Transcripts For CSPAN2 Henry 20240703 : vimarsana.com

CSPAN2 Henry July 3, 2024

Shape our cities. And this is one of them. And they we see the troubles that we are running into every day and wonder to fix them. And we wonder, is this solution causing another problem down . And its its very complex and its very convoluted and everything connected. Henrys new book paved paradise offers compelling exploration of the forces that shaped our cities from the rise, the automobile, to the challenges of Housing Affordability and the urgent need for climate conscious urban planning. Please help me welcome the man can write sentences like this and really love this sentence you like. You wonder why parking is so important. Youre driving around and you just start getting so. Its like youre sweating. You want a parking so bad. He writes a parking space is nothing less than the link between driving and life itself. Please help me welcome. Tonights final. Its time we get a drink. Good evening. Thanks for that introduction. And thanks for upstaging me with these falcons. I we all just want to spend the next hour watching the falcons feeding. But this wont take long. Im just going to explain the entire of the american urban environment. You and i thank you for coming and really proud to be giving the albert pile urban lecture today. Everything ive heard, albert suggests that he have loved this topic and would have been just so ready to jump into a conversation and argue with all of us about parking all night. And i have no doubt that we could that we could do that so want to start with something that will break i think with the elevated theme that characterize the intellectual life of the Mercantile Library. And these seven season reality bonanza parking wars if you havent seen it for the most part this show follows the workers of the Philadelphia Parking Authority as theyve ticket and tow philadelphians cars and generally provoke and sometimes experience an extraordinarily excuse me, an extraordinary level of mental anguish. As you can probably imagine. When i started writing a book about parking status as a psychic third rail, i felt blessed to learn there were dozens of hours of footage, this kind of thing at its the tension in this show revolves around an unresolved question at the heart of the american urban experience to whom parking belong, who it and on what conditions cannot change hands. Two decades ago, donald shoup, the pope of parking studies and the first albert pilot irvin lecture speaker, observed that thinking about parking takes place in the reptilian cortex. The part of the brain said to govern aggression, territory reality and ritual display. And i believe that cognitive science has moved on from this concept, but it holds for parking sitting here in this Beautiful Library removed from the stress of the road. Your answer to the question of parking ownership may be simple. Let me say its public. It belongs to all of us. But from the behind, from the wheel of your car, you might see it. Otherwise you might say it, belongs to me. You see this assumption on on like neighborhood forums such as next door, where an unfamiliar parked car at a suburban curb can become the days subject of conversation in many cities, including cincinnati issue local parking permits as a way of legitimizing this claim. The parking belongs only to the people who live here, even your run of the mill Single Family home driveway plays a similar role. It offers access to a private garage course, but it also reserves piece of the curb for you you. After a snowstorm, a more fine grained system of curb ownership takes place in the person who shovels the spot, gets to keep it. Theres a blog, chicago, that catalogs the fantastic array of objects used in this practice folding chairs, children, toys, heavy machinery, nativity figurines. Ive always imagined the implication is that you or your car would be beaten with the object in question if you were to take the spot. Perhaps some of you have experienced this on one side or the other. I dont need to know which its hard to imagine. Another domain in which the City Government implicitly endorses vigilante justice. But thats what dibs or saves is when boss stern tried to limit this practice to 8 hours after a snowfall, a city councilman protested. The issue speaks to the basic principle what it means to be an american, he said. Like the gold miner and the pioneers, residents have a right to stake their claims. Will not surprise you to learn that dozens of american are killed over parking disputes every. I submit to you that the most important driver of parking is a deep sense of confusion over ownership and following from conflicting standards, entitlement and behavior. Its parking public private, somewhere in between. Conceived. There are some other maddening things about parking. Its not in driving directions, so it feels like a time penalty. The rules are confusing and so rarely enforced that getting a parking ticket feels both unlucky, unfair. Why me . Finally, parking is maddening because we have no choice but to drive the car. Maybe freedom, but not being able to park it turns it into a kind of a cage. But youre probably thinking of figuring out the source of this irritation is. Easy. Theres just not enough parking. Well, fair enough. Sometimes someplace there isnt enough for a driver to find a spot immediately in front of their destination immediately upon arrival. Parking people like to say drivers want parking to be free, convenient and, available. Think of it as a venn you can often hit of those three free and convenient but not available. Well, thats parking when you show up to a hot restaurant downtown at 8 p. M. And all the spots are taken convenient and available, not free. Thats parking front of a hot restaurant downtown that has parking meters free and available but not convenient is where many of us wind up parking because we dont want to pay for it, myself included. In other words, a standard for parking are very, very high. We dont want to pay we dont want to wait. We dont want walk. Universities. The