This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

If you have even a passing familiarity with Los Angeles,

you've probably heard this before. In LA nobody walks.

LA is a city of drivers, a place that feels purpose-built for cars,

and to fit all those cars, you need a lot of parking.

It's one of the greatest concentrations of parking in the world.

That's Henry Grabar, author of a new book called Paved Paradise How Parking Explains the World.

I think in LA parking has a special place in the mind because we think of LA as a sort of

of an iconic place to drive with its famous freeways and its palm line boulevards and all that.

So I think it's a place where perhaps you get the highest level of contrast between the

kind of utopian idea of driving and the dirty reality that is looking for a parking spot.

In LA, that dirty reality plays out all the time on the local news.

Spists are flying in a South L.A. parking lot in an apparent argument over a parking space.

The more spectacular ones tend to make the news if there's a video and you know, two guys fighting with baseball bats and somebody runs the car

into a storefront like that's gonna make the news but I think a lot of run-of-the-mill

parking fights don't. America has as many as eight parking spaces for every car, but despite all of this abundance,

we are constantly fighting with each other about parking.

And most of that fighting happens in rec center basements and

city council chambers. You see people fighting over parking in that context in

for example community meetings, discussions about zoning, about parking requirements,

about what gets built in their neighborhood, because everybody is afraid of new residents encroaching

on the parking stock.

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