Author's Forum: Paved Paradise

Well welcome everyone to on the park bench. A public square conversation. Today we have an authors forum paved Paradise with Henry Gravar on the park bench, a public square. Conversation is brought to you by the Congress for the new urbanism on the park bench presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in the new urbanism and Allied industries, providing an opportunity for the audience to engage in real time. The Webinar series is a platform for senior members to engage, debate, and collaborate on the most pressing issues of the day. So you can share your thoughts on hashtag, on the park bench. You can go to Www. Dot tiny url.com slash Otp, bb, feedback, and you can join us for upcoming on the park bench. Webinars. We have climate and equity challenge projects. On Tuesday, July 20, fifth, and that will explore 2 different projects representing different approaches to centering climate and equity in New Urbanism, and you can learn more about that webinar and upcoming webinars at cnew.org slash resources, slash on the park bench, and don't forget about seeing you membership. Thank you to our seeing you members, for joining us on today's webinar. If you're not yet a senior member, membership offers the opportunity to join an interdisciplinary network of new urbanist practitioners across sectors, professions and geography. You can learn more about membership and [email protected]. And now for today's webinar, Henry Grevar is a staff writer at Slate, where he writes, the Metropolis column with a focus on housing, transportation and the environment his work has been published in architect the atlantic the Guardian Harper's the Wall Street Journal, and other applets, and he's produced Podcasts for decoder ring, 99% invisible. What next? And other shows his research on French Colonial Artecture, and Algiers. After 1962 was published in the Journal Cultural Juries. Henry was the editor of Future of Transportation Anthology, and most recently he's the author of Paved Paradise how Parking explains the World, which was published in May 2023, by Penguin Press Henry has discussed the subjects on television and Radio, and before audiences at New America, the National press Foundation, and various conferences and classrooms. He taught journalism to students from the University of Southern California. Sarah Lawrence and other institutions. This story about immigrants in the meat package town of Fremont, Nebraska, was a finalist for the 2018 Livingston award for excellence in national reporting by journalists under 35, Henry was the 2020 recipient of the Richard Rogers Fellowship from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, Henry graduated from Yale with a degree in American studies and French, and I'm Lauren Mayer. I am the communications manager at Cnu we're going to start today's webinar. So, just as a reminder, please use the function to ask questions as they occurred to you, and we will get to them later in the webinar. Alright, Henry, over to you! Thank you, Lauren, and it's a pleasure to be here talking about parking with all of you at Cnu. I feel like new urbanists were some of the first people in America to really pay attention to Parking's appetite for urban land and the ways in which it shapes our architecture and our communities and as I'm sure you are aware, this has lately become a relatively hot topic in city councils and at community meetings. As you know, are priorities about climate and our environment and the affordability of housing and the types of places we've built. Those priorities begin to class with our long standing, desire to provide free, convenient, and available parking. I wanted to start with this graph because one of the questions I think people often have about parking is like, Well, why can't we just make it better why can't we just solve this problem? And this is, I've heard this thought expressed several times from several different people, but it's a classic trilemma, which is to say, a situation in which you have 3 goals, but you can only obtain 2 of them. In this case the 3 goals everybody wants for barking, or for parking to be free, convenient, which is to say, located directly next to the thing that you are trying to access, and available, which is to say, I'm open for you to drive in there and leave your car there at the moment you arrive, unfortunately, because parking both costs a lot of money and takes up a lot of space, and everybody wants to park in the same place at the same time, according to the rhythms of the day, it is impossible to achieve these 3 objectives and and build anything that resembles really living community. This type of fulfillment, of free, convenient, and available, is only really possible in a giant suburban strip mall, and even then, in that situation you would have to ask how convenient really is this parking for doing anything besides walking into the single shop that I that I came here to go to so I think in this Vandegraram you see different types of places that fulfill 2 of these objectives. For example, convenient and available, but not free, corresponds to certain places where there's such a premium. On parking that people actually are willing to pay for it. Which is to say, busy downtowns. Some small town main streets, airports, stadiums, other big destinations would be basically most big city American neighborhoods where you drive to the restaurant at night and the parking is free and it's right in front of the place. You're going, but unfortunately it is not available, and that's often because it is free and convenient. There's lots of demand for it. And then, finally, you have parking that is free and available, but not particularly convenient, and that's often where you might end up parking when you decide not to pay for parking and mostly though that corresponds to the or been planning paradigm. We know is sprawl, where there is lots of parking. It's free. It's always there when you want it. But it's not very convenient next. So when I started working on this subject, I delved into a lot of history books and was aounded to find that this problem was just captivated. Urban leaders in the 19 forties, fifties and sixties. The question of how to provide enough parking, and why it seems so difficult to provide enough parking for Americans. Demand for driving was just absolutely top of mind. For many urban leaders at this time, and this cartoon from the Los Angeles Times, I think wonderfully illustrates this. The gorilla, if you can see, is portrayed. Is it representing the downtown parking problem? Sort of towering, halking over Los Angeles, and it just seems hard to believe now, looking back in time at all the problems that cities confronted at this point in time, that they were so obsessed with providing enough parking. But they were, and and the results of that, of course, are well known. Next. Because they are codified in the parking generation manual, which is I'm sure, is something that many of you have worked with. But if you