At the end of the day, free parking. All that equitable, after all. It leads to pollution. Congestion, tickets, traffic crashes and a parking shortage that motivates opposition to new housing and new residents to the outskirts of the city. A free place to park is a lousy consolation prize from a city that doesnt want you to live there. This reassessment parking ownership, liberal liberalizing the private lots and regulating the curb is an opportunity to improve cities in other ways too. What else might we do with the curb . We could create tiny parklets patches of space where older people, teenagers and young parents can sit and chat. We can build bus lanes to stop transit riders from getting stuck traffic or streetcar riders for that matter. We can build bike lanes because no one should die riding a bike. We can plant trees and restore patches. Prairie which will draw in bugs and birds clean and cool the air and soak up stormwater before. It floods peoples basements. This is no fantasy. This spring wrote a story about paris, a city has taken the upheavals of the last three years and flipped its parking policy down. It has stripped away tens of thousands of Parking Spaces and in their place put in place streets for school outside hundreds of schools. Like what . What youre seeing here, some of them include trees for shade lanes, for bicycles or and benches for older people, rest on their morning walk. This rethink is a necessity because. We are in the midst of a once in a century change in parking policy spurred by the arrival of electric vehicles. Parking in the 21st century is going to assume all the functions of a gas station. Building out electric vehicle. Charging whether in a condo parking lot or on a big city curb, is expense ev. It would be crazy. Install this infrastructure for every car in every single parking. But if were going to share, we have to figure out how to share parking. And with shared parking with, a world of parking thats a little less divided between public and private and lot better managed. We would not so much parking. Now you may say that doesnt sound very good. Me. And its true that Many Americans voted with their feet for a house in, the suburbs with a three car garage. But the promise of parking reform is not punishment for drivers or a Mass Movement towards car free households. Its the freedom to leave the car behind once in a while. There is a surprising amount of promise here. The median american owns 2. 2 cars. Thats a lot of cars. But more than half of all trips in big metro areas cities and suburbs are under miles. Thats distance that could be comfortably, could comfortably be covered on an electric bike or in a golf cart or on foot. If we made the streets safe enough for people to feel comfortable doing so, and if we were to take all parking and permit ourselves to do Something Else with it, there would be so many more things. Schools, cafes, gyms. So on parks, within walking distance, the most expensive places to live in this country are time, time again. The very where driving is optional and parking difficult. Historic university. 19th century neighborhoods in philadelphia. Boston. Wicker park in chicago or Highland Park in l. A. In our obsessive drive to, create more parking. We have made it impossible to build more places like these even as they have become the most desirable and neighborhoods in the country without parking. Baked into our streets and architecture. How many more people could live walkable places like these . How many more car dependent freed from parking laws could grow into neighborhoods where people could ride bikes, where a family with three cars could get by with two or a family with two cars, might manage with just one. In that world it would be easier, not harder, to find a spot and much easier to live in a place where you would not need to drive quite so often. Kids could walk to school and adults to the grocery store. In a world with better parking, there might be fewer places to park. But in place of those old parking spots would emerge. A city so much richer and fuller and fairer that we would not think twice about the one we had lost. Thank you very much much. Yeah, for some questions. Yeah. So were going to do questions and raise your hand and ill come over with the microphone. People can hear the question. If you havent. I remember hearing in the first stories when we started seeing about a selfdriving cars back concept effects that might happen in the cities where cars come and go, not stay in the city. Who dropped . Someone off at a location and, then go away from the urban core park outside before or cars could be shared and requiring more traffic, more on the road and less time park and fewer research about that and how would affect parking needs. And it isnt even Real Estate Tax and thats great question when i started working on this book feel like it was peak hype for selfdriving cars and i was very interested in that idea. And the founder of lyft wrote this long blog post about how selfdriving cars would make it possible to reimagine the urban environment. Because, for example, in downtown, you would no longer need any Parking Spaces because cars would just drive in, drop off their owners and drive to some low rent lot out by the airport or something, and parked there all day until it was time to pick up you from your job. And that is obviously an enticing vision because we have some we