Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Henry Grabar:

By allowing parking to become this political third rail, we have created an environment in which it’s acceptable to reject new neighbors and reject affordable housing projects in your neighborhood on the grounds of a parking shortage, and that, again, is perhaps the largest consequence of our parking status quo and the most unfair.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Henry Grabar. He’s a staff writer at Slate, who covers housing, transportation, and urban policy. With so many debates swirling around the future of cities, Grabar chose to write a book about a fascinating but often overlooked topic, parking. It’s called Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Indeed, you’d be surprised at how much parking impacts all other aspects of urbanism from affordable housing to self-driving cars. I spoke with Grabar about the outsized role that parking has played in our country’s urban landscape and what we can do to change that. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions.

This question comes in an email from Ben who writes, “Dear Preet, in case you haven’t heard by now, your given name is the answer to a clue in last week’s crossword puzzle in the New Yorker, the intersecting answers are RPM, pure, elites, nauseous, and toasty. My question is this. If there are additional indictments of Trump, what are the chances of any of the other three cases coming to trial before the November election? Could any of those cases be expedited in consideration of their importance to the national polity?”

So first of all, Ben, thanks for your congratulations on being in the crossword puzzle. A number of people did point that out to me. It tickled me. I will admit though that I don’t do crossword puzzles, neither the New Yorker crossword puzzle, nor its cousin the New York Times crossword puzzle, but every day as often as I can in its most days, I do the Wordle and I do the New York Times spelling bee.

Now onto your question. So there is one current pending indictment as everyone knows in Manhattan, brought by the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and that case was brought not that long ago. There’s been some haggling about when the trial would take place. We now have a trial date set, March 25th of 2024, smack in the middle of the primary season in which Donald Trump, the defendant in that case, will be facing a whole slew of opposition candidates.

Now, I think there’s some question as to whether or not it will really happen on that day. Trial dates slip all the time, and even though we have that date set, depending on what kinds of motions are made and depending on what kinds of decisions are made on those motions and what kinds of appeals are made on the decisions of those motions to the extent they’re appealable, that could get pushed as well. So I’m not at all assured that even the current pending indictment will be brought to fruition in terms of a trial in March of next year or even sometime by the middle or late part of next year.

Now, with the other three potential pending investigations, whether or not they blossom into full-blown indictments, still remains to be seen, but there’s a lot of recent reporting and in the tea leaf reading that’s been going on suggesting that the Mar-a-Lago documents case might be brought in the near term. We have a lot of signaling going on from the Fulton County DA in Georgia that a case will be brought with respect to the Georgia election sometime in August.

So just doing the math compared to the Manhattan DA’s case, which trial is set about a year out from the date that the indictment came down, is looking more and more tight with respect to those two matters as to when there might be a trial. I think the likelihood of there being a trial before the election with respect to the other pending investigations that have not yet turned into indictments is low.

Now, part of this is going to depend on what Donald Trump and his team wants. He’s a defendant. Our system, in many ways, not in every way, but in many ways bends over backwards to try to be fair to the defendant. If he needs more time or he makes arguments related to the election, those might not fall on deaf ears. Judges in the various other cases, should they come to pass, might be sympathetic to claims that it’s very, very difficult to resolve this matter close in time to an election that’ll work some unfairness against the former president. I don’t know that that will succeed. I don’t know if it won’t, but I think the judges will have to listen to those considerations.

If on the other hand, Donald Trump and his team thought it was worthwhile and better for him to try the case more quickly and get it out of the way and perhaps become exonerated, in advance of the election I think there’s a decent chance that the case would be brought and the trial would be had before the election. There’s a famous example of this in a case that otherwise went south and was a big black eye for the government some years ago. There’s a sitting senator, the senior senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, was charged by the Justice Department in an election year and he asked for and received an expedited trial because he thought it was in his best interests. The trial didn’t go well for him, but ultimately, the case was thrown out because of a lot of improprieties that were found by an Inspector General report and the case was dismissed.

So a lot of this is going to turn on when the indictment is brought, if it’s brought in each of the pending cases, and what the view of Trump and his team are. More consideration given to him if he wants to expedite, but I suspect he’ll find it politically more viable and more advantageous to have the charges pending with each success of primary and even the general election itself.

This question comes in an email from Fred who writes, “I have twice over the last months asked you to do a show about the Hunter Biden affair. I don’t think you ever responded on air and certainly didn’t communicate with me at all. I’m a devoted listener of your podcast, not a right wing conspiratorialist. Simply put, we the people deserve an impartial review of the situation. We haven’t gotten one. Why don’t you explore this? At the least you could spend a moment and email me that the Hunter affair isn’t relevant to your podcast if that’s the reason.”

Well, Fred, thank you for your very frank statement in an email. We get a lot of requests on a lot of points and a lot of issues and a lot of topics. We can’t cover them all on this particular show and we can’t respond to every email, so I apologize for that, but we have spoken about Hunter Biden at length on the Cafe Insider Podcast with Joyce Vance on multiple occasions. I typically weigh in on the matter when a big piece of news breaks. There hasn’t been a lot of news recently, but back in March of 2022 when the New York Times reported that Hunter Biden had paid off a significant tax liability, even as a grand jury continued to gather evidence in a wide-ranging examination of his business dealings, we talked about it.

Joyce and I spent a good portion of that episode discussing the likelihood of charges. There’s also a potential gun charge that we also talked about. Then a few months later, in October of 2022, the Washington Post reported that one or more agents in the Biden case believed that there was sufficient evidence to bring charges in two categories, as I mentioned, one relating to his taxes and another relating to false statements he may have made in connection with purchasing a firearm. So we spent a lot of time there, but I apologize it didn’t come up that often in Q&A on the Stay Tuned podcast.

Now, it’s June of 2023 and we still don’t know whether Hunter Biden will face charges. What we do know is there’s a serious investigation that’s been underway for a long time, very significantly with respect to how you view the fairness of the investigation and the relevance of the fact that Hunter Biden is related to the head of our government, Joe Biden. Just to remind everyone, of all the US attorneys in the country, only a very, very, very few were retained, and one of them retained from the Trump years is the US attorney in Delaware.