haven't, this is the book that tells you how many parking spots should be associated with every single land, use, and as you'll see in this slide, it's just onefully detailed. I mean, you've got just an astounding variety of different types of different types of office buildings, different types of institutional uses, different types of recordational uses from a public park to a Marina golf course, there's a small difference between tennis courts. And racquet and tennis clubs. And all this goes to say that this downtown parking crisis of the nineteenth fiftys produced the sense that these land use codes zoning for parking were absolutely essential, and that without them we we would wind up with anarchy, and that this was really the only way to make sure that we wound up with enough parking to to suit our societal needs. And I just don't think that anybody really could have imagined at the time that these codes would become so ubiquitous and so effective as to create an environment in which that so little resembled really what had come before an environment which parking was absolutely plentiful, and then, furthermore, they would prohibit the types of buildings that had previously characterized the American city to the extent that in many places those types of environments became basically extinct. Next! In brief, we wound up with really a lot of parking. Here are some images from Atlanta, Los Angeles County, on the right, Seattle and Philadelphia. There on the left, and just the the parking is highlighted in all these places, and you can just see that these policies have been tremendously effective. They really have accomplished what they set out to do, which was to create enough parking for everybody to have parking, that is, more or less free, convenient, and available, although there are, you know, chinks in that that occur in various places. And there we could say Well, if we haven't managed to create parking, that's free, convenient, and available, even when it takes up this much land, how much land really is going to take? And I think this sort of goes to illustrate the fact that that goal adapting suburban parking standards, or rather adopting suburban parking standards, bringing them to to the urban environment was always going to be a losing back because cities, were never going to beat suburbs at their own game, if free and easy parking was the most important thing to you. The downtown was never going to be the place that you wound up shopping and an urban neighborhood was never gonna be the place you want to live, and a small strip of, you know, adjacent attached restaurants and retail was never gonna be the place that you would want to shop, next. Of course, this abundance, super abundance of parking, and required parking also had really pronounced effects on the types of structures we are able to build, and this again, is the subject that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, but the more parking you require the more you deform the use of land in favor of basically an asphalt block. I got Alpha to the great California illegrator who did the drawings that are. Did this this nice little sketch that just shows how parking begins to eat up at, you know, basically your typical Main Street line as more parking is required per square foot. And you can really watch the progression here from on the upper left. The typical. You know us Main street, circa, 1920. To what we wind up with in many of our communities today. And I think I hope, one of the points of the book is not to say that what's on the upper left is better, and you should like it, because X and Y, but rather to say just to illustrate to people the trade-offs that we've made by requiring all this parking and I think in many communities people actually do have a preference for what's on the upper left and they've wound up with what's on the lower right, simply because they're not quite aware of the way that they're priorities intersect and in this case. The obligation to provide parking turns out to be one of the primary primary terminants of the urban form. Now! Yeah, and this is a concept I heard about from actually a new urbanist named Peyton Chung, who told me about the Vanity of the high parking requirements, which was the idea that parking requirements work pretty well at at low densities, because it's pretty easy to provide the parking that's required right there on the surface without digging down or building up, which is very expensive. On the right of the the valley you see also places where land values are high and densities are high, and those places also actually manage to conform to parking requirements. And that's because land values are high enough that developers can afford to build garages. And it makes sense. It pencils out to. Maybe you know. Put your building on top of a 4 or 5 story garage a sort of parking podium in the back, and then in the front. The type of building that is sometimes known as a Texas donut, where the residential use wraps around an interior parking garage. This stuff only works where land is expensive enough, that it that it makes sense to build that type of structured parking. And then in the middle, of course, we wind up with the famous missing middle, and in this case parking requirements is an important factor in that, because if you don't have those super high land values and you don't want to build sprawl you find yourself in the middle of that valley where it's really hard to make anything work. Given the amount of parking that is required by law. So next. And all of this adds up to a situation in which, yeah, I think perhaps even more important than the actual codes that I was showing you earlier, which are in place in most American communities. We have this situation, in which parking is actually people's primary concern when they think about residential density when they think about new neighbors when they think about society, and they think about new neighbors as coming in parking sized packages and they think about new neighbors as coming in parking sized packages and that in turn serves as a motivating, you know, a reason to reject, change, and to stop new people from moving into your neighborhood at a time when housing affordability is really, perhaps our primary challenge in our cities and the fact that parking remains this enormous obstacle is stopping us from from doing better things, and I get it right. I mean, I think if you're competing for street parking, and you're concerned that the new neighbors are going to take your street parking, then you will see you'll see them as a threat to to street parking before you see them as potentially future friends future future neighbors, future classmates, etc. And so so this is the situation which we find ourselves. And I think this is the should provide that much more incentive to try and figure it out, to try and find some sort of compromise between requiring so much parking that we have basically outlawed places that look like this. And, on the other hand, just