There is no question that American culture is a car culture. And if everyone needs a car to get around, they also need some parking when they arrive where they are going. This book delves (deeply) into how parking has influenced the way homes and cities are designed, and wonders aloud if it isn’t the right time to do something better.
There are some great quotes in this book. The first one that caught my eye was explaining the parking rules in various cities in America, and how they are often incomprehensible even to the locals, and representative of the self-interested clusterfuck that is American parking policy.
Reading about this policy and how it came about was pretty interesting. I think the target of this book is the people involved with parking policies or town/city design, rather than the average Joe. But it is eye-opening how decisions made so long ago have had such a lasting (negative) impact.
The book was written recently, so the influence of the COVID pandemic is included here, and this reveals the positive changes that the pandemic brought – and gave me a little hope.
As for me the book helped me realize how lucky I am to live in a place where I don’t really need a car, and could certainly live without it.
Sometimes this book went a little too far into historical details and I felt occasionally like the writer was having so much fun telling his stories that he lost sight of how the reader might be feeling about it. The full title of the book is “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World”, but the second part of the title wasn’t really delivered. The book explains a lot about America, but I thought there might be a bit more on how other countries/cities around the world deal with the automobile.
Next I am reading Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili.