Part of the reason that Joe Biden didn’t, as is his right and as every president’s right, didn’t replace the US attorney who’s investigating his own son, his own flesh and blood is that that would look terrible. Certainly, what’s relevant here is by all accounts, David Weiss, who I don’t think I know or have met personally, is an accomplished career prosecutor in a politically appointed position now, but it’s not to be fair and tough.

So I think it’s important to remember whatever the decision is about bringing charges or not bringing charges, what particular charges are or are not brought, that Joe Biden, very deliberately and may have had some mixed feelings about this, but very deliberately retained the former Trump-appointed United States attorney in Delaware to complete his investigation so that it wouldn’t be interfered with, and it wouldn’t look like it was political where there was favoritism or nepotism going on with respect to this investigation.

At the end of the day, we’ll have to see what charges are brought or not brought. At the end of the day, if an indictment is filed, I think we have to respect the fairness of the process unless we see something untoward in the indictment or in some process that led to the indictment. So that’s all we know so far. My recollection is that Joyce and I were a little bit skeptical about the false statement charged with respect to a firearm. I, for one, don’t know enough about what the tax charges might be. I don’t know what the evidence is. Like all of you, I look forward to a decision, and if there is a charge, we’ll analyze it, I think fairly and impartially, as we try to do with all cases that are brought and not brought.

So I want to follow up on a question and answer I gave last week. With respect to the scandal relating to the United States attorney or former United States attorney in the District of Massachusetts, Rachel Rollins, who would you’ll recall from the podcast last week and otherwise from news reports, very serious allegations made about her conduct, violations of the Hatch Act, accepting favors, and a whole bunch of other things that are not commensurate with what the behavior and conduct of a Justice Department official should be.

I said last week among other things that it was very serious, it was very egregious, particularly the allegations that she tried to smear confidentially through press leaks, a political opponent, an adversary of the person who replaced her as the local district attorney. I also said I wasn’t sure any laws were broken of a criminal nature. I want to clarify that because I did last week explain that one of the most egregious parts of the story as alleged was when the investigation was taking place by the Inspector General’s office at DOJ, it appears and it’s alleged that Rachel Rollins lied about her conduct and her behavior, and that she apparently was not aware that there were text messages about the leak to the press, and once she found those out, it sounded like she became more forthcoming.

Now, lying to federal agents, if you’re a devoted listener to this podcast, you know subjects you to one, possibly two criminal charges, making a false statement to law enforcement, Section 1001 and one or more obstruction of justice statutes. Now, there may be an investigation here with respect to her making a false statement. I do think at the end of the day it’s possible she gets charged, but I think unlikely. Among other things, there’s a very robust and significant OIG investigation. She has taken responsibility to some degree and has left office, which some people will think was a punishment visited upon her.

There are other examples of cases where an IG investigation, people are found not to have been telling the full truth or not being forthcoming with agents that have not resulted in criminal charges, whether you like that or not. For example, Andrew McCabe, the former number two at the FBI, when he was investigated by the IG’s office, was found to have been not fully forthcoming. No charge ever arose from that. There are other examples as well. I’m not judging it one way or the other. I don’t know every single fact. I don’t know precisely what all her answers were and how much she should have been aware that her answers were false, but it sounds like it’s pretty bad. So we’ll wait and see if there’s a Department of Justice investigation into those, but I just want to clarify that although I don’t think she’ll be charged with a crime and I’m not sure that it’s appropriate because I don’t know all the facts, it is possible given the nature of her conduct.

I’ll be right back with my conversation with Henry Grabar.

THE INTERVIEW

We rarely talk about parking, but a new generation of urbanists is reexamining our relationship to cars and to the places we put them. Henry Grabar is an urban policy reporter at Slate. He’s out with a new book on how our obsession with parking has made cities uglier, more expensive, and less livable.

Henry Grabar, welcome to the show.

Henry Grabar:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

So we talk a lot about infrastructure in this country. We talk about transportation, public transportation, private transportation. We talk about the highways, we talk about bridges. One thing we don’t seem to talk a lot about, but that you were expert on and we’re going to explore at some length, which may surprise people, is parking. Parking is a big deal, isn’t it?

Henry Grabar:

Yeah, and it’s always been ignored by everybody who is thinking more seriously about, quote, unquote, “more serious” types of infrastructure. So that’s nothing new.

Preet Bharara:

Well, not you, you’re not ignoring it.

Henry Grabar:

Don Shoup, who is the Pope of parking studies likes to say, “I’m a bottom feeder, but there’s plenty of food down there.”

Preet Bharara:

I think that’s what lawyers say too.

Henry Grabar:

Well, there you go. Parking lawyers, there’s probably a few of those out there.

Preet Bharara:

So we’ll get into why this is of interest to you, but just to give people a sense of scale about how much land and attention and cost is attributable to parking in this country. I think you write in your book in terms of square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is housing for each person. The country builds more three-car garages than one bedroom apartments. Tell us more about how much we spend in terms of land and space and cost on parking.

Henry Grabar:

Well, to get back to what you were saying a moment ago about parking being ignored and absent from the conversation or an infrastructure, there’s an enormous amount of ambiguity in these estimates, which I think speaks for itself. The thinking about how many parking spaces there are in this country ranges between one and two billion, which, again, huge room for disagreement just there, and that’s because in part there’s some flexibility about what qualifies as a parking space, but also it’s because this is an area of our landscape that despite being so fundamental to the way we get around has been basically ignored.

This ambiguity, by the way, persists down at the city level too, where you’ll see in New York City, for example, which has the most valuable land in the entire world, the city itself has this ballpark back of the envelope estimate for how many parking spaces there are, which, by the way, is thought to be about three million, but in the country as a whole, yes, lots and lots of parking between one and two billion spaces, and that amounts to, well, three to seven per car, which means that there are always at least two spaces empty. Of course, some of those cars are in motion. So in reality, there’s between two and six spaces available for every parking spot that is occupied.