throwing up our hands and deciding that we're not gonna think about parking at all, in which case we might end up with situations where neighbors take things into their own hands and just say, well, we're not going to allow anybody to live near us ever again. Next! So as I worked on the course of this book, I began to think about all the things that become possible when we're able to take parking down a rung on our hierarchy of urban needs. This is a photo from Chicago, from the little Italy neighborhood, and it just shows, that you know this is not like some famous design. As far as I know, I just happen to stop in and say, Wow! This street is become a really lively and pleasant place and you'll notice that one of the things that distinguishes this part of the block is that there is no parking there and and that creates a sort of really open green space that you know it is a street and a car could drive down there, but it does sort of take on the error of a public space in the sense that a. That a more you know, in the way that streets once did in most American cities and I think one of the takeaways again, is not that we should get rid of parking because parking is bad. But the parking is what is standing in the way of of the establishing these kinds of public spaces, which again, just like that building we were looking at before, are actually most Americans. Idea of what looks good and what they'd like to see in their neighborhood next. Of course, parking is also a major impediment at redesigning streets to make it possible not to drive one of the primary objections I come across when I talk about this book is, people say, well, it's well and good you want to get rid of parking. But in my neighborhood. There really isn't enough parking. And so it's not going to work for us, because people are dependent on their cars to do X and Y, and I think there are many neighborhoods in which people claim there is a parking shortage, and there actually isn't one which any parking consultant will tell you they go to city after city, where they hear there's on the parking, and, in fact, there is. It's just 2 blocks away or it's inside of garage, or something like that. But the other thing which is important is that when we think about making it possible for people to get around ways besides driving parking is very much an impediment to making that happen. And this is a kind of idealized street design. But one thing you can notice here is that the curb lane has been pushed into the street and is being used by kind of a bus. Rapid transit situation, and that is one of the ways that we can make transit more efficient and more attractive for people and encourage them not to drive. But it is impossible in most places to create this type of system, because you often have to take a lane of parked cars away. This is also, of course, true for bike lanes, like real protected bike lanes, and make people feel safe when they're riding with their kids. For example, and those those really aren't possible either, unless you're willing. Maybe not to get rid of a whole line of park cars, but to move them daylighting intersections is another example of this. I mean, there's so many changes to our streets that simply cannot be accomplished, because there's so much resistance to taking away parked cars. And this is not only in cities where people really are mostly relying on their cars to get to work, but our in place, like New York City, where fewer than half of households on cars, even there there's been tremendous resistance even to making bus riders commutes a little bit faster by giving them their own lanes. The average speed of a New York City bus is something like 7 miles an hour and you begin to understand well, at that, at that pace. No wonder people drive right. You can't unlock this virtuous cycle of of people, you know, ditching their cars for other modes, unless you begin to take some of that space away from park cars. Next! Oh, and then, of course, there's public space and civic life, and I think this is an old idea. But if you decide that you're going to consign the street to be exclusively for the storage of cars and also for their movement, but often it's the storage that really gets people really hung up. You foreclose all kinds of other uses, and it can be hard to even imagine what might be possible until you have a day like this, where this this is Brooklyn, and you can see the block is closed for a block party, and I mean it it just looks and in fact. was very idyllic, and a really lovely occasion for neighbors to get together and get to know each other, and grill and kids playing in the street, and it's just that the whole thing is completely transformed in a way that I think is quite difficult to imagine if you haven't seen it right in forever eyes. And again, this is the kind of change that is impossible when you've consigned so much of the urban real estate to be used for storing cars next. Of course we had a very prominent example of this epiphany during the pandemic, when spaces in front of restaurants were converted into space to eat, and and this was especially funny, because prior to this restaurants and small businesses generally had often been some of the the most, the loudest agitators for more parking for required parking, for free parking, and when they began to see that, in fact, this real estate could be put to some other use, they decided, well, you know what maybe it would be better. As something else. And suddenly those those concerns about parking simply vanished. And I think there has obviously been a lot of retrenchment on this issue since the pandemic. But I think the thing that we can take away from this is that lots and lots of people had this epiphany that I think the thing that we can take away from this is that lots and lots of people had this epiphany that maybe some of you have had that the space that we currently allocate to cars on the curve does not need to be used that way, and it could, in fact, be used for something else. Next. And then finally, you have the what's happening in some cities where there has been this realization. This is a photo from Paris, where they they began closing the streets outside of schools to cars, and this is, I think, actually a policy idea that could pretty easily be adapted to us cities, even in places where people mostly drive their kids to school. You could just move the drop off. Point a little bit further away, and what you see here is that the street obviously is pedestrianized. But not only that, it takes on this kind of it becomes a kind of an easy civic space to create, because it functions as a bridge between the school and the neighborhood, and in that sense it not only creates a space for the kids to hang out after school, but soon pretty quickly also becomes a place where adults like to walk, and they can sit at a cafe where their kids play soccer in the street, or something like that. And this is, I think, a baby step towards rethinking our relationship with with cars. But every time I go