would have so much land work with. But i think the thing that has happened since is that the promises of selfdriving cars have just consistently failed to, you know, the reality has failed to live up to the promises over and over again. I think elon musk said a tesla drive crosscountry in 2018 and five years later were hearing it hasnt happened yet. So my sense is that its not its quite around the corner as we as we thought it was before. Coming out of this book is terrific in its process. I would like to buy it you can and will sign and ill put my parking stamp on it literal stamp. This is sort of related to the previous question, but maybe a stepping stone is. Im curious what your thoughts are on car sharing. I think it is maybe in your book or somewhere i heard that 1990 5 of a cars life has been parked. So its a huge waste. The use of the car and i just have stayed in touch. Whats going on with zipcar and other companies that have gone into that area . But it seems like its a bridge between waiting for the of selfdriving cars. But more efficient while were on our way. Yeah so those companies showed a lot of promise. There were all these companies were offering car, sharing. And for example, in an urban car, urban you even have a real Public Parking spots that would be reserved for them. And you could take one out for a couple hours and pay ten or 15 bucks. And it was much and cheaper than renting from from hertz or avis or Something Like that. My understanding from speaking with people who worked in that industry is that their business was sort of done in by the billions of dollars that were poured into and lyft. And it got to the point where you could rent a zipcar for 4 hours to, you know, drive out to the outlet mall or Something Like that. But it would cost more than it would cost to just get an uber driver to come and drive you both ways. And obviously that was not an actual comparison of the costs of each of those processes, but there was so much vc money being poured into uber and lyft at that time that they sort of drove some of those Car Sharing Companies out of existence reduced their clientele. Now, one reason for optimism, perhaps, is that car ownership has become extremely expensive of the price. Evs are obviously very pricey and the price of a new vehicle is gone up by Something Like ten or 15 in the last few years, and car payments are auto debt is also a soaring portion of americans household debt. So all of that i think adds up for all that adds up into reasons why car sharing might be possible again. But. But i think the companies that had to go out of ten years ago obviously were no longer in that low Interest Rate environment that permitted them to to do that kind of thing. And so, you know, im not sure. So i just had two questions. First of all, as do follow the not just bikes movement and that do you think moving a wave from bikes and towards the public is probably the way that would be beneficial towards or to most american and you know for here what was the first question do you follow the not just bikes movement not just bikes but no what what is that its i mean its moving away from sort of cars and towards, you know, Public Transportation bikes, those sort of things. They may have a lot of things that youve said throughout your. I and obviously im not familiar with the with with the expression not bikes. But i think generally speaking, i like the idea making it possible for people to get around other ways. I think one of the big challenges here, right, we i talked obviously about how how much parking is has been into the urban environment in a way, has made it really hard for to get away from from driving everywhere. And there are some pretty easy we can make like getting rid these laws that require new parking with every building that will begin to reverse tide. But its not just about land use, its also about street design. And if you do not make it safe for people to get around some other way on the street, then they are going to stop driving and you know, like today i was over in mount lookout. I was actually visiting my the childhood home of my grandmother who grew up in cincinnati and like there so many things about the neighborhood that just feel like theyve gotten a lot right, like theyve got these parking meters down by this little downtown commercial district, which obviously prevents, you know, the people who work in the stores and from parking there all day and taking up the. But then you go on some of streets around there like delta avenue and people are driving 55 miles an hour and theyve got bike lanes on the. But youre two feet away from somebody going by at that speed in a in a in a in a pickup truck. And no ones going to want to take their kids to a Little League game on that street. So i think that, you know, getting rid of the parking requirements is sort of a low hanging fruit. And after that, you have to start making some difficult decisions about how youre going to allocate the space in the street. And politically, obviously, that has proved challenging. I, i joined the slide right here. I joined the of the Community Council in overtherhine to advocate for residential parking. And ive emailed dr. Shoop and hes sent me suggestions for we did get permit parking. Thats helped a lot, but i found that the city that is prioritizing high density specific and adr uses the parking minimum to sort of make this case that if i