Preet Bharara:

So how many spaces for parking should we have? What’s the ideal number and why?

Henry Grabar:

Well, I think that depends on your perspective and what your goals are, but I think that people who study this subject professionally, professional city planners, sometimes say that you want there to always be about 15% vacancy on a particular street or in a particular parking lot because when parking is full and there’s nowhere to park, then drivers will drive around in circles looking for someplace to park, and that is responsible for a lot of traffic and a lot of externalities that are associated with traffic like carbon emissions and local pollution, injuries, and so forth.

So I think maybe the ideal number of parking spots would be somewhat more than the number of cars. Although then again, it gets complicated because people tend to want to go to the same places at the same time. This is where you get into one of the fundamental problems with the entire car based system generally, which is that parking takes up a lot of room and it costs a lot of money. So to build enough parking for everybody who wants to park somewhere at a given time, which is basically what we’ve done in this country, requires really an astounding amount of parking and an astounding amount of investment. Also, well, it just takes up a lot of room as well.

Preet Bharara:

Is it fair that parking costs money? Should parking be free or does that also depend on what the goals are?

Henry Grabar:

There are some people in the parking reform movement, which is the subject [inaudible 00:16:33]

Preet Bharara:

Who knew there was such a movement? I did not even know.

Henry Grabar:

I know, right? There’s a Facebook page called The Shoupistas, which is full of the followers of Don Shoup, the scholar of parking reform.

Preet Bharara:

Pope, they call him the Pope, I believe.

Henry Grabar:

Yes, the Pope of parking reform. Then there’s the parking reform network, which is made up of architects and transportation planners and busy bodies at city council meeting who are really focused on this issue. Among these people, there are certainly people who believe that free street parking is theft and that parking should always cost money because the externalities of driving, pollution, crashes, carbon emissions tend to be undertaxed. So charging for parking is a way to claw some of that back and they should pay for the public land that they use up with their automobiles, with storing their automobiles.

I have a slightly more flexible take on it, which is that charging for parking should be used to achieve the ends we want from parking. One of the big problems with parking in this country is that it was often given away for free, which distorts the demand for it. If you give free curbside parking away for free, you will find that a lot of people use it in ways they wouldn’t if it had charged money in the first place.

Now, this was the original purpose of the parking meter was to manage the street, not, as subsequently happened, to raise a bunch of money, but actually to help organize the way that people park, so that the people who were parking for a longer amount of time would park further away and the people who were parking directly in front of their destination would pay a small premium for that great access.

So in that context, charging for parking, it’s not a question of fairness, it’s a question of management. Then with respect to private property, we’ll get into this soon I’m sure, but there are these laws that compel builders to provide parking. They don’t necessarily say it has to be free, but they require it to be built, and that functions as a massive subsidy. That may seem free to you because it’s given away by the developer when you buy a unit there, but it sure costs money to build, and that has actually been bundled into the price of your rent or the price of your condo.

Preet Bharara:

So obviously, the parking issues must be different depending on whether you’re in a rural area, suburban area or a city. Let’s talk about the cities first, and it’s what I know best. You already referred to New York City as having the most expensive land in the world. As between curbside parking and garages, you’re right about this, why does it make sense that curbside parking is either free or quite cheap as compared to a garage? I don’t know if you want to tell people who are not from New York how much it costs to park near Lincoln Center or near Times Square or the Theater District for three hours in New York.

Henry Grabar:

Oh, boy. I would guess it’s probably on the order of $40 to $70.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, it’s more than that.

Henry Grabar:

Does that sound right to you?

Preet Bharara:

It sounds low.

Henry Grabar:

Well, garages are very expensive in New York, and that’s because that’s what land is worth in New York City, and that’s actually the price that parking probably should be because that’s what it costs to provide it. That’s what it costs to buy a piece of land and devote it to storing automobiles. In comparison, street space is given away. Well, probably 95% of it in New York City is given away for free, and that which we do charge for in New York goes for I’d say maximum $4 an hour, which, again, creates this situation where there’s tremendous incentive to drive and drive and drive until you find a curbside parking spot. You’re going to save.

Preet Bharara:

Isn’t it your estimation, I think it’s your estimation, that some substantial percentage of drivers downtown in Manhattan on any given day are people looking for parking?

Henry Grabar:

There have been a number of studies of various cities that suggest that approximately a third of traffic in congested areas.

Preet Bharara:

They’re just people looking for a space. They’re not going from point A to point B. They’ve already arrived at their destination.

Henry Grabar:

Right, yeah, and I think that that clocks for me. Every time I drive someplace in Manhattan, you got to build in, what? I would safely build in 10, 15 minutes to make sure I have a place to leave the car. We could talk about, obviously, that that creates a lot of traffic congestion and the congestion, again, saps the city’s economy in a fundamental way, but on the other hand, the scarcity of parking Manhattan certainly also dissuades many people from driving in as well. So it goes both ways.

Preet Bharara:

So Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, should he immediately enact policies that would increase the price of parking at the curb and give subsidies to private garages so that people can park more cheaply in garages or does that not make any sense either?

Henry Grabar:

I would not start by giving subsidies to garages. My thinking is that if you were to charge even a little bit for curb parking on residential neighborhoods, you would see a lot of people reassess their thinking around car ownership. New York is a very anomalous place because most people who own cars do not use them to get to work. Let’s start by saying the majority of households in New York City do not own cars. Then within that minority that does own cars, there’s an even smaller minority that uses them to do their job or get to work every day.

So a lot of the cars that are stored on the streets of New York City are there. It’s car storage. That’s what a lot of this curb is being used for. I think in that context, it would make a lot of sense to charge for that real estate, both because you would encourage car owners to make decisions on the margin about, “Do we really need two cars in this family or could we get by with one? Do we need to park right here on this busy strip adjacent to a commercial district or could we park further away at a location where the parking is a little easier to find, is a little less convenient?” Perhaps it makes sense for some of these people to park their cars in garages.

