Government policies and societal habits surrounding cars are the subject of the book "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World."
Author Henry Grabar said the title comes from a popular song with Hawaiʻi roots: "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell. She told a journalist in 1996 that the lyrics were inspired during her first trip to the islands.
"I took a taxi to the hotel and when I woke up the next morning, I threw back the curtains and saw these beautiful green mountains in the distance. Then, I looked down and there was a parking lot as far as the eye could see, and it broke my heart," she said.
Grabar said the book title — and the song lyric — recalls the experience of seeing automobile infrastructure take nature's place and of understanding that society designed itself to do so.
"It's very much something that we decided that we wanted to replace all this natural land. And I think that, in the end, that was a mistake, as Joni recognized," Grabar said.
Storing one's private property for free on the edges of a public street has been an assumed right in some places, he said.
"In many cities, the largest single public real estate holding is the streets. And so if you want to think about how we can make a city a better place to live, build public space, build bike lanes, bus lanes, stormwater infrastructure, plant trees, all that stuff, you have to consider this parking lane as maybe just terrain that shouldn't just be reserved for storing cars," he added.
He said parking fees are the top way to encourage people to carpool, use public transit, walk, etc. The more free parking there is, the more people will own cars — and drive them.
"A lot of places have realized that free parking is like a fertility drug for cars," Grabar said. "If your goals as a city are to have less traffic, to have less pollution, to have more people biking, using transit, etc., then free parking is really the place to focus on if you want to make changes in that realm."
Grabar is the featured guest in the University of Hawaiʻi’s Better Tomorrow Speaker Series. His talk at UH Mānoa on Thursday evening will examine planning policies around parking.
He is also a writer for Slate and a Loeb fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
This interview aired on The Conversation on May 16, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1. Sophia McCullough adapted this story for the web.
