Another Time, Another Place

 

Another Time, Another Place

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

Joni Mitchell – Big Yellow Taxi

Even though Donald Trump and MAGA followers might have missed those wildfires, that expanding coastal erosion, ignored the growing frequency of intensive tropical storms, the flood here and the drought there… they still want us to “drill, baby, drill” and let China take over every aspect of EV car and truck manufacturing, leaving us with a fading fossil fuel world as our preferred energy source. Back at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, when cars were just beginning to sputter down dirt roads, where paved highways were still a luxury relegated to them big city folk, many American towns banned them new-fangled thing-a-ma-jigs from small town America. Seems backfiring car engines scared the horses. Odd that if you want to see horses on city streets these days, you have to travel to New York’s Central Park or Amish Country in Pennsylvania. That green area in the pie-chart above is what percentage of greenhouse carbon emissions come from fossil fueled transportation.

Still, cars were originally created for people to travel farther, transport their goods to market and create an industrial future like no one could ever have imagined. Unless your best friends own major interests in the fossil fuel industry (including car and truck makers), you have to be a pretty unobservant person to think fossil fuels are good for us… forever. But cars and trucks seem to have lost that notion of being “there to help people”… with so much of modern life, particularly cities where our economy seems centered, being determined by cars. As garages, streets and access to parking now define how cities are built and zoned… space is more the final frontier for automotively-directed construction and planning than that area beyond Earth.

Aside from those edifices of a glorious past, apartment buildings have, over the years, been subject to requirements for off-street parking as a condition of permitting construction or renovation. I live in a large prewar apartment in Beverly Hills, but every year I have to “buy” the right to park near my home. Writing for the December 1st edition of FastCompany.com, writer Andy Boenau took a hard look: “[T]here’s a tipping point when the built environment and our lives are arranged around motor vehicles where the benefits start to come undone. Building to prioritize space-hogging cars brings a long list of negative externalities.

“In Greek mythology, the god Dionysus granted King Midas his wish for the power to turn everything he touched to gold. Midas revels in the effortless wealth—objects, furniture, and even the ground beneath him turn to gold. The Midas touch was great right up until he wanted to eat or drink or just hug his daughter… There’s a King Midas aspect to motor vehicles, this technological gift that promised and delivered abundance until it became a curse…

“Like Midas discovering he couldn’t eat golden food, we’re discovering that car-dependent places can’t sustain the human activities they were meant to enable. The same infrastructure that promised connection now isolates. What began as freedom morphed into obligation… American cities now dedicate somewhere between one-third and one-half of their land area to streets, parking lots, and garages. In downtown Los Angeles, parking occupies more space than all the buildings combined. We’ve paved over so many of the destinations cars were supposed to help us reach.

“The economic costs of car dependency are brutal at the household level. Transportation often ranks as the second-largest expense after housing, consuming up to 30% of household income. The “drive until you qualify” phenomenon pushed families toward affordable suburban housing, only to burden them with commutes that devoured time and money. Car loan defaults have jumped 50% in the last 15 years, and in 2024, car repossessions hit the highest number since 2009… The Midas story ends with the king learning wisdom through suffering. We’ve suffered quite a bit from the built environment. But even in real life, things can get better in the end.”

David Harrison, writing for the April 3, 2023 Wall Street Journal, paints the picture: “America’s parking glut has its roots in zoning rules first passed in the 1950s, when car ownership was on the rise and urban planners worried there weren’t enough curb spaces for all the new drivers. Many municipalities imposed detailed parking requirements for every type of land use. In Los Angeles, for instance, churches must include one spot for every five seats in the pews. Hospitals must have two per bed.

“Parking mandates resulted in an abundance of parking, particularly in the West, where development boomed after they took effect. Parking covers about 14% of the land area in Los Angeles County, according to one study by a group of researchers from Arizona State University, UCLA and Georgia Tech. That is an area almost as large as Houston... Downtown parking garages in most cities are rarely full.

“About 20 years ago, researchers and local leaders began challenging the rationale behind those rules. A 2016 study by C. J. Gabbe, a professor at Santa Clara University, and Gregory Pierce of UCLA found many of those spots are rarely used. The cost of providing all those spots is passed on to consumers in the form of higher rents or retail prices that even nondrivers pay, subsidizing drivers… A garage adds about 17% to the average rent, the study found. Almost three-quarters of carless renters have a parking spot included in their rent. They collectively pay $440 million a year for parking they don’t need, the study concluded.

“One of the earliest experiments with reducing parking came in 1999 with a Los Angeles ordinance designed to turn neglected downtown office buildings into apartments and condominiums… To encourage builders to take a chance on what was then a moribund part of town, the ordinance made them exempt from parking requirements though forbidden from removing existing spaces.

“That allowed builders to pack more units into the buildings and offer them at lower cost. In a 2013 paper, Michael Manville, a UCLA urban-planning professor, studied 56 of those refurbished buildings that added about 6,700 new units, and found that 2,640 of them wouldn’t have been economically viable had existing parking rules prevailed.” The Journal also noted that LA doesn't even track the number of parking spaces. The WSJ estimates on the low end, the entire U.S. has at least 700 million parking spaces, and on the high end, the estimate is more like 2 billion. That works out to somewhere between 2.5 and 7.0 parking spaces per registered vehicle in America.

Today, there are large downtown LA areas where people don’t own cars. Uber, Waymo and Lyft are common, but a whole new elevated Metro is proving increasingly popular here. Are Angelenos evolving? Perhaps. But urban wildlife certainly is. I’ll close today’s blog with a story about raccoons: “For Raffaela Lesch, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, inspiration struck while she was walking around the campus. She had tossed a can into a waste bin, and it landed with a thud instead of a clang. Soon, Lesch realized why, as a raccoon — aka a ‘trash panda’ — popped its head out of the garbage… Lesch reflected on how prevalent and comfortable raccoons can be in urban environments — even in the middle of the day — and it sparked her curiosity: Could she be witnessing the early stages of the same process that led to the domestication of dogs thousands of years ago?...

“[Her] researchers used a computer imaging program to measure the length of the specimens’ snouts, from the tip of the nose to the tear duct, and total head length, from the tip of the nose to where the ear attaches to the head. When Lesch and her students mapped the counties where each picture was taken, a clear pattern emerged: Urban raccoons’ snouts were 3.6% shorter than those of raccoons in rural areas.” CNN, November 24th. Raccoons are clearly evolving… How has accommodating cars changed our human biological evolution? I suspect, not for the better.

I’m Peter Dekom, and there is no question that if we were able to bring an average American from 1905 into the present, we might finally understand what we have done to ourselves.