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99% Invisible

99% Free Parking

99% Invisible

SiriusXM Podcasts and Roman Mars

Design, Arts

4.828.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2010

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s weird how much anxiety comes from parking in a city. Beyond the stress of looking for parking, you must contend with the frequently unreliable meters. The signage can be indecipherable. As a point of interaction with your municipality,

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment.

0:10.0

UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find

0:14.2

transformational solutions.

0:16.1

It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things.

0:20.1

Find out more at 21st century.

0:21.9

UC Davis. edudavis dot edu

0:28.0

this is 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars

0:38.0

99% of car trips in the US end in a free parking space. But if there's one thing that Urban Planning and Parking Guru Donald Schoop wants you to understand, it's that so-called free parking. parking Everything you do has a bit of the cost of parking embedded in it.

0:54.1

Everything except one thing.

0:55.7

Except in your roller's driver.

0:57.3

In the suburban environment, free parking is a given.

0:59.9

Having a massive tarmac that can comfortably fit a fleet of cars and also land a 747 is a huge part of the suburban landscape.

1:08.8

But even in urban areas, we are subsidizing paid parking spaces because the rent on them is below market value.

1:16.6

We also collectively pay for parking with time.

1:19.4

Cruising for parking wastes time.

1:22.3

We've all done it.

1:23.2

You go to a place and you see the price of all street parking

1:26.3

is maybe $5 an hour and it's 50 cents an hour on the street.

1:30.7

Well, you'll circle the block until you see somebody going out.

1:33.6

Yeah because parking in a lot is for quitters.

1:36.1

If you do it everybody else is probably doing it it all adds up.

1:40.4

Donald Schoop studied the amount of cruising for parking in a 15 block business district near UCLA

...

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