to one of these I just think well, that's just so nice, and perhaps the thing that you can't see in this photo, or understand until you're there. It's just how quiet it is, and how one of people's biggest complaints about city life that it's noisy is really a complaint about cars, and that when you get rid of cars you suddenly find yourself in the space that's that's super super quiet. And again, this is a street that's actually closed to traffic entirely. All you have to do is open that gate with a little peg, and you and you can drive and make your delivery, or drop off your package, or pick something up, or whatever it is. But the important thing about this the street is that it is no longer used for parking cars, and in that sense you really see how that the absence of the parked cars liberates people to feel like it's their own, and there is some sort of law that that i've observed here which is that if you create a pedestrian street, people will walk right down the middle of it instead of along the side on the sidewalks, and that, I think, is it from my presentation? And now we're gonna have a discussion. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Henry. That was really great. I also had the pleasure of reading your book before we got on this webinar. I really enjoyed it, and I had some questions for you just through reading your book kind of one of the first ones, and I think I saw it in the chat as well. Is, that cities and towns nationwide are starting to actually remove parking minimums, and through the course of your research in your book, what did you find? Were the inflection points or parking reforms in major cities over the past decade and kind of were their geographic trends. Political will or other things that made this happen. Nationwide. Well with respect to geography, I have to say it is very much a nationwide phenomenon. If you look at the parking reform networks, map of places that have begun to revise their policies towards this you will see that it is all across the country now, many of those places are small towns that have done away with parking requirements just on their main streets which I think is a. It's a nice start, and enables especially the revitalization of historic buildings, which I mean, there's nothing worse than a place that has parking requirements. So strict that people are tearing down historic buildings just to provide the requisite parking and so the downtown restrictions being lifted is a big part of that more broadly, I think you're seeing it in 2 types of places. Small towns big cities, the places you're not seeing yet are suburbs, and that's really where I'm unfortunately, most of the work needs to come, because those are the places where I expect we would like to see most housing growth going forward because in many cities. The suburbs haven't have hardly changed their population. Profile in many years, and they're stuck with this very restrictive single use. Land use paradigm, and I think the suburbs are changing, and I think many people would would like to begin to see that stuff change, and it's not going to change until there's a new approach to parking as far as inflection points are concerned. I think there's 2 things that motivate people who are interested in reform on this issue, and one is housing affordability. And so in places, where housing is super expensive, the the choice that we make with every project about whether to provide space parking, whether to provide that space for housing, that choice becomes more and more consistent in the fact that we have decided to choose parking over housing, and I think that's what you've seen in. Certainly on the West Coast, where these reforms have have really taken off, and you've got statewide changes that have happened in California, Oregon, and Washington and so that I think is a major part of it. And the other. One, of course, is climate, because transportation is our largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. And so if we want to to tamp that down and enable people to have other ways to get around, then phasing out some of these just, I would just say more broadly, reassessing or thinking about parking is important. And that's for several reasons. Not only because, as I mentioned before, parking serves as an actual obstacle to creating other ways for people to get around, but also just because parking encourages car ownership, and so the more parking you have the more people will drive and that is just that's that's kind of the opposite of what people think. Mid-century. When they were thinking about that parking size gorilla, they thought, more parking will reduce traffic, because people will get off the street and into the parking lot. And, in fact, what we found in 70 years of experimenting with this is that that is mostly not the case. Very cool. Yes, we are definitely seeing that happen in our city. Some small towns, for sure, speaking kind of on those same lines here at Cnu, one of our things we work on is our project for curios, and this identifies barriers to creating walkable communities by recommending incremental code reform and one common code reform we recommend is adjusting parking requirements. Can you talk a little bit more? And you mentioned this in your presentation with the valley of high Parking. Can you talk a little bit more about the role of parking requirements in addressing new urbanist principles like missing mental health? Yeah, I was just looking today at a great diagram from opticos, which is the firm that coined the exponential missing metal housing. I believe, showing how parking requirements reduce the available density for a given plot of land, and basically, the conclusion of this was that even if you're providing one space per unit, which is low by the standards of many suburbs, certainly you are. You're effectively cutting rightidential density in half when you require all this parking onsite get, you know, given an existing building envelope, obviously, you could build a 4 story building atop a two-story garage but that has bad effects on the urban environment as as well. So the short answer is that parking has serves as a huge impediment to building these types of designs, both because it's very expensive. And if you're building a relatively small project, those costs can serve as those costs look very large, and you know, and I think I heard once a developer say, parking is sort of like eggs. You can't buy just one like parking spaces. Come in trays, and so, if your parcel only has room for say, 4 parking spaces, and the code says you need one space per unit. Then you are going to build 4 units, and if you'd like to pull 5 units instead, and that triggers requirement for another parking space. Well, then, you're really in trouble because you're gonna have to build a ramp or you're gonna have to go underground. You can have to find some other solution. And and that it sort of that in it on its own shapes. The design of projects, that there's this sort of marginal cutoff point at