The late Pope Francis may have been the most quotable head of the Catholic Church in living memory. His line about how “the Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth” certainly had a way of making the rounds every few years on Twitter. Another of his pointed observations on the state of the world appears as the epigraph of the first chapter of Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. “The quality of life in cities has much to do with systems of transport, which are often a source of much suffering for those who use them. Many cars, used by one or more people, circulate in cities, causing traffic congestion, raising the level of pollution, and consuming enormous quantities of non-renewable energy. This makes it necessary to build more roads and parking areas which spoil the urban landscape.” The following 350 or so pages constitute an expansion on that theme, and specifically on the part about parking areas, the overabundance of which has done so much to reduce the quality of life in cities — across the world, yes, but most visibly in the United States of America.
I admit that, when Paved Paradise came out two years ago, I wondered if the world really needed another book on that subject. After all, there was already The High Cost of Free Parking, chef d’oeuvre of Donald Shoup, the UCLA urban planning professor interviewed for every single article, explainer video, and podcast about the negative effects of excessive legally mandated parking infrastructure on the built environment. I even interviewed him on my own podcast, Notebook on Cities and Culture, which I started up soon after moving to Los Angeles in the early twenty-tens. As any fan of Shoup (or “Shoupista,” as they call themselves online) will tell you, his book is far more readable and entertaining than an 800-page statistic-laden tome about parking policy has any right to be. As is the work, so was the man, who continued patiently and humorously articulating his diagnosis of the problem and his recommended solutions right up until his death this past February. Given that he was in his mid-eighties, the need for a successor had presumably been clear for some time, and in any case, The High Cost of Free Parking, originally published twenty years ago, hadn’t had a revision since 2011.
Read the whole thing at Substack.