As those changes begin to happen, I think you would see streets open up, people would find parking more quickly, and in the long run, the city would be less congested because fewer people would be owning cars and driving them. Once you have a car that’s parked in front of your house, you’ll use it to do errands that you might have otherwise done on foot. Everybody knows that feeling. Once it’s convenient for you, you will make those decisions that way.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s talk about some of these laws that you mentioned that I didn’t really have an understanding of until I read your book. By the way, I haven’t mentioned your book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, which is where a lot of these ideas are contained. When people build things like housing or shops or office buildings, et cetera, in almost every jurisdiction in the country, as you write, there is a requirement to build a certain amount of parking along with that new building. Can you explain how that works and why that is?

Henry Grabar:

It’s exactly as you said. There are complex tables embedded in city zoning codes that dictate how many parking spaces must come with, for example, a restaurant, an office, a home, and then there are a variety of more obscure uses like a tennis club or a funeral home or wastewater facility, what have you. All of these numbers were devised at mid-century when cities were overwhelmed by the number of drivers and the number of people trying to park, and they thought, “Well, let’s force the private sector to solve this problem for us, and let’s make sure that as new development occurs in the city, that those new neighbors who move in do not park their cars on the street and encroach on this precious public parking supply that we, the existing city residents, rely on and have claimed for ourselves.”

Preet Bharara:

Does this make sense?

Henry Grabar:

Well, it’s had a number of pretty bad effects on the American city, and we could start by talking about simply the cost of providing parking. $30,000 or to be precise, $27,900 is what it costs per parking spot to build a garage in 2022 according to WGI, which is a consultancy of parking construction experts, and that’s on average throughout the country. So when you look at places where construction is much more expensive, and especially if you look at what it costs to build parking underground, those costs rise significantly. When you require parking with every new building or renovated building, you are passing those costs on … You are raising the cost of construction and development, and you are eventually passing those costs on in the form of high rents and high home prices, and eventually making that part of the cost of doing business paying for all that parking that gets built. So that is super expensive, and that obviously has an enormous drag on how much it costs to build things in this country.

Preet Bharara:

One of the externalities here we should get to because the parking situation we’re talking about some people might think, “Well, it’s not that important. It’s only about parking.” What is the degree to which these parking rules cause people to oppose other good development of housing, other good projects? Could you explain that? Because that’s something that I had not appreciated, and it’s actually a big deal that goes much, much, much farther beyond parking itself.

Henry Grabar:

So parking is obviously a direct cost. 10% to 20% of your rent is going into this required parking if the required parking is getting built. The other thing though is that the reason the parking is required is because the neighbors do not want new people coming to the neighborhood if they’re going to be parking their cars on the street. Anybody who’s been to a community meeting in an American city or a new residential development is being discussed and tell you that when people think about the possibility of having new neighbors, they imagine them as coming in parking spot sized packages.

In fact, the concern about whether people are going to come and take your parking spots, your is in quotes there because it’s just parking on the street, it’s public, it belongs to everybody, but that concern is a major motivating factor in NIMBYism and in saying no to new apartment projects, and you see it constantly, and this is true both for projects that come with an adequate number of parking spaces according to the code, but it’s especially true for the infill, missing middle, affordable, vernacular housing that characterized most American cities until the post-war period. Brown stones, triple deckers, three flats, courtyard apartments, all this stuff was never built a top a pile of four stories of parking garage, and those are the projects that tend to arouse, actually the most opposition in these neighborhoods because parking has become such a political third rail, and people feel so entitled to those spaces on the street.

Preet Bharara:

When you say NIMBYism, of course you’re referring to not in my backyard ism, right?

Henry Grabar:

Yeah. So NIMBYism encompasses more than just parking, but has become such a major force in American political life that it seems to be redefining the population geography of the entire country because housing costs have diverged so significantly between the cities and states that don’t build, places like California, cities like Boston and New York, and the places that do like Dallas and Houston and Orlando, and the Sunbelt.

Preet Bharara:

You cite to the parking reform network, you’ve mentioned it already, and somebody who works there is saying part of the problem or the collection of problems associated with parking is this, quote, “We undervalue parking, we don’t share parking, and we don’t tell people where it is,” end quote. Then you go on to explain what each of those mean. Could you do that for us?

Henry Grabar:

Sure. So when people hear about how much parking there is in this country and they hear that we could pave an entire New England state entirely an asphalt, they say, “All right. Well, that’s bad, but how come it’s so hard for me to find a spot?” I think that’s a very fair question. One answer, of course, is that, well, a lot of the parking is located at a football stadium out six miles from town, and not a lot of it is located along this busy, vibrant, commercial corridor. By the way, no accident that those busy vibrant places tend to be short on parking. People like to be able to walk from one store to the next without crossing a huge parking lot, but I digress.

When people ask that question, I think there’s three answers. Why is it so hard to find a parking spot if there’s so much parking? The first one is that parking is too cheap. Again, going back to the concept of the parking meter. Many consultants who study these neighborhoods and perform parking studies, which is a constant demand of local governments across the country because they hear from businesses and residents that there isn’t enough parking, they can’t approve new developments until the parking situation gets remedied, and they do these studies and they find without fail that even on the busiest days, 40% of the spots are available, 60% of the spots are available.

The issue is that they’re often just not available right on that commercial strip in front of the restaurants and the businesses, et cetera. Now, what can you do about that? You can install parking meters. What parking meters do, if they’re priced properly, which is to say if they’re priced high enough to create vacancies, is they push people who are going to park all day to park a little further away. That cost for them, the cost of walking from a parking spot to their business or their place of employment gets amortized over the course of the day. If you’re parking for eight hours, a five, 10-minute walk means less to you. That way, if somebody who comes just for an hour or 45 minutes can always find a parking spot in front of where they’re going even if they have to pay a little bit for it. So charging correctly is a huge component in making sure that the parking stock, which is ample, gets effectively utilized in a way that there’s always a spot for someone when they want one.

