The True Cost of Free Parking: A Conversation with Henry Grabar

Henry Grabar is the author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. His book examines how parking shapes Americans’ lives through day-to-day interactions such as violence over a parking spot to its role in affordable housing development. Paved Paradise questions whether parking is the most efficient use of space and resources, and what parking reform must focus on. Henry is also a staff writer at Slate.

On June 26, 2023, Chicago Policy Review’s Mehul Gupta interviewed Henry Grabar on parking policy and reform in the U.S. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

CPR: A lot of people in the transportation policy and planning space don’t give much attention to parking. Why should policymakers and planners focus more on parking?

Henry Grabar: The most obvious answer is that it takes up a lot of space. The average car spends 95% of its lifespan parked. When you think about the impact of car culture, which I think we can all agree has radically changed the American landscape, society, and economy, the spatial impact of that is concentrated in parking spaces. Many planners have ignored parking for the last 100 years and treated it as an afterthought of the broader system of car culture. But in doing so, they ignored the biggest piece of the puzzle. I argue in my book that giving it the slightest bit of forethought and attention can bring about a lot of positive effects.

CPR: In the book, one key statistic you mention is there are about three to seven parking spaces per car in the U.S. Yet, Americans continually fear parking shortages. Can you speak how this narrative started?

Henry Grabar: There’s a few things happening. The first is that Americans have very high expectations for parking, and so even spending two minutes looking for a parking space can give the impression of a real parking shortage, even if all that meant in practice was that there wasn’t a free parking spot immediately available. To some extent, our high expectations play a role in making us believe there is a shortage of parking when in fact, it’s just that our standards for parking are higher than they are for virtually any other good or service.

Second, parking is underpriced, hard to find, and it’s not shared. Those things each create a situation in which you might have a good amount of parking on a neighborhood, city, or even a national scale, but when you arrive on a particular block it may be hard to find a parking space. That is often a result of mismanagement. If you make the parking free, then it will be consumed by people who leave their cars there for days or even weeks at a time, and so people who show up to run an errand will find there is no place to park. If you don’t tell people where the parking is, which is often the scenario in many cities, finding the best place to park if you’re running an errand or watching a movie is sort of up to you. It’s not like they include directions from the city. It’s held in reserve and as prized local knowledge. That’s not conducive to good parking policy either, since many people from out of town will not be familiar with those practices.

And then parking isn’t shared. There may be a lot of parking, but it’s often balkanized between different uses, like a bunch of spaces that are included in a residential building that are off limits to office workers during the day, a bunch of spaces that belong to the University of Chicago faculty, or that at night are off limits for residents.

With commercial spaces, you run into this problem all the time. At a strip mall, you’ll see there are little signs in front of every parking space saying this one is reserved for the dentist and this one for the sub shop. I understand why people do that, but since many of the businesses have different operating hours and cycles of demand, they often require many more parking spaces than they need.

CPR: You brought up the question of pricing. We know that parking is often free for the consumer, especially in large suburban areas, but it’s costly for the developer and for society. It also has environmental consequences. How should we think about factoring those costs to price parking adequately, or is that a question that will depend on the location?

Henry Grabar: It always depends. One way to think about it is that parking should be priced to raise money for its location. I don’t think that’s a good strategy. Another option is that parking should be priced as an externality of driving, and we want to discourage driving. I think that’s a decent strategy, but it’s probably not the most effective way to put a tax on driving. The third way, which I would encourage cities to think about, is pricing parking to manage street space in a way that produces the best outcome for everyone in the neighborhood. That’s obviously a more challenging set of priors than making the most money, which often results in heavy-handed parking enforcement, and expensive parking tickets. Many cities have this system, and it makes people feel understandably angry about parking enforcement. I think if you were to instead price parking with the goal of ensuring access to parking, reformers say that would mean about one or two spaces available on every block at all times.

Then the question is, what does the price of parking need to be to make that happen? And that’s simply a question of trial and error. The great thing about parking is that it’s well suited to those kinds of mini policy experiments. I think people often get very nervous about charging for parking because they think nobody will want to shop in that area. I don’t think that’s true. I think that the value of the downtown is worth more than the price of a parking meter. And if not, cities will learn quickly.

CPR: When thinking about pricing parking, one of the concerns is equity. There’s the argument that people who rely on free parking are dependent on cars. They may be working class or live in areas that don’t have adequate access to public transit, and so they’ll be harmed the most by increasing prices. How should policymakers consider the equity-efficiency tradeoff there when trying to adequately price parking?