which you trigger another tray of parking. And and suddenly, that's that's no longer possible. And so the other, and so the other thing besides the cost obviously, is the geometry and that's a big part of it, too. Right? Like you simply do need to dedicate your ground floor to parking in order to provide enough parking to have a certain amount of missing middle housing in a relatively dense neighborhood. In some places you might be able to put that parking behind. But again, if you're building it, you know, let's say, like north side of Chicago, kind of densities which to me is like the missing middle paradigm, right like there's neighborhoods that have on one block everything from a single family home to a six-story courtyard apartment, and those types of buildings get really difficult to build if you're forced to require that much parking. And then, obviously, that is especially true of commercial structures, because their partner requirements tend to be even higher. And if you have a commercial area where you have parking in front of every building, you've just created a space that no one's really gonna want to walk around. That totally makes sense. Yeah, missing middle is a very big topic right now as we are talking about affordability, another kind of question I had from reading your book was about kind of the money involved with parking. And how punishing people for parking violations can be a pretty lucrative business for a town. How does the role of financing and parking violations impact the government's willingness to change parking practices? That's a great question. One thing I learned when I was working on this book is that many cities make more money from parking violations than they make from meters and garages, and even garage taxes put together, and that's really bad right like New York city for example, makes twice as much from parking, meter, parking fees, parking violations as they do from meters and garage taxes. And it's a similar pattern in most cities. And to me that shows 2 things, number one, the parking system is not very well designed. If people are in violation that often and obviously, enforcement is really spotty most of the time you park illegally, you don't get ticketed. And so for this reason, I think you know, to some extent cities do have high parking fines because they want to disincentivize illegal parking, and because, inforcement is spotty, the fines have to be high, and it's really it's a terrible system. Because it both makes people feel really, really, mad about parking enforcement because they feel like that. The fine for illegal parking is way out of proportion to the offense, and most of the time it's a hard to argue with that. And also it traps people in cycles of fines and debt. It can lead to more serious consequences in a way that shouldn't be on anyone's agenda for creating a fair and equitable city. So the question is, how do we get around this? How do we create a system? Where people are both incentivized to follow the rules, and also the rules aren't so punitive as to as to really, really punish people here. And I think there's a few steps to this number one is that the city needs to design a system that's focused on creating space for people to park and maximizing the ease of parking rather than thinking purely about how much money we can make because at first sense I think those of you who are familiar with the teachings of Don. Think well the incentive for cities to make money from parking is good, because they will charge market prices for parking spaces, but actually, because cities make more money from fines than from fees. They're not really concerned with charging the proper price for meters and freeing up spaces on busy main streets. There? Could they have an incentive for people to park illegally, even if illegal parking comes with many other negative consequences, for the streets, such as creating traffic, congestion, and all that so the first thing I think, is for cities to really think about how they're designing these systems? And what is their goal in designing these systems? And it shouldn't be maximizing revenue. But then the second part of it is, they have to do a better job of parking enforcement, because, again, the reason, the fines are so high is for them to have a deterrent effect. Most cities in Europe now use automated parking enforcement license plate reading. They have a car go around with the sort of camera on the top that just scans all the license plates and checks them against the you know, the digital data and sees who is paid for a parking space, and who's out of compliance and all that, and they issue the tickets in the mail, and that hasn't been adopted in American cities. I think because there would be so many parking tickets that people would revolt, and they would destroy the vehicles and that people would revolt, and they would destroy the vehicles, and they'd have to park them in some secret garage in the middle of nowhere so that nobody knew where they were, but it doesn't have to be that way right like, if parking if enforcement were more efficient and more dependable, and it was also easier to park legally. Then you can imagine a situation in which parking fines were produced to amount to something like, you know, $20 in a place where a meter, a meter, was a dollar an hour something like that right? And then I think you begin to come to a place where people could begin to feel more possibly about this. And and obviously and obviously, it helps to that. The money goes towards something in the neighborhood that people can appreciate. And that's another lesson of Donald Trump's, which is, people don't like to feel like the money they're paying for. Parking is going into a black hole of city budget, or even worse, to some private company, and if you can show them that that money is paying for improvements that they use to make the neighborhood more pleasant, whether it's transit passes or bike share or street trees or park benches, all that stuff that makes people feel much better about paying for parking. They feel like they're making up a positive contribution. Very cool. Yeah, that totally makes sense. It's definitely a multi prompt approach. And speaking of Donald Shoe as he featured him in your book as well, can you share an insight or an anecdote from Don Shoot, that you found particularly interesting or enlightening? Oh, where to start, I mean, high cost of parking is. It's a tremendous, tremendous book. It's a great scholarly achievement and it's also funny and I wouldn't go so far as to say, it's like a page, Turner, but like it's pretty fun if you're into parking policy, and Don is don is also really funny and I think the thing that stands out, you know, it would be impossible to picture just one thing from the high cost of free parking because Don sort of founded this field and blew it wide open. But but the one thing I'll say about Don is that he is extremely funny and generous with his time, and I think anybody who has gotten into parking reform in