Comprehensive anti-parking screed: Americans in particular have insisted that parking be payment-free, steps from their ultimate destination, and always available. But only two out of the three are achievable at any one time, and the result has been a country optimized for cars instead of humans, high housing prices, traffic congestion, and much worse. “[M]ore than half of baby boomers, a group that tends to dominate local politics, said free parking was more important than affordable housing in their neighborhood.”

A great aside on parking & organized crime explains that parking is perfect for money laundering because it’s a cash business and nobody can really keep track of how many cars parked that day, especially since most parking is unused most of the time. (As a cash business, parking lots are also good to rob, for writers looking for that kind of thing. And they still make a lot of money because, given parking habits, parking garages tend to have a monopoly or oligopoly, especially at places like college campuses.)

About that utilization: Even neighborhoods where people think you can’t ever find a parking space are almost never fully utilized, and their fullness is for only short periods. By some estimates, there are six parking spaces per car! But parking-centric design means you’ll still feel frustrated much of the time.

His solutions include zoning that allows parking-free construction or at least much lower parking minimums, although the neighbors scream bloody murder about it; this allows cheaper housing and also turns out to encourage people not to own cars. “If the Empire State Building had been built to the minimum parking requirements of a contemporary American city, for example, its surface parking lot would cover twelve whole blocks.” He also wants dedicated off-street parking, to reclaim the streets for non-drivers and accustom people to parking a block or two away from their destination rather than holding out for the holy grail of a spot right in front of where they want to be. And of course more urbanist design more generally: “One reason that Americans retain such nostalgia for college is that it was the only time in our lives so much was within walking distance.”

Why is America the worst? Because we see parking as a frontier that opens up anew every day, so, among other things, like other American pioneers, we feel free to disregard the actual rules. Icky: “Drivers take 21 percent longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting.” And our utility calculations are off regardless: people mostly like to search for the closest spot, underestimating the time that makes them spend driving around in circles and overestimating how much they’ll walk. (Of course, if you’re walking through a parking lot, it’s a much less pleasant walk than if you’re walking past houses or storefronts.) Parking violations are also infuriatingly arbitrary and offer opportunities for both abuse and corruption.

Speaking of which, Grabar tells a sad story of Chicago’s sale of its parking meters to private profiteers who then charged them for every street festival that shut down parking for a day. The city made much less than the sale was worth, of course, to fill one budget hole, and then its contract prevented it from improving things for drivers. “Parking ticket fines had to be at least ten times meter rates, and unpaid tickets had to be sent to a collection agency.” The new owner charged the city $73 million for issuing too many disabled parking placards—as much in one neighborhood as it had generated previously from all the parking meters in the city. Rahm Emanuel sold it as a political success when he decreased the amount the city was paying, but it was supposed to be getting paid!

On the plus side, Morgan Stanley raised prices so much that driving decreased, average space utilization went down to 25%, and transit and bikeshare improved. Grabar likes that and wants on-street parking to be more expensive if it is to exist at all, though he might let delivery trucks and similar vehicles get an exception. But it’s not great that Morgan Stanley made back its billion dollars with 64 years of receipts left to come.

Here, have some statistics: “If it takes three minutes to find a parking spot on a block, that block is generating sixty thousand extra driving miles each year.” But if you make on-street parking really expensive and garage parking less expensive, people circle less and violate fewer parking regulations, as San Francisco found.

Also some advice: don’t say “parking requirements” or “minimums.” That’s value-neutral at best, or implicitly conveys a need. Instead, try “costly parking mandates.” Existing minimums are both random (varying hugely by city) and incredibly overgenerous. DC required Target to build a 1000-car garage, less than the 1700 required by then-extant regulations; it was never half full and Target has now built a store in nearby Rosslyn with zero parking.

But this is politically hard, often impossible. Grabar suggests that free parking seems like the only thing many people can have, given the cost of housing (to which parking’s contribution is invisible). “Free parking near campus looks good for students who can’t imagine living close enough to walk. Easy parking in wealthy neighborhoods is a lifeline for workers who will never be allowed to live nearby. And acres of parking downtown feels like a right to commuters and shoppers when the bus comes only once an hour. In each case, parking stands for a primitive kind of access that both overshadows and impedes a more profound and widely held right to the city.” ( )

Grabar's book is a fascinating examination of the many ways parking rules our lives. With entertaining anecdotes, backed up by recent data (and copious back matter at the end of the book) the author makes a powerful case for the need to modify our thinking and planning about parking. He avoids being overly evangelical by his conversational narrative style and sense of humor, but it's impossible not to be changed by his presentation about the absurdity of the dominance of the automobile and parking on our lives, especially in towns and cities. The sociological, emotional, and financial repercussions are catching up with us. As someone who rarely reads nonfiction for enjoyment, I found this book to be a fun read, and plan to give several copies as gifts. ( )