Henry Grabar: There are a few components. One is that wealthier people tend to own and drive more cars. If what you’re doing by pricing parking is ensuring that you’ve created enough space to dedicate a lane to bus rapid transit, then that’s a positive development for neighborhood equity because people experiencing poverty are still more likely to ride the bus than they are to drive.

Free parking is never actually free. It comes with many externalities. One cost comes in the form of time. It can be hard to find a parking space when you go someplace where the parking is not properly managed. When people assume that paying for parking is going to have a negative effect on poor and working people, there’s an assumption that their time isn’t worth very much. That’s often not the case. In fact, working class people are particularly sensitive to time concerns, such as to being on time to their shift, or being able to make it to an interview. The cost of spending ten additional minutes looking for parking or even worse, parking illegally and risking a $120 fine, are serious compared to $1.25 for the meter. You shouldn’t be so quick to assume free parking is an unalloyed good for the people who use it.

Finally, there are so many inequitable features of cities. It would be a mistake to ask parking policy to remedy some of those inequalities all on its own. Things like traffic congestion, pedestrian fatalities, and emissions often exert the greatest harms on low-income people. Those are all things to consider. I understand there’s an intuitive idea that free parking is good for people who don’t have as much money, but I would encourage people to really examine everything, including the externalities, that come with free parking.

CPR: In your book you draw attention to Chicago’s Marina City tower parking, the famous ‘corn cob’ buildings, as a model that defines high-rise residential and commercial architecture in the United States. What role Chicago has played in how America thinks about parking infrastructure?

Henry Grabar: Chicago’s greatest contribution to the American parking discourse is probably the cautionary tale of the Chicago parking meter deal, where the city privatized almost all its parking meters for 75 years starting in 2009. That has been regarded as a disaster, both in municipal finance terms because Chicago got ripped off, and in city management terms because Chicago gave up the right to manage its streets. Every time the city wants to make significant changes to any blocks that have parking meters on it, it needs to negotiate with the company that now owns the parking meters.

CPR: Is there a model for cities to benefit from privatized parking or is it better served as providing it as something more publicly accessible?

Henry Grabar: I wouldn’t draw a fine line between privatizing the management of street parking and making it publicly accessible. There’s no reason a private company couldn’t do a good job installing parking meters, managing parking meters, and collecting tickets. There’s no reason a city, especially a small city, should feel inclined to develop its own technology to read license plates or something like that. But the trick is writing a good contract.

CPR: Towards the end of the book, you discuss how electric vehicles (EVs) require a new challenge when it comes to parking. How will the electric vehicle shift change how we think about parking? Will it just reinforce the reliance on cheap, highly subsidized parking like in the status-quo or will there be other alternatives in the future?

Henry Grabar: It’s very unclear what’s going to happen with EV charging on the street. Most American drivers have home garages that could install level one or level two chargers. About a third of Americans don’t have access to a home garage and so we must keep them in mind in the energy transition. Research shows people won’t buy EVs unless they have a place to charge them. Then the question becomes “What are you going to do about it?” and I haven’t really seen any good answers to that. One idea is you install a bunch of chargers at the curb in parking lots. The trials I’ve seen suggest that’s always a very expensive piece of infrastructure to install and drivers simply aren’t willing to pay enough for the charging to make it work.

CPR: Throughout the research of your book, you write that you became convinced that “a substantial share of Americans did want to live in places they could walk around, and some were even willing to give up their cars to do so.” As we’ve seen with recent debates over ideas like the 15-minute city, NIMBY-ists (Not in My Backyard) are quick to reject the idea. How can policymakers overcome the hurdle of small, highly motivated interest groups that can stop development issues in their community?

Henry Grabar: One of the things I hope this book accomplishes is to illustrate the tradeoffs that are at work when people insist on more parking. Some people have the best intentions for their community and might not quite understand how the demand for more parking in the long run creates more traffic, less affordable housing, less walkable environment, and so on. If you want to require so much parking, being aware of these consequences, it’s not up to me to tell you that’s not what you should do.

That said, I do think there are places in America where a small group of people are standing in the way of, for example, affordable housing or something like that which we agree as a society needs to be provided. The solution in that case is to delegate the responsibility for making those decisions to a higher-level authority. For example, in California, it is no longer up to the particular community to decide how much parking is required from housing built near transit. That’s up to the developer of the parking in consultation with their lender and their future tenants or buyers, not the neighbors. That’s policy I hope we can expect to see in more states going forward. There’s no reason local neighbors should be able to stop building affordable places to live especially by invoking parking.