best parking is doled out along a stop status hierarchy at uc berkeley, for example to win a reserved parking place must win a nobel prize. So i dont know what what what what is required here at the library and it would be unimaginable for us to hold other good to this standard but the problem certainly not that we dont have enough parking in fact there is astounding amount of parking in this country as many as eight spots for every car. And of course, not all of the cars are parked at the same time. Even as someone who set out to write a book about how much for parking there is in this country. I was a bit shocked by these numbers, so i will digress momentarily from the difficulty of finding a parking space and give you a sense of just how much parking the is in los angeles county. You see it right. There are 19 million Parking Spaces. Its five for every household. Its percent of the incorpoted in the county. Its more land than the moving lanes on the streets. The freeways put together in silicon valley, the wealthiest region of the United States, parking is 13 of the land. There are 15 million spots in the bay area, enough to wrap a parking lane around the twice smaller the city. The more parking there is. Generally speaking, seattle has five spots per household. Des moines, iowa has 24 househd peer parcels. In other words, properties devoted exclusively parking make up 28 of the land in louisville, 29 of downtown kansas city. And that dsnt include garages or underneath buildings or curb parking. You can also see atlanta and philadelphia here. Also, plenty of parking in buffalo, new york, where over half of downtown property was devoted to storing cars. The reformer, patrick mcnichol, joked, quote, if our master plan is to demolish all of downtown, then were only halfway there. If you look very closely, there are still some buildings that are standing standing in the way. Parking, progress. And its not just buffalo. There is more land used for storing each car in this country than there is for each person in the midaughts. When the team of programmers at maxus were on the first new simcity game in a decade, they studied american municipal architecture, politics and urban design to try to produce a compelling similac room lead designer still in the brand used google earth to measure his surroundings. The Biggest Surprise he found was the size of the parking lots. When i started measuring out our local grocery store, which i dont think of as being that big i was blown away by how much more space there was for parking lot rather than actual store. He that was kind of a problem because we were originally just going to model cities, real cities but we quickly realized that there were way too many parking lots in the real world and that our game was going to be really boring if it was proportional in terms of parking lots in the game. He said they to imagine that the parking was underground, we had to do the best we could and still make the game look attractive. So if theres so much parking then is it so hard to find a spot . The answer lies in this question of ownership. The. The parking problem is old as the road itself. In the seventh century b. C. , the assyrian king sennacherib posted signs that read royal road, let man decrease it under penalty of death and public impalement. So you can stop complaining about your parking tickets. Julius introduced off street chariot parking in rome to reduce traffic. 17th century new york established a towing service to clear the streets of animals. You could get your pig back from the pound for a florin or your horse for two and a half. And in fact, the terms dog pound and tow pound both come from this shared history of unclaimed property up until the invention, the automobile. However, the temple temperamental nature of horses was its own form of regulation. The advent of the car and especially cars that could be left outside in all weather for days or weeks. A time turned the problem into a major dilemma. Not only did merchants country folk quickly abandon horsepower in the first few decades of the 20th century, wealthy commuters could drive themselves ditching the unwashed, the pickpockets and the bustle pinchers on the trolleys americans enthusiasm. For this new mode of transport was overwhelming and immediate. In 1920s, muncie, indiana, one woman spoke for a nation when she said she had bought a car before installing indoor plumbing. Because you cant go to town in a bathtub. What followed were . Four decades of interminable traffic jams as cars swarmed downtown streets. Observers believe the root of the traffic problem was parking a large share of the traffic was caused by looking for parking. And another share was caused by people who up. And double or even triple parked. And so by the time the end World War Two cleared the way for the of the nations cities, everyone was convinced that parking was a crisis. In a postwar report on decentral the flow of Business People and money to the suburbs, the urban land institute, the National Organization of Real Estate Developers concluded that parking was the important single problem facing Central Business districts of large cities. When i first came across this accounts of the midcentury, like this cartoon you see here, which in case you cant see the label on the gorilla, says Downtown Parking problem, i could barely believe it because between crises of racial inequality, endemic pollution, ramshackle housing, job loss and crime that characterized the urban trajectory after the Second World War newspaper editorials and conference keynotes focused on parking yes, a General Motors video from the 1950s. Give yourself the green light. Neatly represents the conventional wisdom of the postwar era. Build more parking and what brings up store today is parking space. One merchant says it is important to volume as shelf space and display. Best investment a town can make lots of parking and the rise of the suburbs gave this problem new urgency. Fix your parking. The thinking went or become obsolete. The idea that parking was an elixir to fight suburbs sapping