the last couple of decades has crossed paths, crossed paths with him on a few occasions, and I think one of the reasons that this one of the reasons that this has taken off as a place where people are pushing and trying to figure out better ways of organizing. It isn't just because it takes up so much land. And there's this sense that we could be doing it better, but also because Don, who has done all this research on this topic, and for a while was really the only person who had is super super generous with his time. And really really eager to work with people who are making changes in this space. That's wonderful. My final question. Before we go to the audience is, as more places remove parking mandates and minimums. Where do we go from here? What can we learn from other countries that have kind of pushed back against the American export of suburbia and kind? Of what have you seen? Where do you think we're headed next? Well, I think the most important thing for cities that are working on these reforms is to couple those reforms with changes, to streets, policy, transportation policy, because it is not going to be effective to tell people that they can choose to live in a building that hasn't been provided with parking spaces. If you're not going to start to encourage people to get around in other ways, and that that should be the easiest part of this, because in most American cities the streets are so wide, there's so much space and the improvements that are needed to make it fast, easy, save to walk by ride, transit, etc. All that stuff is really low hanging fruit. We know how to do it it's just that there hasn't been a lot of political will to do it, and so I hope that that's the next thing that comes out of this discussion is that once we realize that building housing without parking is good, and is eventually going to result in a lower amount of traffic associated with every new resident and lower rate of car ownership associated with every new resident. But we also need to think about reforming the policies on our streets to make it safe to get around without driving, and then, after that, I think the other thing is that in places that really do suffer from a parking shortage, we need to begin to think more seriously about how to regulate street, parking, and that's big political Third Rail. I did an interview with Jake Blumard from the Philadelphia Enquirer, Philadelphia is a city that in many places has a legitimate parking shortage in the sense that there is not available parking in the places where people need to park on their block often and Philadelphia has. It's also a city with it doesn't have as strong of a I think Nimby culture as some other American cities. And so they've begun to approve a lot of new development some of which has no parking included which is great for affordability and great ultimately for encouraging people not to drive. But but when those residents start to park their cars on the street, obviously get conflict, and so there's various options being explored for how to navigate this challenge, and how to improve more parking without more housing, without parking, without further contributing to a sense that there's gonna be like conflict between neighbors. But it's it's definitely a thoroughy question, because some of the solutions that I've seen proposed involved basically implying that the new arrival in the neighborhood shouldn't have the same rights as the people have been there for years that's they shouldn't have the same right to park in the public right of way, or perhaps the most extreme example of this is in Phoenix. At cul de sac, which is this very new urbanist. New development in in Tempe, and last I checked. They were saying that in order to get out of their obligation to provide parking with the city of Tempe, they promise that future lessees would sign in their leases that they would not own a car, and parking on the street, and to me like that is that's not a good solution we don't really want new neighbors to come into the neighborhood under a different status than people who have been living there for a long time, just because they got to the public street parking for. That's very cool. Yeah, we also featured cul de sac. And one of our previous. On the park benches, so as a plug if you want to know more, you can check us out and see our recordings of previous webinars. Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions. Henry. That was really great for me. Hopefully, you all learned a lot and now I'm gonna turn it over to the audience. So I'm just taking a look at some of the questions here. And I'm gonna combine a couple that kind of have to do with the different types of will that are required to remove parking. So we have questions from Neville and Healy that are basically, how do we show local retailers that it is in their long term interest to support getting rid of parking along curbs and remove parking. And in the same way politicians and financial institutions. How do we change parking minimums in that same way? In that same thing? Right, well, I think there's a couple of things going on. I mean one of them is that local retailers there's been so many studies on this that show that people who come by bike or on foot really do contribute a lot of money to local establishments, and this goes counter. To, I think, like literally decades of thinking about shoppers right? Like, I think there's some famous quote from some store magnet and buffalo in the Urban Renewal era, saying something like, I would rather have. I would rather have one person who came in a car than 10 people came on foot because, of the, you know, cars associated with both with wealth and with also buying a lot of stuff, and I think there's a lot of studies since then that prove that actually people come on foot or on bike or are just as likely to spend money, and that's especially true. Of course, of restaurants. But it's also true of retail, and especially in an era when everybody can have everything delivered anyway, just because somebody comes in a car is not a sign that that person is going to drop more money on their purchases. So there's lots of studies about this. Unfortunately, I think people find it hard to believe until the rubber meets the road. And so I think, to some extent, if you sit around as a city and try and convince every owner on the block that that by getting rid of X number of parking spaces, you're going to make business better, because you're going to make the street safer and more pleasant you're going to be stuck there for a long time, and I think the only way to do it is trial and error, and again take it back to these. Some of these open streets outside schools that I showed you in Paris. That's been the pattern here we're on block after block where they've created this retailers. Basically said, Yeah, this is good. And in fact, people who the street traffic is more pronounced on those blocks, in part because the sidewalks here are so narrow. And so you actually see that where where streets