Second is the issue of mismanagement and sharing. So the parking-

Preet Bharara:

What does that mean sharing and not sharing?

Henry Grabar:

Well, one thing that happened with these parking laws is that they required every single building to come with its own parking supply. So the parking stock is, by design, bifurcated between various businesses, homes, institutions, offices, et cetera. What this means is that if you are in a neighborhood full of residential buildings, for example, and there’s a few businesses, the residents may leave during the day and their parking may be empty, but people who arrive and come to the businesses can’t park in the condo parking lot. Similarly-

Preet Bharara:

I go to my dentist and there’s four spots. It’s a freestanding, like a residence in Westchester, and there are four spots, but there’s lots of other parking around, but they’re not for the dentist’s office, and that’s everywhere.

Henry Grabar:

Yeah, and everybody knows this. You drive into the parking lot and it says, “These spots are reserved for Sam’s Subs,” or whatever it is, but it’s 9:00 PM and you’re going to the movies and the sub shop has been closed for four hours, but you still can’t park there and-

Preet Bharara:

That should be easily fixable. Why can’t we fix that?

Henry Grabar:

Part of it is the law. All those businesses were required to provide that parking. So you’ve already got that situation, and until you get rid of those laws, they’re not allowed to say, “I’m going to open a restaurant with no parking, and I’m going to-”

Preet Bharara:

Wouldn’t it be a simple matter to allow free trade of parking? We allow people to trade rights to pollute, but we don’t let them trade parking spots. Does that make any sense?

Henry Grabar:

Some places have tried something along these lines, and it’s easier when you have the public sector there to mediate rather than a bunch of businesses trying to sort out amongst themselves. Santa Monica, California, for example, has this really charming downtown strip. What they do there is they say, “You open a restaurant here or a store here, you do not have to provide 45 parking spaces. We do not want you tearing down an adjacent structure to build a bunch of parking, but what we do want is for you to help pay for the public garage that sits nearby where everybody parks.” That’s a good way to get everybody who’s coming, at least if they’re going to be there for a few hours, into this big public garage. That way, you’ve effectively got these businesses sharing the parking, and then the parking can be utilized more effectively over time because what belongs to a business in the morning can belong to a restaurant at night.

Preet Bharara:

Then what about this last part? “We don’t tell people where the parking is.” I think I know what you’re getting at and people will recognize this problem, but could you explain that?

Henry Grabar:

Well, I think one thing that’s fascinating about parking is that it seems like so much of our lives have been optimized online. You can look up exactly what you’re going to order at the restaurant, and there’s a rating for every dish, and Google Maps will tell you exactly how long it’s going to take you to drive somewhere, and then parking is this totally opaque system that is really hard to understand, and it is not included in your driving directions and good luck figuring it out.

Preet Bharara:

Well, there’s a P. You can find, at least in New York City, you can find the big garages denoted with a P on Google Maps and on Waze, but that doesn’t tell you anything at all about street parking.

Henry Grabar:

Yeah, and it doesn’t tell you exactly where you should be parking for the amount of time and the price that matter to you, and all that has been the domain of local expertise. As a native New Yorker, I take some pride in that being able to say, “Oh, you’re coming here on a Sunday afternoon. Well, here’s where you’re going to be able to park, and here’s where it’s going to be tough, and here’s how much you’re going to have to pay,” et cetera, but if you’re running a system and you’re trying to make it used most efficiently by a lot of people who may not have that intimate familiarity with the particular rules on one street and few do, then you’ve got to make this really obvious to people.

So I think there’s a couple things that are happening on this front that are good. One is, obviously, cities can put up big signs saying, “Free parking is this way. Convenient paid parking is that way. The public garage is over here,” et cetera. The other thing is that there are these now digital intermediaries who are beginning to sort this out. I think that’s a step in the right direction as well because, ultimately, the idea that you’re going to drive somewhere and just go around in circles while you try and figure out where to leave your vehicle is ridiculous and, again, is associated with a lot of bad effects.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve been living and working in Manhattan, living in or working in Manhattan for over 30 years, 33 years, and I still get confused with the rules alternate side of the street parking and whether I can park on a particular street and for what hours. To be cynical for a moment, are those rules intentionally difficult and hard to follow because as you write and report, a huge amount of the revenue the city gets related to parking comes from parking fines rather than from parking taxes and the like?

Henry Grabar:

Yeah. I am cynical about the management of parking in big cities. Let’s start with alternate side, which is a particularity of New York, but one of the things that happens is they-

Preet Bharara:

Could you explain that to non-New Yorkers? What the hell is that?

Henry Grabar:

It’s this civic ritual of New York life that you have to move your car twice or even three times a week to allow the street sweeper to pass and clean the curb. So on these residential streets that otherwise have free parking, we might otherwise expect people to leave their cars for literally months at a time. Alternate side is the only thing making sure that you are still present in the city, that your car still works, et cetera. Of course, I don’t think that the street sweeper actually needs to come twice, three times a week to make sure the street is clean.

I think one of the reasons that that happens is because so few people, it’s so unlikely that everyone will move their car on a given block on a given day that the street sweeper, they need to do it twice a week just to ensure that they can get every spot on the street. I think this is true generally that parking enforcement is, while everybody thinks that they’re always being targeted, it’s pretty spotty and it’s pretty easy to park illegally and not get a ticket. So as a result, the fines tend to feel disproportionate because they need to be high to have any deterrent effect.

Preet Bharara:

Well, they always get me. I’ve been late by 45 seconds and I’ve gotten a ticket.

Henry Grabar:

So I got some data from New York City on fines and fees. It turns out that New York City basically collects twice as much in fines, which is to say parking tickets, as it does from meter and municipal garage revenues. This is backwards. We’ve designed a system where people are encouraged to break the law because there is so little parking available where it should be available. Again, this is an argument for better parking pricing because people are going to come there in their cars, and if you do not provide a space for them to park legally, they will park illegally.