urban population and tax revenue was commonplace. At this point, cities had two choices. They could try to manage parking demand by charging for parking, sprucing up Transit Service, encouraging carpooling and building walkable places, jobs, homes and amenities were close by. They had a new the parking meter invented in 1935 by an oklahoma newspaper editor. Noticed that all the best parking spots were taken by employees. They would write, they would arrive in the morning and park all day. And then there was nothing free during the day. Charge even a little for parking and the all day. Parkers would park a five minute walk away, leaving the premium spaces. This interface between the street and the buildings free for shoppers. Clients and deliveries. Parking meters were held in their time as a miracle. But of course, cities chose another path. They chose to focus parking supply. Parking lots settled into the wreckage of urban renewal. Publicly funded garages were put up downtown. Parking meters fell out of favor. And Transit Service began to disintegrate. Mixed use. Midrise development was redlined out of existence. Most importantly cities began requiring every new or renovated building to have its own parking supply. In this, they began a long transfer of parking from a public on streets or in municipal garages to a private one, required every home and business incapable of managing their streets and curbs. Cities. The private sector to take care of car parking. This decision would have serious consequences. Cities were about to come up with a very complicated and unwieldy answer to the question who owns that parking space. Chronologically speaking, we now in 1970, curbs are made free or cleared for faster, and their critical as urban access is limited by either decision. For builders zoning parking is ubiquitous. You can understand what planners were thinking when they established these rules. They could have the private fix the parking problem instead of city tax dollars funding tax exempt garages. Developers be forced to build the parking themselves. Nearly every city adopted a long complex that dictated how many parking spots had to accompany every single use from Apartment Buildings and schools to donut shops, nail salons, notaries Funeral Homes . Yes, they really are that specific. In fact, youre looking at a popular parking manual on screen. Tag yourself. I am a coffee donut shop with a drive thru window. But theyre so specific. I mean look at some of these Marijuana Dispensary store Building Materials and lumber supply judicial complex. Goes on and on. Here in cincinnati, for example. The code includes the following rules. One spot for every 250 square feet of a pool room, one for every 150 square feet of a bingo parlor, five for every lane and a bowling alley, one for every two berths in a marina, one for every 250 square feet of a quote, sexually oriented business. And no, i understand why that needs its own parking regulation either. I dont think planners could have imagined how effective these policies would be going to run through some of the consequences of this misguided approach to parking. The. Most dramatic consequence of asking the private sector to take care of car storage is in housing. Anyone wants to build a small Apartment Building in the United States must first confront a multivariate financial geometry problem that begins with how many Parking Spaces can fit on the lot. The size, quantity and shape of the housing. Not to mention its price, follows from their sometimes with just one parcel. It can be hard to make work at all by lot next door, and you could unlock some economies of scale like a driveway with stalls on either side by four parcels and well. Most small Time Developers cant afford four. Even if they could find four. Adjacent properties. Sale. Parking is immovable. Object at the heart of neighborhood architecture. As a result of these rules, we have simply stopped building small buildings. Parking requirements have helped to trigger an level event for. The bite sized infill apartment like row houses, brownstone urns and triple deckers that made the American City in the early 20th century. The production of buildings with between two and four units fell, but fell by more than 90 between 1971 and 2021. More means less housing because, parking takes up space and costs money to build. Quite a lot of money, in fact, building a standalone garage is rarely profitable. Required parking adds tens of thousands of dollars onto the cost of every single american apartment or home, imposing a half 1,000,000,000 penalty annually on tenants who dont drive because pay for that parking in their rent regardless. And for every completed building with a bunch of parking included, there is a blueprint for an unbuilt structure that pencil out. So this is the valley of the high parking requirements. On one side, on the right, you see properties in expensive areas like downtown cincinnati to justify costly, structured or even subterranean parking, which can cost 100,000 a space. On the left, you see a low density urbanism with ample room to park. You dont see much in between the valley of the high parking is not a fertile place. Our laws limit housing and require parking. And as a result we have a parking and a housing shortage. A second consequence of making a parking spot as mandatory as the front door has in architecture. For a century american, architecture has evolved in tandem with parking laws as increasing quantities of required parking have developers to move from the 20th century vernacular. I just mentioned corner taverns storefront groceries, row houses, flats, triple deckers, bungalow, etc. To fast food chains, Big Box Stores and houses where the primary architectural is, the garage door where la values are high enough. You get the parking podium building. The most famous example might be marina city in chicago, which you can on the left. But there are also plenty of examples here in downtown cincinnati where when the land values are not so high, you ge

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