Michael Moynihan: Maps may help you get there — but with parking, you’re on your own

"Do you take off in a plane not knowing if there’ll be an airport for it at the other end?"

Thu, 15 Jun, 2023 - 02:00

Lessons in parking, nos 1-3:

1. Drivers take 21% longer to leave a spot if someone is waiting; 33% longer if that person beeps.
2. In New York, drivers look for a pedestrian’s clenched fist — they’re clutching car keys, about to create a space.
3. Want a free, reserved parking space on campus at the University of California at Berkeley? Win a Nobel Prize.

All this and more I learned from Henry Grabar’s magnificent book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. I had to track him down.

“One man I spoke to said: ‘Do you realise how crazy parking is?’,” he said.

“If aliens were looking down at us they’d see us take our means of transportation somewhere without knowing where we’ll leave it — do you take off in a plane not knowing if there’ll be an airport for it at the other end?’

“That uncertainty is the key part of parking, what makes people get upset about parking, and in conversations I’ve had since it came out, that keeps coming out.

“The emblematic anecdote is that when you type in directions on Google Maps, it can tell you what roads are crowded and which are not, how long it’ll take to drive there to the minute — but with parking, you’re on your own.

It seems to be this grey area, stuck between architecture and transportation.”

Parking 'is an afterthought'

Dubious about parking as a topic? Here’s a simple question.

How many parking spaces are there in Cork?

Kudos if you can answer, because this is a notoriously difficult question. For instance, it’s not known if there are 1bn or 2bn car parking spaces in the US. A fair difference.

“I think 2bn is pretty unlikely,” Grabar said.

“But the whole point is that we can’t be that clear and we don’t keep better track of this.

“This shows the extent to which parking is an afterthought with planning, how little it’s been considered as a subject for systemic study — we haven’t even counted the total number of spaces.

“The other obvious point is that as a driver, there isn’t always a hard line between what is a parking space and what isn’t.

We’ve all seen places which didn’t seem meant for parking, but as soon as one person parks there, then it’s open season.

“That’s part of the ambiguity. A playing field, a playground, an urban plaza — once some person parks there, then it becomes a parking lot.”

Privatisation

True. Then there’s the commercial side of parking. And what happens when parking gets privatised, which I found very interesting given the ongoing debate in Cork about parking.

Grabar told me that in 2008 the city of Chicago sold its 36,000 parking meters for a lease term of 75 years to a consortium of investors, getting $1.1bn in return.

“When they did so, however, not only were they on the hook for very high parking rates, but they had also lost control of the streets," he said.

“The company which owned the parking meters had the right, if the city wanted to install bus or bike lanes or pedestrianise streets, to say that that change was affecting revenue. Either the company had a say in that work, or it would charge the city for what it calculated as the difference.

“Parking rates in Chicago had been so low for so long that the city didn’t have a good sense of what parking might be worth, which is something Chicago has in common with many other cities.

By keeping rates low, cities don’t get a sense of what people are willing to pay for parking on the open market.”

Six months after the Chicago deal was signed, a report found that the real value of parking in the city over 75 years was between $2bn-$3bn. The company which bought the rights earned its money back within 15 years, so all revenue since is pure profit for that company, and revenue which the local authority has lost for municipal works.

There’s a lesson here for local authorities. Privatising services doesn’t always work out well — at least not for the local authority — but there can often be a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of paid parking also.

“It was originally intended to organise this precious interface between streets and buildings,” says Grabar. “Parking meters are the only way we have to impose some kind of order on how long people park their cars in those spaces.

“Unfortunately, over the years they’ve come to be seen as a way to make money — and not just from parking itself, but from the chaos when people park illegally.”

Housing

When parking isn’t about temporary space, but a more permanent proposition, it’s no less troublesome.

“One of the major motivations of parking reformers is housing — parking makes housing more expensive, it encourages low-density development, and it makes it hard to build some forms of low-cost, vernacular infill building — the kind of buildings we had before the arrival of the automobile.

“Housing is a big concern in the US and I know that’s the case in Ireland as well, and the cost of housing is forcing people to reconsider the importance of parking.

“The other consideration is climate, obviously.

A parking lot is self-evidently a blight on the environment.

“Also, the more parking you build, the more people will drive. That is an important discovery which reverses the consensus of the mid-20th century, when it was felt more parking would get traffic off the streets as that traffic was being caused by people looking for parking.

“I think we’ve now realised that if you build spaces with tons of parking, that has a determinant effect on car ownership and car use. The more free parking you build, the more you are signalling to people they ought to be driving.

“That’s not just an incentive to drive either, it affects other modes of transportation.

Sometimes what stands in the way of bus lanes or bike lanes is people’s attachment to particular parking spaces on the curb.

Then you see that parking is the central impediment to improving a bus route, for instance.”

As Grabar writes, parking “determines the size, shape, and cost of new buildings, the fate of old ones, the patterns of traffic, the viability of mass transit, the life of public space, the character of neighbourhoods, the state of the city budget, our whole spread-out life in which it is virtually impossible to live without an automobile” — yet for most of us, it’s an afterthought.

I ended up with a new respect for my journeys around Cork, and a new awareness of my parking adventures. I had one last question for him, though.

“I’m a moderately skilled parker,” laughed Grabar.

“I grew up in New York, so if you don’t learn to parallel park, you never learn to park at all.

“Our family car now is a Fiat 500, it’s very easy to park. If I drove a bigger car, I might have written a completely different book.”

Parking to be phased out at public buildings with good transport links