Why You Can’t Find a Damn Parking Spot

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The other day, I did something foolish.

I drove into Manhattan.

It was foolish because then I needed to find a place to park.

Oh, I think I see a spot.

It's right there.

It's...

Oh, it's sorry.

It's a hydrant.

Someone was just blocking the hydrant.

So, okay.

If you drive, you know the feeling of looking for a spot and not being able to find one.

Okay, no, we're finding a parking space.

Okay, then we can go to the museum, but we have to find a parking space first, okay?

You know that frustrating, powerless sensation that your one precious life is slipping through your hands because instead of living it, you are stuck in your goddamn car looking for a parking space.

Oh, look, this person looks like they're...

Let me roll down their word.

Let's see.

Here, here.

Hello?

Can you...

Are you?

Are you leaving?

No?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, here's like this person's leaving.

Do you think we can get it?

You think we can get it?

Ah, no, this guy just got it first.

All right, all right, all right, all right.

It's horrible.

And no one knows that better than my colleague, Henry Grabar.

Many Americans say finding a good parking space is the difference between a good day and a bad day.

Henry's the author of the new book, Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World.

Okay, everyone knows a lot about parking.

Everyone's an expert because we've all done it our entire lives.

But I have spent a lot of time thinking about it recently.

It's something that we all do and that everyone hates, according to one survey, even more than going to the dentist.

Parking's a big mess, and doing it sometimes lasts 15 minutes and lands you six blocks from the museum.

But I've come to see that it's one we've got ourselves into and one we can get ourselves out of.

So you mean we should build more parking spaces?

Absolutely not.

Because trust me, if America has enough of anything already, it's parking.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

And I'm Henry Gravar.

Parking is one of the great paradoxes of American life.

On the one hand, we have paved paved an ungodly amount of land to park our cars.

On the other, it seems like it's never enough.

I've spent the last few years investigating how our pathological need for car storage determines the look, feel, and function of the places we live.

It turns out our quest for parking has made some of our biggest problems worse.

In this episode, we're going to hunt for parking from the mean streets of Brooklyn to the sandy lots of Florida.

We'll explore how parking has quietly damaged the American landscape and see what might fix it.

So, today on Dakota Ring, if there's so much parking, then why is it so damn hard to find a spot?

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Hey, Willa, you leaving that spot?

I am.

Show's all yours, Henry.

Great.

So, I'm glad Willa kept her cool.

People fight over parking spaces.

People get killed over parking spaces.

New York City recorded its first homicide of the year.

Police say a 63-year-old man was stabbed to death in the Bronx over an argument about a parking spot.

It is hard to imagine a more senseless way to go over a square of asphalt that was only going to be yours until the next time you got in your car.

And it's particularly obscene when you realize that there really is enough parking.

There might even be too much.

Estimates of how many parking spaces there are per car range from four to nine in the United States.

Rachel Weinberger is a parking researcher, and the numbers she just cited add up to between one and two billion parking spaces in America.

enough to pave the entire state of Massachusetts.

Here's how you get to that total.

For every car, there's at least a space at the office, a space at the mall, and a space at home.

In fact, your typical American home with a two-car garage probably has another parking space in the driveway and a couple more on the curb.

Say if there's four parking spaces per car, that means 75% of the parking supply is unused at any given time.

And that's assuming everybody's parked.

Now put some cars in motion, and it's more like 80, 85, 90% of the parking spaces that we have are just empty, waiting for somebody to come along and park in them.

When Rachel talks about parking being 80% empty, she's talking about our national parking stock, which frankly includes a lot of places no one wants to park.

Miles and miles of curbs in the exurbs or the lot at the football stadium on a Tuesday.

So what about the good parking?

Well, Rachel reviewed some pretty good parking too, Main Street parking.

And she found that parking was oversupplied even there?

by 60%.

Even at the highest demand on a normal day, in a normal week, parking is oversupplied to the point where there's two parking spaces for every car that wants to park.

