Grabar points out another, perhaps overlooked way that parking contributes to the climate crisis: Cement is responsible for nearly 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, much of which goes toward the provision of parking. Low-income and minority communities are also disproportionately exposed to air pollution - often the result of traffic emissions - and suffer higher rates of asthma and other respiratory ailments. Black pedestrians are nearly twice as likely to be struck and killed in traffic as white pedestrians. The problem is particularly acute in low-income and minority communities, which are less likely to have sidewalks, marked crossings and other designs meant to make spaces safe for pedestrians. ![]() roads, making it an outlier among economically advanced nations. In 2021, some 43,000 people, including more than 7,000 pedestrians, died on U.S. has the highest rate of road accidents of any OECD country, and traffic fatalities are on the rise. Rarely do you hear people say, ‘There were too many people on the sidewalk’ or, ‘There are too many people at the park.’” If cities provide comfortable and convenient alternatives to cars, “you can defang one of the most prevalent NIMBY arguments, which is really about traffic and parking. “I think people’s opposition to new neighbors is often motivated by their fear of traffic and parking problems,” Grabar said. Those rules, Grabar argues, create sprawl (which in turn incentivizes more driving) and fuel the current housing shortage. Across the country, zoning laws often require new developments to build a set number of off-street parking spots. When it’s free, there are often shortages, incentivizing drivers like his father to circle the same block several times in search of a spot. ![]() (Electric vehicles may reduce emissions, but the need for chargers brings a host of other parking challenges, Grabar notes.) Americans’ propensity toward driving isn’t simply a function of our size - Americans drive 60% more than Australians and Canadians - but rather, he writes, “we built a country with exceptional rewards for driving and punishments for getting around any other way.” Today, Americans drive more than almost anyone else in the world, and transportation is the U.S.’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. “Cities sought to emulate the suburban parking model and very nearly destroyed themselves in the process.” “The question of where to park all these cars consumed American politicians, shop owners, traffic engineers, and urban planners in the 1950s and 1960s,” he writes. cities to the postwar era, when American car ownership skyrocketed and much of the middle class moved to the suburbs. Grabar traces much of the design and feel of modern U.S. “In story after story, I kept finding this hidden factor that seemed to be determinative of the way various projects turned out,” he said. He has written about housing, transportation, and urban politics for the last decade. In the book, he recounts travails familiar to anyone who has ever looked for parking in New York: His father used to drop the family off in front of their building before he set off in search of a curbside spot as a teenager, Grabar was often tasked with sitting behind the wheel of his parked family’s station wagon, “…hoping I would not have to move the car when the ticket cop came. Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, grew up in Lower Manhattan in the 1990s. allocates more land to car storage than to housing), siphons public assets into private hands, blights downtowns and fuels the climate crisis. Paved Paradise reveals how cheap and convenient car storage exacerbates the housing shortage (the U.S. “If you begin to think about retrofitting and adapting that, the possibilities are endless.” “We have all this land that’s being currently allocated in one of the least efficient and least environmentally sound ways possible,” Grabar said. Instead, the city devotes most of its curb space - an area equivalent to 52 Central Parks, according to advocacy group Transportation Alternatives - to parking. It could even help drivers kick their addictions to cars and avert climate catastrophe, writes Henry Grabar, author of the new book Paved Paradise : How Parking Explains the World. ![]() It could build bioswales to collect rainwater and prevent flooding during heavy storms. It could create safe, cool play spaces for the more than 1 million New Yorkers without easy park access. It could get rid of rats by moving trash off the sidewalks and into containers. What could a city like New York achieve if it repurposed some of its 3 million curbside parking spots?
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