Decoder Ring: Why You Can’t Find a Damn Parking Spot

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4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Parking is one of the great paradoxes of American life. On the one hand, we have paved an ungodly amount of land to park our cars. On the other, it seems like it’s never enough. Slate’s Henry Grabar has spent the last few years investigating how our pathological need for car storage determines the look, feel, and function of the places we live. It turns out our quest for parking has made some of our biggest problems worse. In this episode, we’re going to hunt for parking, from the mean streets of Brooklyn to the sandy lots of Florida. We’ll explore how parking has quietly damaged the American landscape—and see what might fix it. This episode was written by Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. It was edited by Willa Paskin, who produces Decoder Ring with Katie Shepherd. We had extra production from Patrick Fort and editing help from Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director. Thank you to: Jane Wilberding, Rachel Weinberger, Donald Shoup, Andrés Duany, Robert Davis, Micah Davis, Christy Milliken, Fletcher Isacks, Victor Benhamou, and Nina Pareja. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at [email protected] If you haven’t yet, please subscribe and rate our feed in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. (Even better, tell your friends.) If you’re a fan of the show, sign up for Slate Plus. You’ll be able to listen to Decoder Ring without any ads—and your support is crucial to our work. Go to www.slate.com/decoderplus to join Slate Plus today. Decoder Ring is now available on YouTube. Listen here: https://slate.trib.al/ucMyTst Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The other day I did something foolish. I drove into Manhattan. It was foolish because then
0:19.0	I needed to find a place to park. Oh, I think I see a spot. It's right there. Oh, it's
0:25.8	sorry, it's a hydrant. Someone was just blocking the hydrant. So, okay, if you drive, you know the
0:32.6	feeling of looking for a spot and not being able to find one. Okay, no, we're finding a parking
0:37.8	space. Okay, then we can go to the museum, but we have to find a parking space first, okay?
0:42.4	You know that frustrating, powerless sensation that your one precious life is slipping through
0:49.1	your hands because instead of living it, you are stuck in your goddamn car looking for
0:54.9	a parking space. Oh, look, this person looks like they're, let me let me roll down their
1:01.0	way. Let's do it here here. Hello? Are you are you leaving? No, thank you, thank you. Oh, here's
1:11.9	this person's leaving. Do you think we can get it? Do you think we can get it? Oh, no, this guy
1:16.6	just got his purse. All right, all right, all right. It's horrible. And no one knows that better
1:21.7	than my colleague, Henry Grabar. Many Americans say finding a good parking space is the difference
1:27.9	between a good day and a bad day. Henry's the author of the new book, Paved Paradise,
1:33.8	how parking explains the world. Okay, everyone knows a lot about parking. Everyone's an expert
1:40.2	because we've all done it our entire lives, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about it
1:44.4	recently and something that we all do and that everyone hates, according to one survey,
1:49.9	even more than going to the dentist. Parking is a big mess and doing it sometimes last 15 minutes
1:56.8	and lands you six blocks from the museum. But I've come to see that it's one we've got ourselves
2:01.8	into and one we can get ourselves out of. So you mean we should build more parking spaces?
2:06.6	Absolutely not, because trust me, if America has enough of anything already, it's parking.
2:20.6	This is Dakota Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. And I'm Henry Grabar. Parking is one of the great
2:26.7	paradoxes of American life. On the one hand, we have paved an ungodly amount of land to park our cars.
	...

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