Of course, the city does benefit from this in some way. There are a lot of costs associated with illegal parking and double parking, people parking in bike lanes. Lots of reasons that we should be trying to discourage those practices, but of course, the city does make hundreds of millions of dollars from it, and even there are some delivery trucks, which have a special program with the city that permit them to basically handle all these fines on mass with a reliable payer discount if they promise not to go to court. So it has been institutionalized, this idea that illegal parking is part of the cost of doing business in New York, and there’s no other way to do it.

Preet Bharara:

I think you write there are three or four companies, Amazon, Peapod, maybe a couple of others that represent a substantial percentage of all the fines related to parking in New York City.

Henry Grabar:

It’s massive. We’re talking a single box truck doing business in New York City can amass tens of thousands of dollars in fines a year. So that suggests a number of things. First of all, that’s just the times they get caught. So that’s part of it, but also, to me that suggests that the city desperately needs to create loading zones, and this is not just New York, but this goes for Boston, San Francisco, DC, et cetera. It is essential to create loading zones where this growing economic force of people getting things delivered, not to mention pick up and drop off from Mover and Lyft can pull over and not get a ticket, and also not be blocking traffic and not be blocking a bike lane because whatever you think of the ticketing, and if you think that’s unfair, that’s one thing, but it does cause an enormous amount of congestion to have all these cars illegally parked all the time.

I guess the conflict of interest there is that if the city does create loading zones, then if they make it easier for delivery trucks to park, they would lose hundreds of millions of dollars in fine revenue, but I would argue the cost of congestion is greater still.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Henry Grabar after this.

So I have a dumb question. When someone parks in a parking garage, a private parking garage and they get charged for that, that money goes to the owner of the parking garage company, but there’s a tax and the tax goes in part to the city, right? If you park on the street with a parking meter, the revenue from those parking meters goes to the city. Am I right?

Henry Grabar:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

So if they just increased the price of parking, and by the way, don’t yell at me if you don’t like this idea, but I’m just playing it out with my guest, if they increased in a rational way the price of parking and made it at least somewhat in line with what a private garage costs instead of being one-tenth of the price or one-fifteenth of the price, couldn’t they make up the difference in terms of lost revenue?

Henry Grabar:

Lost revenue from people no longer receiving those fines for being double parked [inaudible 00:41:52]

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, if parking is a route to not just car storage, but also revenue for the city, isn’t it more efficient to just charge people more for curbside parking, which doesn’t require having officers and cops to come and ticket your car?

Henry Grabar:

That sounds right to me when San Francisco tried something along these lines. San Francisco has a bunch of municipal garages downtown, and what they did was they raised the prices of the parking meters to try and free up spots in these busy locations, try and cut down on double parking, cut down on circling, et cetera.

Preet Bharara:

People freak out?

Henry Grabar:

What actually happened was lots of people started parking in the garage instead, and they inverted those prices and they made the garage cheaper than the street, which aligns actually with people’s preferences. Everyone would rather park on the curb in front of where they’re going than park on the sixth floor of some smelly garage, but you have to have the prices reflect that preference. So the meter should be more expensive than the garages. Now, obviously, New York has a lot of private garages. You can’t tell those people what to charge for it, but I agree with you to some extent that if you charge more for on-street parking, the revenue from the fines would surely go down, but of course, the revenue from the meters would go up.

To me, that seems like a better system all around and one that people have more faith in. I think one of the things that’s so irritating about parking is the unpredictability of it. You don’t know, you never know when there’s going to be something available for you or not. That’s a problem that could easily solved by charging the right price, a demand-based price for this precious street space.

Preet Bharara:

Is there an argument that we should make parking in cities just as difficult as possible either by removing spots from the curb, having fewer garages or charging very high prices because the goal, ultimately, is to be as car free as possible, both because of the environment and also because of wanting to have a nicer lifestyle in the city? I’m not saying that’s what I would propose, but is there an argument that you should do everything possible to reduce parking, to reduce cars?

Henry Grabar:

Well, it is certainly true that if you make it challenging to park, that fewer people will drive. Now, I think the conflicting thing that cities are dealing with is they’re weighing the positive effects of limiting traffic, which is to say cleaner air, fewer people getting run over or hit by cars, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, higher quality of life and nicer streets versus the right of access, which is also important. Of course, to the extent that people need their cars to get where they’re going, a functioning economy. Now-

Preet Bharara:

Right, but whose right of access? I’m somewhat ignorant here. Generally speaking, and not always, but generally speaking, let’s talk about Manhattan, not the other boroughs for a moment. If you have a car and you’re coming to work or shop or see entertainment in the city in a car, you’re not poor because you can afford, A, the car, you can afford to pay the tolls if you’re coming from outside of the island, and you can afford to pay the parking. Locals don’t have car. I didn’t have a car until I was 36 years old because I was living in Manhattan. So who are you disenfranchising if you take away the right of access by vehicle?

Henry Grabar:

Well, I tend to agree with you that I think the idea of the car as this blue collar symbol is a bit overplayed by New York City politicians. Statistics show that most people who drive to work in Manhattan do indeed have plenty of disposable income and that most people who don’t take subways and buses, and by the way, people who take buses are directly disadvantaged by the priority we accord to street parking because it prevents us from creating lanes dedicated to bus rapid transit. The average speed of a city bus in New York City is seven miles an hour. So there is a direct cost associated with that.

I think it is also true that where we’re at right now, there’s lots of jobs that still need to be done with cars, and there is also an unfortunate correlation between transit access and real estate prices. So it is true increasingly in Brooklyn, for example, that people are being priced out of the neighborhoods with good transit access and into places where they do have to depend on their cars.

Again, I think that’s a small minority of people, especially the ones driving into Manhattan, but I think with respect to the cost of parking, I think one thing that often gets understated is that if you drive for work, and let’s say you drive one of these delivery vans, there are a lot of costs associated with free parking. One of them, of course, is all the tickets you get because it’s impossible to find a space. Another one is you’re stuck in traffic constantly, which adds to the cost of doing business. Finally, perhaps the more abstract one, is that by allowing parking to become this political third rail, we have created an environment in which it’s acceptable to reject new neighbors and reject affordable housing projects in your neighborhood on the grounds of a parking shortage and that, again, is perhaps the largest consequence of our parking status quo and the most unfair.

