Typically, when someone talks about a parking problem, their concern is that there isn’t enough parking.
Henry Grabar is part of a large and growing contingent of people who think the problem is the U.S. has far too much parking already.
“The parking in this country is mostly overbuilt, which might not surprise you if you’ve ever looked at a parking lot,” Grabar said. “Most people, most of the time do not actually have trouble parking the car. I live in Boston, and I don’t usually have trouble parking the car. But those few occasions where we do really have an issue parking the car, I guess it just makes such an impression on us that it has become grounds to reorganize our entire society, architecture, planning, street design, everything else, just around solving for those edge cases.”
In a free event CivicCon event Feb. 23, Grabar will explore how parking requirements drive up the cost of housing, influence traffic and transit, shape neighborhood politics and municipal budgets and degrade the quality of public space. Grabar will ask a simple but urgent question: Is parking really the best use of our finite resources or can rethinking it help us build more affordable, livable and resilient communities?
Grabar is a journalist who writes about cities. He is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic and from 2016 to 2025 he was a staff writer at Slate where he wrote the Metropolis column, with a focus on housing, transportation and the environment. He was the editor of The ‘Future of Transportation” anthology and was the author of “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World,” which was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the New Republic.
At CivicCon, he will discuss some takeaways from his book, including how parking has come to dominate the American built environment and what that has cost our cities, as well as how we have reshaped our neighborhoods in a relentless quest for car storage.
Grabar told the News Journal that parking problems have solutions. He said those edge cases—the major events like festivals, sports events and concerts that make parking feel highly limited and competitive—are challenging, but can be addressed with planning and strategy. While paid parking isn’t popular, it is a valuable tool that can help incentivize turnover of parking spaces and allow people to self select parking that is more expensive but more convenient, or farther but cheaper.
And the revenue from parking can be reinvested into keeping high-traffic areas clean, attractive and, ideally, easy places to park once and enjoy on foot.
“In terms of convincing people that this is worth it to them, it’s very hard, but ultimately if you are competing (for businesses and visitors) on the basis of your free and easy parking, you are going to have a lot of competition because there’s a lot of random malls out by the side of the highway that are always going to have better free and easy parking than downtown,” Grabar said.
“A downtown has to distinguish itself by something greater than that. The offer has to be more interesting than just better and more parking,” he added. “So ultimately, I think the way that you convince people it’s worth it to pay to park downtown or to park in a parking structure or to walk five minutes from where they parked their car is by making downtown great. It’s saying, ‘Yeah, it’s a bit more challenging to park here, but that’s because you’re getting an experience that you can’t get anywhere else.'”
Want to learn more?
Grabar’s CivicCon presentation will be held 6-7:30 p.m. Feb. 23 in the Consulate Upper Room of First United Methodist Church, 2 E. Wright St. in downtown Pensacola.
The event is free and open to all. Registration is available by searching “CivicCon” at eventbrite.com.
The event will also be live streamed on the Pensacola News Journal’s Facebook page at facebook.com/pnjnews.
CivicCon is a partnership of the News Journal and the Center for Civic Engagement to help empower citizens to better their communities through smart planning and civic conversation.
More information about CivicCon, as well as stories and videos featuring previous speakers, is available at pnj.com/civiccon.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: CivicCon live: Want people to pay for parking? Make it worth their while
Reporting by Kevin Robinson, Pensacola News Journal / Pensacola News Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