Even in places that believe they have parking shortages, Rachel found there were 45 percent more spaces than necessary at the busiest time of the week.

And even in a super dense place like New York City, there are about two parking spots per vehicle.

Though there are certain neighborhoods where it's difficult to park, as Rachel well knows.

Now, I live in Brooklyn and parking is a little bit unbearable.

And I'll confess that when I'm done talking to you, I'm going to run outside and I'm going to move my car because they're going to clean the street and my car's in the way right now.

Park slope?

More like can't park slope.

Rachel's complicated parking routine in a city with twice as many spots as cars captures something important about all the statistics that she just reeled off.

They are totally counterintuitive.

They're accurate.

but they do not feel like it.

It's in part because our standards are so high.

We expect parking to be extremely convenient, immediately available, and free.

We don't hold just about any other good or service to those standards.

But when we don't get rock star parking, we get frustrated.

And so parking feels fraught, stressful.

It's the kind of thing you see guys fighting about on the local news.

Witnesses say the two parties were fighting over a parking spot.

One man armed with a baseball bat starts swinging at the Audi driver.

That driver, by the way, he crashed the Audi into a bakery trying to run the other guy over.

To understand why parking can be so abundant and hard to find at the same time, we've got to go back to the beginning of America's love affair with the car.

Henry Ford rolled out the Model T in 1908, promising his new car would give Americans new freedom of movement.

A little more than a decade later, you could barely drive downtown.

In Los Angeles, double and triple triple parked cars brought traffic to a halt.

The problem was so bad, the city banned all on-street parking for all of three weeks.

Angelenos went nuts, and then they got their downtown parking back.

This would set the tone for the decades to come.

The solution to any parking problem was just to provide more parking.

This was easy enough to do in the suburbs, where there was lots of space.

But as city people began moving to those very suburbs, city merchants were desperate to keep up.

What rings up store sales today is parking space.

It's as important to volume as shelf space and display windows.

Best investment a town can make.

Lots of parking.

They got public officials on board.

Here's New York master planner Robert Moses, who built the city's highways.

I see no reason why we shouldn't have adequate off-street parking facilities, even if they're expensive.

There were critics of this this strategy right from the start, like Ray Rubinow, a philanthropist who had bested Moses by closing the road through Washington Square Park.

Every time capacity is built for cars, more cars are attracted.

There's a new school of thought which says, let's not encourage cars to come into metropolitan areas any more than they must.

To which Moses responded, nonsense, it's just nonsense.

And Moses got his way.

Cities adopted suburban standards for driving and parking.

They built wider, faster streets and tore down neighborhoods for highways.

They let mass transit service fall apart and built lots and garages that could emulate malls with their acres of free parking that never fill up.

They also required that every new building come with its own parking spots.

Planners put a little table in every city code.

One space for every pool table at the pool hall, one for every 100 square feet of restaurant, at least one for every home.

Where would all this parking go?

Well, that was the easy part: where the buildings had been.

From now on, we shall be seeing much demolition.

The first step in making our cities better places to work, better places to live.

In the 1950s and 60s, raising buildings to make way for cars made sense to most people.

Cities were dense, dirty, and clearly in decline.

And cars were the future.

The revival of the city always seemed to be be just one parking lot away.

But by the 1970s, it was clear there could be such a thing as too much parking.

Some cities had built so much space to store cars that there wasn't much left to drive to.

Even cities that didn't go this far were frustrated.

All the new parking they built, it didn't even solve the parking problem.

For one thing, all this parking is divided between different businesses, homes, and offices.

You can't park in the church parking lot or someone else's condo garage, and you can't pull into one store's lot and run errands in the neighborhood.

One motorist found this out the hard way on AE's reality show Parking Wars when she crossed the street to the pharmacy after visiting the video store.

I was in blockbuster.

No, you weren't.

Yes, I was.