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about two other quick things that are New York related and I guess city related that are consequences of our fetish with curbside parking. One is, and this is unpleasant for both people who are in New York and outside New York, and that’s the rat problem. As you write and others have suggested and as I’ve observed for decades in New York, one reason we have a rat problem in New York is that in the city, we pile up our garbage on the sidewalks instead of putting them in containers at the curb. My understanding of that is the reason is we would take away too many parking spots. Can you talk about that?

Henry Grabar:

Right. So for those of you who haven’t traveled to New York City, we have this rather barbaric practice of stacking up all the garbage in big pyramids of stinking, leaking garbage bags. The city has just released a study earlier this month saying that by taking away about 10% of the parking spaces on residential streets, we could get about 80% of the trash on those streets into containers, which would obviously free up the sidewalks and reduce all the food for rats, and besides have just produced, obviously, a nicer experience for anybody who’s walking down the street. I think most people’s reaction to this seeing this study is, “Never going to happen.” 10% of the spaces, the cost is simply too high.

Preet Bharara:

Because parking, parking, parking,

Henry Grabar:

I think this is a stand in for a larger issue, which is that if you were to frame the question differently and you were to say, “What do you think of this practice of leaving the garbage on the street? Would you like to see this change?” [inaudible 00:48:56]

Preet Bharara:

Everyone would say yes. From the original position, you would say yes.

Henry Grabar:

I think people might say yes, and certainly if the situation were reversed, and we had containers in the streets and people said, “You know what? We’re going to get rid of these containers. We’re going to create-”

Preet Bharara:

We need parking.

Henry Grabar:

“We’re going to create 10% more parking, but we will throw the garbage all over the sidewalk and we will also have a billion rats,” and people would say-

Preet Bharara:

That’s a very profound … You make a very profound point about change generally that often the rational is sacrificed because of the nature of the status quo, right?

Henry Grabar:

Status quo bias is very strong. People tend to let their desire for free curb parking get in the way of a number of things that at the end of the day they actually think are more important, and that includes cleaner streets, safer streets, better public space, places for kids to play, affordable housing. All this stuff is being hung up on this issue of curb parking. Obviously, there are a lot of people who really do care about curb parking and it is the most important thing to them, but there’s a lot of people who I think if they understand the trade-offs that are involved here would actually come around to the idea that, “You know what? Maybe it is worth giving up a couple parking spots to put the trash in a bin.” We will see there is a pilot about to get underway in Upper Manhattan that’s going to test this out. So we will see how people receive it and whether they think that the trade-off is worth their while.

Preet Bharara:

There’s a particular trade-off, and we’ll move on, that is at play right now, and that is one of the very, very few silver linings, if you can say that, about the pandemic. All of a sudden, there was a flourishing of outdoor seating, and many blocks started to look like Paris, not quite Paris because we have the garbage problem, but lots and lots of seating at restaurants, and some of them, many of them never had any outside seating at all, but the consequence of that is parking spots at the curb were taken away. Now that the pandemic has abated, I would like to see, and maybe I’m in a privileged position so I can say this, I’d like to see the outdoor seating continue and persist, but there’s a fight, I guess, about whether or not those should be returned to parking spots. How are we doing with that trade-off?

Henry Grabar:

It looks like New York City is going to decide that those patios can be in place during the summer months but not during the winter. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think there’s no reason that restaurants should necessarily have first dibs on curb space. That said, the way this program was rolled out, which made it really easy and cheap for restaurants to do this has produced this really cool geographic equity that never existed before with sidewalk seating in New York City.

Of course, there are more restaurants that have outdoor seating in Manhattan because there are more restaurants there, but there’s also a lot of them in the Bronx and in outer Queens and in Brooklyn and in Staten Island. I think those are places where this would not have happened if there had been permits to get, if there had been an annual construction and deconstruction period as there will be going forward.

So I’ll be sad to see this become a seasonal program because I think it will decrease the number of people who participate and it’ll decrease the types of restaurants and the types of neighborhoods that participate. All that said, I do think that when I started writing this book I thought it would be amazing if people could understand just how many things could be possible here at the curb, if we could stop for a moment and consider it for something other than the storage of private automobiles, and in that context, the restaurant thing has definitely moved the Overton window and not just in New York City, by the way. I was in Cincinnati last week and Cincinnati has beautiful patios set up in parking spots, and that was not the case five years ago.

Preet Bharara:

How are electric cars, electric vehicles going to change the landscape, not only for driving and the environment and all that other stuff that we generally talk about, but how is that going to complicate our parking crisis?

Henry Grabar:

That’s a great question. One thing about electric vehicles is that one of the top factors in determining whether somebody will buy an EV is whether they have access to charging at home. Obviously, most New Yorkers park their cars on the street, and that is also the case in places like Chicago and Philadelphia and San Francisco. Now, we could potentially provide some public charging along the curb, and New York City is trying to do that. They have built out a small network of curbside chargers, but they’re pretty expensive to install, and to imagine them in every single curbside space is financially speaking a total impossibility, and secondly would require permanently dedicating all that curb space to car storage, which I think is a moment when we’re starting to reconsider that would be a shame.

So it’s going to be really challenging. I think New York’s going to have to find a way to install these things at cost and also convince people to think differently about parking and try and share some parking because it’s never going to work that we have a charger installed for every car in this city. It would be inefficient and incredibly expensive if we were to try and do something like that, but on the other hand, having people charge at the street is going to involve a totally new approach to thinking about parking.

Preet Bharara:

Is part of the problem, particularly in the cities, is that our cars are too big? Now, you go to a European city and you’ll see lots and lots of these tiny little smart cars. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smart car in Manhattan.

Henry Grabar:

Yeah, it’s true. I think in terms of the parking supply, it is certainly true that if you drive a small car, it is easier to find parking. That said-

Preet Bharara:

Think of how many SUVs, think of how many SUVs you see in New York City. I don’t think you see that in other urban places around the world.