are open, people prefer those places. And so I think trial and error is really the key. You can show anybody any number of studies and it's going to be pretty difficult to convince them. In the absence of just doing it to some extent, and then, when it comes to politicians, I think you can, they are actually more susceptible to looking at studies and data, especially about municipal revenue housing affordability, development all that stuff. I mean, they're supposed to have all that stuff in the back of their mind when they're making decisions. But I think the most important thing for politicians is often just to get them out of their cars and to get them to ride a bike, get them to use transit, get them to use these systems that they are in charge of managing and like in California actually which when they abolished parking requirements near transit for for most uses. This happened. This has been proposed for years by a assembly woman who comes from Glendale City, near Los Angeles, and she had had her own brush with parking requirements, and thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and so she sponsored this reform but it got held up by a guy who didn't like these types of policies. And what changed his mind was during the pandemic. He started riding a bicycle, and he saw the world in a new way, and I think I certainly have had this experience, and maybe many of you have have had this too. But politicians just aren't gonna get it until they get out of their cars. And that's true for biking. And it's especially true for transit and for transit. You've got. Sometimes you've got transit boards like in Chicago that are made up of people who don't use the system at all. I mean 0. So how can they be expected to understand how frustrating it is to be in a bus that's stuck because there's a double part delivery, Van, because there's no loading zone on the street, or whatever it is so I think that's that's really just one of the most effective things you can do for politicians is plead with them, you know. Just come out here. Try it. Very true. You mentioned in your answer some things about data, and we have 2 questions here, one from Tom and one from Terry, basically asking what sort of data do you think is missing from parking research. And in that same vein is there any specific point at which transit mitigates the need to provide surface or grage pering? I let me start with the second one. I think reformers should be cautious of making progress. The transit will lead to less driving, I think, because driving often responds to the availability of parking, and people will drive to suit exactly how much parking there is, and if one person who used to drive decides, they're going to take the bus and somebody else who didn't use to come downtown at all we'll decide to drive, because it's become that much easier and the parking's become that much more available. And so on, so I would instead frame it as better transit provision allows us to have more urban activity. Really without having to spend the money to form the urban environment. Great, the environmental blight and spend. And again, like that that is, providing all all those parking spaces so I think that's that's the promise of transit. And and also it's just important to, with respect to building housing without parking, I mean you again. That's a really great and overdue reform. And one of the reasons that it's overdue is because parking requirements, usually over built the parking. So wasn't just a case of providing the parking for people who needed it. It was really a case of a lot of waste. And so that's great that we're getting rid of that but at the end of the day, like you can't do that reform, and not at the same time provide ways for people to get around. So I think that's that's really crucial. And then, with respect to data, the field is still plagued by so little information about so much of this stuff. Beginning with how many parking spaces there are in a city in a neighborhood in the country as a whole, it's just it's just it's there's really no good information. And I think that's a place where I would just would really be great to see people focus on that more. And then, you know, I think the other thing is that we've had so little experimentation with how we provide parking that there is a lot of research to be done on. For example, this all this new research coming out right now about the effects of these parking reforms, like once that were undertaken in Buffalo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco in Hartford, Connecticut, 5 or 6 years ago, there were some of the earliest cities, to get going, allowing housing to be built without parking, and that kind of research is just happening now. So to some extent we are still flying a little blind in terms of our understanding of whether the market is is going to cut back on parking. If they're no longer these laws in place, and if so, how much? And then again following from that how that affects car ownership car, use all that stuff that is, it's it's also new and and it's really important, right? Because I think one of the big cases that reformers make is that building less parking won't just mean more attractive architecture. Nicer neighborhoods and better housing, affordability, but it will also in the end lead to fewer people driving, and so it's important that we follow up and find out what's happening to the people who live in those projects, and if they decide. To own a car, do they park it on the street? Would they would they use transit if it came near them? All that stuff? So I think that's really important to figure out. Absolutely. And we have a question here from Terry, which is Henry in a perfect world. What would you envision to be the best balance between a desire for free, convenient, and available parking? I think, convenient and available, is really the sweet spot. I think one thing we learned right, like this is Don, Troupe's whole thing. Free parking isn't really free. It feels free when you use it, but it's just because somebody else is paying for it. And that may be because it's paid for by whoever owns that parcel and has to devote half their property to parking. It's certainly paid for in the externalities that are associated with parking, with driving, which include obviously traffic congestion, fatalities, local particulate pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, all that stuff, those are all externalities, associated with free parking that don't get paid for by you when you park there for free, and I think that's that's kind of old news that's the people who follow this debate closely. But parking is never really free unless I think convenient and available is really the sweet spot, and I guess the good news is parking is so mismanaged that you don't really need to do that much in a lot of places to create a situation which there is convenient and available parking, and in many cases free and convenient and available, sorry, free and available parking. Just a little