I went across the street and I came back, and and now you take a moment.

With parking divided between these different fiefdoms, it can feel scarce, even when it's not.

The woman in the show, her car is already chained up on the tow truck.

There's a more fundamental problem, too.

I'm going to tell you a secret about parking.

Well, if you build it, they will come.

This is demonstrably more true of parking than it is of a baseball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield.

Like freeways or free beer, if you make more parking and you give it away for nothing, people will use more of it.

They'll buy more cars if they have parking at home.

They'll drive to work more if they have parking at the office.

They'll drive because it's easier, because it's hard to use transit, bike, or walk when all the buildings are separated by parking lots.

And once they're driving, they'll be looking for parking everywhere they go.

Which is why a quirky bicycle riding professor concluded, maybe we should try something other than building more parking.

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Tell me a little bit about how you got into parking.

It's not an obvious subject.

I backed him.

Oh,

Like almost everything.

Don Shoup is a planning professor at UCLA.

Trained as an economist, he became the pioneer of parking research, a star in the world of parking.

I wrote my dissertation on the land market, and it didn't take me long to realize that parking is the single biggest use of land in the United States.

Don is 84, but he has a childlike enthusiasm for pretty much anything related to parking.

It tempers the dryness of the subject.

Here we go.

Oh, they have garages at the back.

Isn't that amazing?

I sat down with Don at a recent conference in Seaside, Florida, organized to celebrate his life's work.

His 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, makes the case that better parking can be the key to many of the things we say we want from our communities.

walkable neighborhoods, attractive architecture, affordable housing.

Don's book has been translated into Russian and Persian, and he has a Facebook group of thousands of fans online, the Shupistas.

None of them think parking is a dry subject.

There's more footprint of land than there is for housing or industry or offices or anything like that.

And it's almost all free to the user.

So

the question is, well, who pays for parking and how?

And that was a real intellectual puzzle.

One of Don's great insights was just how many miles drivers drive looking for coveted street parking when it's free.

He and his students counted how long it took cars to find a spot in a commercial district next to the UCLA campus.

We found that it took on an average of three minutes to find a curved parking space, which isn't much.

But when you add it all up for all the cars, given the turnover, it was 3,600 miles a day, which is more than the distance across the United States in a 15-block commercial district.

It's very easy to see how it's happening everywhere.

Studies estimate that a full third of downtown traffic is made up of drivers looking for parking.

Anyone can see this as a problem, but the typical solution had always been just build more of it.

Another way to put this is that people tend to think about parking as a problem you can address through supply.

like Willa at the top of this episode, or Robert Moses asking for more Manhattan garages, or the American towns that Rachel Weinberger studied.

But increasing the supply hasn't solved the parking problem.

Don, being an economist, was able to see this very clearly.

He could tell the supply was through the roof.

Minimum parking requirements have forced up the supply so much that nothing can be built that doesn't have free, convenient, available parking.

He also understood that supply doesn't just respond to demand.

It can drive demand.

It wasn't as though planners were trying to help increase the demand for cars and fuel.

That wasn't their goal, but that was the effect.

So Don thought, what if instead of focusing on supply, we looked at the other half of the equation?

What if we paid attention to demand and how to control it?

This idea is something we apply in lots of contexts.

Restaurants take reservations instead of seating every single person who shows up at 8 p.m.

on a Saturday night.

Taylor Swift concerts aren't open to an infinite audience.

The Olympic Games does a lottery for tickets, instead of making the stadiums all big enough to seat everyone who wants to go.

One idea to manage how much parking you need is really simple.

Share the parking between different buildings that need it at different times.

You won't need as much, and drivers can park once and be on their way.

And the Parking Wars camera crew will be out of business.

There's another, more radical idea about how to control demand, one that's been kicking around since the 1930s.

That's right, the humble parking meter.

It was invented by an Oklahoma City newspaper editor in 1935 after he observed that the best parking spots were always taken by commuters, workers who arrived early and parked all day.