parking for my son or my aging parents or what are all the needs that we have as residents of cincinnati but like to access all of cincinnati and a car is the best option for it theres this sense that i get that im choosing cars over people by trying to advocate for residents that need parking that dont have the affluence, to have Street Parking built into their property. Im also hearing developers kind of use the parking minimum to justify not building parking at all in Affordable Housing where those families absolutely still need their car. So in my Affordable Housing unit opened up a project that was 56 units and it was brought to the street that has 11 parking spots where all of those were already filled residents. And were now looking at density of an additional 35 units. Still, the same amount of car parking, none of them are providing parking because this argument and i think its great it sounds so beautiful. Its very idealistic. Im wondering if in your research you have found the downside of this where developers are going, no parking, i can park 12 units into this project without parking. Youll figure it out later. The residents are now trying to figure it out and getting so much pushback from people that are simply dismissing us with this of like you monsters. You only think about your car. When were thinking about our kids. Yeah well, i mean, yeah, its obviously there. Were going to have to make some tough choices. And if choice in that case is, you know, its do we want 56 units and no parking or do we want, i dont know, 35 units and 35 Parking Spaces and . I think that for too long we have taken the latter tack and prioritize over units and the situation may not be as severe or in cincinnati as it is in some other cities, you know, like in new york city, for example theres 60,000 People Living literally on the street and so it becomes very hard in those places to that we should build more parking instead of more homes. That said understand obviously at a neighborhood level does create this sort of intractable conflict that that inspires people to oppose new housing at all. And thats worse, obviously, than winding up with with a with a smaller building that includes some Parking Spaces. Now, the idealistic solution is just to tell people, well, its going to get more difficult to park. This is going to become a neighborhood where car ownership is maybe a little less a little less and people own fewer cars in this neighborhood. This neighborhood is going to change its character. And thats one option. Thats the idealistic option and the sort of cynical machiavellian option is you give the current residents ownership over a limited of parking placards that entitle them to like, you know, ownership over curbs basis thats limited. And so anybody else who moves in the after that they come with the car if they want but their options for parking are going to be limited based on the number of available spots. And right now, the status quo in a lot of cities is the issue residential parking permits, but they dont adjust the number to correspond the existing number of spaces on the street. And that obviously creates a lot of conflicts. And so if you were to just cap it and you were to say, okay, this belongs to you and its a tradable asset, then all of a sudden you have an incentive for more people to move into the neighborhood because you have something thats to become more and more valuable, which a license to park on the street. I didnt come over you and i can well enough i like to provide something uplifting but we moved last year after 46 years of pasadena, calif. Yeah, we love the eastern building building and we now come to Fountain Square and the Mercantile Library on south bank shuttle. It puts us up right outside . Our building drops us off right outside graders and we go. And thats something that few people use. But it is terrific. So if you live in newport or covington just cant take it the bloody thing yeah. Just like a question do we have a parking or do we have to drive . Which it feels to me sometimes we have a driving problem more like i. I love that my kids who are in their young twenties are saying i dont want a car for like i want a car when i have kids of my own. Like, are you seeing change in terms of people driving . I am skeptical. The idea that millennials or, gen z, are not going to car drivers just like their parents were, just because theres some innate generational difference there. I think lots i dont think that the american urban environment is a result of actual preferences. Its very hard to see the environment weve got is the environment weve because there is so much law and subsidy that is interfering and encouraging us to create more low density places. That has been the case four decades, starting with maybe the construction of the interstate highway system. Home mortgage interest deduction. On and on and on. Right. So. So. I think that know one of the things that shows me that theres a preference for, perhaps some more urban living is just that the price of living in cities is so high. And that is that has dissuaded a lot of people and thats and thats thats a real shame. And i think with respect to driving parking like i dont know if this is the case for the fellow who was just telling about taking the shuttle. But there are lots of ways you can try to dissuade people driving. You can put a higher tax on gasoline for example, you