Henry Grabar:

One thing that’s happening there is people are responding to conditions that go beyond parking that have been created in America, which is to say gas is really, really cheap in America by the standards of [inaudible 00:55:07]

Preet Bharara:

Don’t ask Americans that. Don’t tell that to Americans.

Henry Grabar:

Well, I’m sorry but it is. It simply is by comparison to European countries or, for example, Japan, and that creates some incentives to drive bigger cars. The other thing is that in cities, there has been very little incentive to or very little action taken to create safer streets. I think this is part of the drive towards bigger cars is that people feel safer in bigger cars and the roads feel unsafe, and people respond to that and they respond by driving bigger cars. I don’t think necessarily that having slower speed limits and installing the infrastructure that makes it … Raised sidewalks, for example, this infrastructure that makes it safer for pedestrians, I don’t think that’s necessarily going to get people to buy smaller cars, but it does encourage people to use alternate modes of transportation. I think that’s a big part of the change that would have to happen if we were to deprioritize parking in New York City.

Smaller cars might be part of that too, but all of that has to come in concert with rethinking the way the streets function. Right now, there’s been very little effort to clamp down even on 18-wheelers, which these super long 54-foot trucks, which are technically illegal on most New York City streets, and yet you see them everywhere.

Preet Bharara:

For parochial reasons, we spend a lot of time talking about cities generally and New York City in particular, if you’re a listener and you’re living in a suburb or a smaller town somewhere and you’re involved in municipal government and know the mayor and know the people who run the town, for purposes of having better quality of life in those towns and/or protecting the environment and having better sources of revenue, all the reasons why city planning makes sense, what are the one or two things you would advocate for them to advocate for where they live, given what you’ve studied and you’ve learned?

Henry Grabar:

You asked me earlier if I think parking should cost something just as a matter of course, and here’s where I would say no, not necessarily. If you’re in a place where there’s one shop downtown and there’s a curb where people can park, and there’s only ever a couple vehicles there at a time, I don’t see why the town should put a bunch of parking meters there. That doesn’t make sense to me, but I do think parking policy can have a huge effect on small towns and especially suburbs. There’s two reasons for this. One is the parking requirement at this point is being rapidly undone in a lot of major American cities, not New York yet, but San Francisco, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Seattle, Portland. There’s a lot of urban places that are making a lot of progress on this, but suburbs generally have not followed suit, and that means that some of these rules are still holding back the development of, for example, missing middle housing, and suburbs are exactly the place where we really need to be increasing the housing stock and making room for more people to live.

The way we need to be doing that is with these types of missing middle forms that will diversify the housing stock, provide room for people to age in place, places for non-nuclear families to live, et cetera. Those buildings, again, are difficult and expensive to build when you’re required to include three parking spaces for every apartment. So that’s an important thing for suburbs.

The other thing is in small towns, they often have historic buildings. Historic buildings often can’t be reused and given a new life, unless they’re accompanied with all this parking, accompanied by all this parking. What that means is that to effectively turn your old county courthouse into a brewery or something like that, you need to demolish the buildings next door, and that has a really terrible effect on the urban fabric in these places.

Then finally, I guess there may be places where parking is not sufficiently in demand to charge for it at the curb, but there’s certainly lots of small towns and suburbs where that is the case. Again, you may have a downtown strip where you perceive you have a parking problem, but especially in these places, there’s probably ample parking two blocks away. So what you really need to do is find a way to just charge even a little bit for those downtown streets and get people to leave their cars for the medium and long term just a little further away. Those changes can be super important in ensuring that those small towns, small commercial strips remain accessible and vibrant.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Final question for you. I saved the most difficult question for last, Henry. It is an age-old philosophical question. I don’t know if it originated with Plato or with Socrates. Are you ready?

Henry Grabar:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

I think one of those two ancient philosophers asked the question, why do we park on a driveway and drive on a parkway? I’ve stumped Mr. Grabar.

Henry Grabar:

Let’s start with park on a driveway. The word parking comes from the original function of those curbside, what we now call parking spaces, which were originally little plots of greenery, curb trees and plants and flowers and such. So the reason that parking has its name is from the thing that it replaced, right? So it has this incongruously green name for what is unquestionably a pretty gray activity, and that is … So that’s the answer to that question. That’s why you park on a driveway.

Now, the other thing we should say about driveways is that that illustrates to me the fundamental fungibility of all this parking. Driveways are effectively the parking place in many single family homes, whereas the garages can be used as a tool shed, an office, a auxiliary bedroom or whatever. That to me just illustrates the fact that you need to be able to think flexibly about that garage space. No city or suburb should be requiring single family homes to maintain that space as a garage. If they want to turn that into an accessory dwelling unit, someplace that grandpa can live or that their young college graduate can live, they should be allowed to do that, and they shouldn’t have to provide new parking to go along with it because the driveway suit’s just fine.

Preet Bharara:

Then why do we drive in a parkway?

Henry Grabar:

Now, why do we drive in a parkway?

Preet Bharara:

You can pass if you’d like.

Henry Grabar:

Well, I think there’s an actual answer to that, which is that in-

Preet Bharara:

Is there?

Henry Grabar:

Yeah, because in the 1920s and ’30s when people like Robert Moses were building some of the nation’s first highways, they recognized that it was really challenging to build these high speed routes through urban areas and that it was a lot easier to build them through parks. So you wound up with a lot of roads going through parks. Additionally, people found it pleasant and thought it was fun to drive through these highly landscaped environments. It was considered a getaway.

Preet Bharara:

All right. Well, there you have it. Henry Grabar, congratulations again on your book. Super interesting, lots of issues that I at least did not thought about deeply, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. Thanks so much.

Henry Grabar:

Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Henry Grabar continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. We talk about the debate over congestion pricing and other ways to reduce the number of cars on the street. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Henry Grabar.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The Cafe team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake Kaplan, Nama Tasha, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.