His new parkometers started to direct how people parked.

Employees began parking further away, leaving the good spots, the paid spots, for deliveries, shoppers, diners, and other clients.

The parking meter sorted drivers by how long they needed to park, not just in Oklahoma City, but in every city.

Even the original TV Batman approved.

Paul, better put five cents in the meter.

No policeman's going to give the Batmobile a ticket.

No matter, Robin.

This money goes toward building better roads.

We all must do our part.

Good citizenship, you know.

But in the race to make cities more like the suburbs with all their free and ample parking, meters fell out of favor.

Cities wanted more supply.

The poor little parking meter is not by itself a solution to automobile problems.

They were ripped out, made to charge so little they might as well be free, and generally neglected, ignored as a potential tool to help solve the parking problem.

That is, until Don Shoup took a good hard look at the lowly meter and saw how effectively it could manage demand for parking.

If you set the price right, you could make sure there was always a spot or two available.

The short-term parkers will come to the most valuable, the most convenient spaces.

So they will come and they'll buy something and they'll leave.

Don keeps a parking meter in his office.

People are going to park for a long time.

They're the ones who will go to the remote lot because they'll save a lot of money.

Don knows that free and easy parking has come to feel like an inalienable right, something that everyone expects.

He likes to say that parking can turn staunch conservatives into ardent communists.

That's how much we want it to be free.

He likes to quote from this old Seinfeld episode where Elaine and George are hunting for a spot.

It's like going to a prostitute.

Why should I pay when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?

I get why people hate paying for parking.

Hunting for free parking is a pain in the butt, but it's a level playing field.

Paying for it feels like one more demand-driven pricing system in a world that's increasingly full of them.

Like paying for the best seat in a movie theater or paying to get on a plane first.

As urban real estate prices make cities feel more and more exclusive, having a free parking spot feels downright egalitarian.

Anything less?

Michael Scott from the office speaks for us all.

But it's only fair in the most superficial sense.

There's nothing fair about all the toxic emissions from people cruising for parking.

There's nothing fair about all those people then getting tickets because there's nowhere to park.

There's nothing fair about all the buses that run slowly because of the double-parked cars or the kids on bikes forced into traffic because there's someone parked in the bike lane.

If you began charging for parking, one empty space on every block is what you're aiming for, you'd eliminate all the traffic congestion caused by the cruising, all the air pollution caused by the cruising, all the carbon emissions caused by the cruising.

And as Don says, if you don't make people pay for parking, you go down the path of American cities at mid-century when all the effort to make more parking didn't solve the parking problem.

Because businesses built parking only their customers could use.

Because the government spent millions on garages but left the curb free.

Because making more parking just encouraged more people to drive.

And when you show up looking for a space where you want it, when you want it, you can't find it.

What would it look like to build something different?

After the break, One Town decided to find out.

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That's Jim Carrey in the 1998 blockbuster, The Truman Show.

In the movie, Jim Carrey's idyllic existence comes to a screeching halt when he realizes his life is being staged.

The movie was filmed in the postcard-perfect American town of Seaside, Florida, a well-known experiment in rejecting the architecture of sprawl.

That's why the celebration of Don Shoup's life and work took place there this past March.

Ladies and gentlemen, Don Shoup.

Seaside was founded in 1981, right as the downsides of suburbanization and urban renewal were coming into high relief.

What if the best investment a town could make wasn't lots of parking, but the town itself?

Seaside is certainly handsome.

The houses are on small lots.

They have big front porches that run right up to the road.

There are no front walls or hedges.

Streets are narrow and paved with brick, and people get around on foot or by bike.

They have to spend a couple of days, and then it dawns on them

that the kids love it.

The experience of walkability has to be lived.

It can't be talked about.

That's Andre Stuani.

He and his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zeiberg, were the town planners.

And when it came to parking, they built Seaside differently.