further away. And so you give people a choice right? And that's possible in most small towns and even in a lot of big city commercial areas where you can say, Look, you want to park right in front of the restaurant, yeah, that's going to cost you $2 an hour. But good news is, if you're more price sensitive. Look, there's this big, residential neighborhood of single family homes like 6 blocks away. There's all this unused curb space, and you can park there, and you can walk, and that's a free parking option for you, and I think that that you know an ideal world. You do have a little bit of something for everyone. There, and that would really be the perfect situation. Very cool. We also have some questions of kind of relating to street parking. One is moving. Parking minimums. Will it require street parking? And in that same vein, what are your thoughts on on street parking from a traffic calming standpoint? And does the traffic coming aspect justify on street parking? Yeah, I mean, there have been places where I think the there's a couple of ideas about getting rid of parking minimums. And what it means. For on street parking, Michael Manville, who did the study of downtown la! After they got rid of their parking requirements, thinks that one of the reasons that worked in downtown La was because downtown La has no free on street parking, and that means that that people who moved into these buildings weren't suddenly all competing for this scarce resource instead, they were making effective use of these office garage is which we're often unused at night precisely when the residents needed them. I've also heard that in Austin, Texas, where they've begin to experiment with some parking light or parking free buildings, they make sure that the some of the places where that those buildings get built have meeters on the street so that there isn't just this problem of people who live in those buildings, leaving their cars on the street for free. Of course, that also those meters on the street also applied to anybody who lives in the neighborhood, and I think that that's a that's a pretty fair situation in which the value of the curve is being basically channeled in these parking meters. But it's being the cost of that is being born by new residents and old residents alike. And then the third scenario, which I think is the kind of like sort of appeals to the worst in human nature, is to say, the people who live in a neighborhood get some sort of grandfather right to to street parking, and you've lived here for long enough it belongs to you you get some sort of tradable permit that new residents aren't eligible for, and that's what's happening in Tempe with cul-de-sac, and you could see something like that being affected in a place like Boston in order to encourage residents to ease up on permitting new development and in fact, they would have an incentive to permit new development, because they would know that only they have the right to. On street parking, and that that right would become more and more valuable as as more neighbors moved in. Wonderful. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Alright. I think we have time for one more question. So we have this one from David. There are many different systems for metered on street parking, including conventional coin meters, smartphone systems, central kiosks, and others. Is there a consensus developing on which one works best? I'm really not an expert in that. I won't pretend to be able to answer the question. I'm sorry. I don't know. I do think that it's I think there's been some hesitancy about parking meter privatization related to the deal in Chicago that has been a huge albatross for that. City, but I don't think there's any reason that cities should go out of their way to reinvent the wheel in terms of how to pay for parking there's all these companies that are out there offering reasonable solutions about how it should be done and I think this is another case, in which again, if you're not maximizing for revenue, you have an opportunity to work with people and make paying for parking much more convenient. For example, making it possible for people to pay remotely. You're sitting in the restaurant. You're you're staying longer than you thought you would. You? Just write in a little. You do something on your phone. And suddenly you can stay for another hour. And conversely, maybe if you leave early maybe you shouldn't have to pay for all that parking you bought after that and that's a system that obviously, from the perspective of the city collecting money for the meter. They wouldn't like that. But if you're really managing the street in the interest of providing available curb space, you really shouldn't be collecting more money from people than you really need, and and once they've once they paid for their parking they've left that spot maybe you should give them, back their money, and that's another way to make people, maybe a further appreciate the idea that paid street parking is not a money grab, but simply a way of managing this precious access point between streets and buildings. Oh, and then I was supposed to say I was supposed to send me something about street parking and protection, and I think that that's that was actually one of the least intuitive things to me when I was starting on this. But John Massingale convinced me that street parking is good on busy streets to protect people who are walking from traffic, and I buy that. I think we've all been on downtown streets where there's no street parking, and we're buses run really fast in the curb lane, and it's not a particularly pleasant experience to be on the sidewalk where that's happening and I think what you see in a lot of European cities like, you know, is the protected bike Lane model, where the bike lane is between the park cars and the curve, and I don't think any American city should build any other type of bike lane. I mean that just seems like a total. No brainer, both, for from the perspective of protecting cyclists, and also because it's really a very small sacrifice for the people who are parking their cars there, I think the place where you begin to get into trouble with the issue of arctic cars, protecting pedestrians is around intersections right where parked cars really inhibit the ability of approaching drivers to see who's about to cross the street, and there is a well established practice in street design called daylighting where you remove the park cars around the intersections so that people can see as they're approaching the intersection. And that's obviously hard to do. If if you're super attached to street parking. Very cool. Well, with that I think we will wrap it up. Thank you so much, Henry, for taking the time to share more about your book. Ed paradise today for all attendees recording of this webinar. Will be available within 24 h, and you can keep an eye on your emails for that link. Thank you again, Henry. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Alright! Have a wonderful day, everyone!