The cost of parking

As a parent and a pastor of a multigenerational church, I know that when teenagers approach their chores (in the church, we call this volunteering) they do so with this simple question in mind: What is the least I can do, yet still have an impact? This is a question Henry Grabar asks repeatedly in Paved Paradise, and the answer is always parking.

Parking reform is the place where you can do the least amount of work and still make significant changes. Grabar writes, “If you want lower emissions and fewer car accidents, parking is the place to start. It’s not the only way to get fewer people to drive. But because every trip ends with a parking space, it’s the easiest.” As it turns out, if you want to work for justice in nearly any realm, from the environment to the economy, you should start with parking.

Parking is ubiquitous, but no one really knows how much parking there is in America. Counterintuitively, Des Moines, Iowa, has as many parking spots as Seattle. In New York City, nobody is quite certain how many street-level parking spots the city owns: numbers vary from somewhere between 1 million and 3 million spots. Since there is no real hard data on the number of parking spots, cities do not know how to adequately price them. In 2008, the City of Chicago leased its parking meters to Morgan Stanley for 75 years for more than $1 billion—only to discover later that they had underestimated the value of the parking by at least half.