Instead of creating more parking supply, they designed a place with less parking demand.

There are no huge asphalt parking lots at the center of town.

There are almost no garages or curb cuts or concrete driveway aprons because people parallel park in front of their houses.

And almost no one, not the homeowners, not the businesses, has a parking spot that is exclusively theirs.

This is twice as efficient.

When parking is fungible, it's incredibly efficient because nothing's ever ended.

What do you mean when you say fungible?

Fungible means that it's not assigned to a single use.

Parking assigned to a use is very inefficient.

When they say, oh, this is only for the dentist, this is only for the bank.

That's useless.

The parking used by the ice cream shop during the day can be used by the bar at night.

The result of all this people-friendly planning was that Seaside residents did not drive that much.

When Dwani's firm planned the next town down the coast, Rosemary, they sent an intern to survey Seaside.

We said, find out how many trips a week they take.

How often they get in the car.

And it was actually

seven times a week.

Your typical suburban house, by the way, is associated with that many trips per day.

Seaside had solved parking.

The design of the town, a style that became known as new urbanism, seemed to tamp down driving demand by offering something residents wanted.

A place where you could have a car, but you weren't bound to it.

But then something unexpected happened.

As it turns out, residents weren't the only ones who liked Seaside's people-friendly design.

Limited parking at the popular destination has been a source of annoyance for many years.

It attracted visitors from other towns too.

Thousands of people were coming to visit Seaside to go to the beach, walk the streets, eat and drink downtown.

But first, they had to park.

Can I ask you how long it took?

Uh

15 minutes.

15 minutes.

Three laps.

Yeah, three left.

And they couldn't find a a spot.

What was your strategy?

Just keep driving around.

Looking for backup lights.

You don't need a college degree for that.

It's hard to miss the irony.

Seaside was supposed to be a place where people could forget their car and get around on foot.

And precisely because of that, it's become so popular that it now has a serious parking problem.

I asked a Seaside employee how to find a good spot.

What time do you have to get here in the morning to get one of those spots?

You can get any of those spots at 445.

That's 4.45 a.m.

Seaside officials hoping to build a walkable town in their quiet corner of the Florida Panhandle did not see this coming.

Micah Davis, head of the Seaside Development Corporation.

It was designed

to be an example of how things could be done differently.

And then like everyone would follow suit and then you just have like thousands of communities like this.

this so he knows things didn't turn out that way

and now micah thinks about parking all the time crammed if you're not managing it it's just crammed with cars like the circling you thought before that you saw was bad it's like it's literally just a line of parked cars slowly moving down the street

seaside needed a solution so they turned to don shoup himself the biggest help was that Donald Shoup had written the high cost of free parking.

Robert Davis, Micah's father, is the founder of Seaside.

A couple years ago, the Davises put SHUOPS principles into practice.

They made visitors pay for parking.

Starting every March, Seaside charges a variable fee to park your car depending on how full the lot is.

Too much money?

You can still park for free, just a little further away.

The money from the parking fees pays for a shuttle to the employee parking lot, public bathrooms, trash pickup, and planting more trees.

I was just there in February before the meters went on.

So I got a taste of what it used to be like all the time.

And the paid parking works better than that.

The Davises say it's a smoother parking experience for everyone, one that sorts visitors by how long they're staying and provides an incentive for families to carpool instead of each teenager taking their own car.

And after putting all this stuff into place, Seaside has been able to do the one thing that has always seemed impossible when it comes to parking.

Getting rid of it.

Because Seaside tamped down parking demand, the town was actually able to reduce its parking supply.

A block away from the paid parking area is Seaside Central Square.

It's a half moon plaza.

Here are the town's civic buildings.

The post office, the bookstore, the ice cream shop.

At the center, there's a lawn where kids play soccer, joined to the stores by a brick promenade.

This promenade was also, until recently, doing double duty as a parking lot with cruising cars circling round and round.

