Parking problems pleasingly parsed

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This article was published 30/06/2023 (1162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg drivers like to think that finding a space to park our cars is our civic, if not human, right.

American journalist Henry Grabar’s new book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, will disabuse us of the notion we are in any way special.

According to Grabar, the unrealistic expectation of convenient, immediately available and free parking is held by every North American with a driver’s licence. “It would be unimaginable to hold any other good or service to the same standard,” writes Grabar, who covers urban policy issues for Slate.

“Once, I missed an entire summer afternoon at the beach because I refused to pay for parking, and while I hunted, my passengers (wisely) left on the island ferry without me.”

In his snappily written and well-researched tome, Grabar surveys wrong-headed urban decisions made over many decades. These have turned downtowns into traffic-clogged disasters and suburbs into grey expanses of strip malls surrounded by seas of empty asphalt and concrete.

The book’s main virtues are Grabar’s grasp of the subject matter and his impressive writing ability. Policy-wonk books are seldom so fluent and entertaining.

A big downside, at least for Canadian readers, is Grabar’s American focus. In his hundreds of anecdotes, profiles and examples, he seldom strays from the contiguous 48 states.

He gives us a single mention, in a paragraph about per-capita car ownership. Canada, he reports, has about 655 cars per 1,000 population, compared to 600 per 1,000 in Western Europe and 800 in the U.S. C’est tout for Canuck content. Well, except for his title, grabbed from the lyric of Joni Mitchell’s song Big Yellow Taxi: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

Grabar acknowledges his research leans heavily on the work of progressive urban thinkers who have, uh, paved the way for him. Chief among them is California-based economist Donald Shoup, best-known for his 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking.

The big evil for Shoup is “parking minimums,” municipal bylaws that command property developers to include unrealistically high numbers of parking spots in their plans for both commercial and residential buildings.

These rules put construction costs out of reach and result in non-drivers in, for instance, apartment blocks, absorbing in their rent the cost of other tenants’ parking spots.

Another common mistake is improper pricing of downtown street parking. If it’s too low, downtown workers will snap up the spots by 9 a.m., leaving only high-priced lots for everyone else.

Most parking-policy errors made in the U.S. have been imported to Canada, but it would be useful to know if and how our regulatory framework differs.

Shoup, by the way, presented his ideas in Winnipeg in 2019 in a workshop sponsored by the Downtown BIZ and the Green Action Centre.

The book contains much else of interest. Included is a portrait of the inventor of the shopping mall, the Holocaust refugee Victor Gruen, an amusing chapter detailing how parking lots attract fraudsters, and another filled with eye-opening stats about the over-availability of parking spots in U.S. cities. “By square footage,” Grabar writes, “there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is for each person.”

Kudos in particular to the publisher for illustrating the text with nifty line drawings, by Alfred Twu, instead of predictable photos.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press writer and editor.