could you could put in tolls, the bridges or Something Like that. But but the often the easiest way just to charge for parking. I mean it is we just know that this is how works if you make people pay for parking, they will really test their transportation and decisions. And so its i sort of agree that the is probably as much as it is parking but parking happens to be the lever we have to control driving and its very accessible, its pretty flexible. And so if you put in a bunch of parking meters and a little downtown Commercial Area and people stop coming there and parking on the street will just lower the price, i mean, you screwed up. Its okay. You can change it. And and thats not true of, you know, maybe like shutting down a highway or Something Like that. And i think thats one of the things thats appealing about the parking Reform Movement is like its about tinkering, right . And thats what they did in san francisco, they raised the price here lower the price. You see how people react and and so so theres theres a theres lot of opportunity there to shape the way drive just just through parking. And although do you know about our three cdc good this is our privatized urban Planning Department its been very successful in gentrifying this whole area, rehabbing places, nice parking spots and stuff. They get a lot of their revenue, parking garages that seems like a conflict interest. We need to be getting rid, but they make a lot of money often for the developers. I mean, i guess it seems like. Yeah. So you can it seems like a conflict of interest because you think that we ought to be they going to construct more parking garages and encourage more people to drive because they make money from it . Actually i think that in a lot of cities the status is permanent conflict of interest because of something i mentioned during my which is that cities make a lot of money from illegal parking citations, almost all of them make more money from illegal parking citations than they do for meters. And this is this is a big component. The department of justices report on ferguson and revenue driven policing there, which is that basically these parking tickets trap people in cycles of debt and fines and it this terrible situation and i think so i basically agree with you that its bad for cities to think about parking as a cash cow they should think about it as a way to organize street space but. That said, if people are willing to pay that much to parking garages, then i think its basically okay. Think thats probably where they should be parking. And if that money goes back into city and creates neighborhoods of people want to invest in and spend time in, then to me thats thats a pretty good source of revenue for that that. So thats a question. And you have a talk too much about public transport station as an alternative. People should be driving all that much. I mean i think one of the ideas of redeveloping a downtown area with fewer Parking Spaces is that people will stay closer to home and if they have to leave, theyll take Public Transportation to leave. But if theyre going to be in a urban environment, they have all their needs met within urban environment. So they dont really need the car. Well, obviously Public Transportation is a big part of the solution. If people are going to be going completely car free and theyre going to depend on it. Right. But i mean and so and again, like a lot of the problems with creating an efficient and workable Public Transportation comes from the fact that parking is free and so theres very little incentive to pay money to use transit and also that it takes up so much space that it prevents us from for converting lanes of traffic for bus Rapid Transit that would allow transit riders to get where theyre going more quickly. But i think the reason that i dont dwell on it so much is, that i think that the real low hanging fruit here is really about those neighborhood trips right. Those are trips that people make in cars. Now but that they dont need to make cars in the future. And so i think it goes without saying, a more efficient and robust Public Transit network will help people get there and reduce car ownership from 2. 2 cars per household to 1. 7. But even that would be a seismic change in the american environment, in our economy and the way we store our cars and all that stuff. But again, i think that, you know, to me, the easiest is really those neighborhood trips. Its those short and that that simply some someplace where Public Transit should be rolled out. I think since the pandemic, weve seen a reassessment of how people think about Public Transit for decades its been organized around getting people downtown because Downtown Business interests didnt want to be choked off by traffic. They were the ones who supported new initiatives, new investments and so on. And i think Public Transit agencies are recognizing that if theyre going to survive in an era where fewer people come downtown, theyre going to need to focus less on serving downtown offices and, more on helping people live car free lives. And i think some of them are to that realization. And i hope they figure it out before they all go bankrupt. Washington journal continues. Host welcome back. Franklin foer, the author of the book called the last politician inside Joe Bidens White house and struggle for americas future. it is about the first two years of the biden presidency. Tell us p