This plaza was one of the least favored spaces I ever designed because it was so full of cars.

But during COVID, it emptied out.

For the first time, the Davises could see how nice it was as a space for people.

It was beautiful.

It was like snow white.

Right, is that the what?

Cinderella?

This was the Cinderella of spaces.

So with the cars temporarily gone, the Davises thought, the glass slipper fits.

What if we make this a permanent plaza?

They closed the square to traffic.

And it worked great.

You'd have no idea it used to be a parking lot.

The merchants like it.

Their sales went up.

Even teenagers approved it.

It's way better like this.

It's like way more relaxed because more people can walk around.

And it's not like, it's more safe.

Yeah.

I prefer it like this because a lot more people, like, you just see a lot more people outside of their cars.

This new square was possible because the rest of the Primo parking supply was shared between the different businesses and finally priced.

Seaside founder Robert Davis credits Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, with giving them the confidence to go from parking lot to plaza.

We've been studying it so that when we

eliminated about a third of our parking inventory.

We weren't panicked.

Don himself is pretty impressed.

In the four years, they've compressed the whole history of parking.

Don Shoup knows people hate paying for parking, but they love what it makes possible.

The feeling everyone came to Seaside for in the first place.

That ineffable sense of parkinglessness.

Or at least a sense that you've arrived someplace built more for humans than for cars.

I think that a lot of the world could look like this.

All you have to do is pay the meter.

Building a great city is hard.

Getting the parking right, not so hard, Don says.

I'm an optimist because I think if we get things right with parking, and especially with moving cars as well, the world will be so much better.

And I think that the parking is the easy thing to change.

Well, you know that.

In the classic 1961 fantasy novel The Phantom Toll Booth, the main character Milo takes a trip to a city called Digitopolis.

It's ruled by the mathemagician, who serves our young traveler a steaming cauldron of subtraction stew.

Milo eats nine bowls, and when he's done, he feels hungrier than before.

This is the dark magic of subtraction stew.

It's also the magic of parking.

The more you build, the more ultimately you need.

Until at a certain point, you build so much parking, there isn't anything else left.

Which reminds us, it wasn't parking we wanted in the first place.

What we want are all the things we do after parking.

And so if the question we're asking is, how do we make it easier to park, we're missing the forest for the trees, the garage for the stalls.

The real question is a bigger one.

How do we make it easier to get to the places we want to be?

How do we build places where you can leave the car behind like you can in Seaside?

Not make it easier to find parking, but make it so you never have to look in the first place.

Oh, come on, George, please put it in a garage.

I don't want to spend an hour looking for a space.

No one does.

And if you get the parking right, you won't have to.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm Henry Grabar.

And I'm Willa Paskin.

You should all please go buy Henry's great book, Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World.

It is smart and insightful, and it will change how you think about parking forever.

Please go get it.

This episode was written by Henry Grabar.

It was edited by me, Willa Paskin.

I produced Decoderang with Katie Shepard.

We got extra production help from Patrick Fort and editing help from Joel Meyer.

Derek John is Slate's executive producer of narrative podcasts, and Merrick Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

Thank you to Jane Wilberting, Rachel Weinberger, Donald Schoup, Andre Stuani, Robert Davis, Micah Davis, Christy Milliken, Fletch Isaacs, Victor Ben-Hamou, and Nina Pereja.

You can find me on Twitter at Willip Haskin, and if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Even better, tell your friends.

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So please go to slate.com/slash decoder plus to join Slate Plus today.

We'll see you next week.

You're juggling a lot.

Full-time job, side hustle, maybe a family.

And now you're thinking about grad school?

That's not crazy.

That's ambitious.

At American Public University, we respect the hustle and we're built for it.

Our flexible online master's programs are made for real life because big dreams deserve a real path.

Learn more about APU's 40-plus career-relevant master's degrees and certificates at apu.apus.edu.

APU, built for the hustle.