The Importance of Car Culture in America

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When they made the game SimCity, where you build cities, it's a game I got kind of addicted to myself. They studied Google Maps to try to replicate as realistically as possible what cities look like. But they quickly learned that the parking lots in actual real cities are way too large. And this has a lot of consequences, right? Like a landscape that has as much surplus parking as the United States does.

For decades, urban planners have blanketed our cities with the cheap and convenient car storage known as parking. They've swapped sidewalks for strip malls and bulldozed bright, inviting storefronts to make room for dark, urine-scented parking garages. In some downtowns, more land is now devoted to parking than buildings.

Parking profligacy has left us with cities that are polluted and hostile to pedestrians; they're also increasingly unaffordable because legally required parking can drive up the cost of residential construction by 25 percent.

In "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World," journalist Henry Grabar dares to imagine a future in which we knock parking off its pedestal by enacting new laws, adopting new attitudes, and embracing new technologies (like e-bikes and autonomous cars) that make our cities greener, friendlier, safer, and more fun.