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

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Society & Culture, Business, News

3.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From our colleagues at Decoder Ring:

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.

Your regular What Next programming resumes Tuesday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone, it's Mary Harris. It's a holiday weekend, so we're taking a little break from the news and dropping you one of our favorite other Slate podcast.
0:12.0	This time around, we're listening to Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin, and her guest is Henry Grabar.
0:17.8	You've probably heard on our show one or two times. He's super great.
0:21.7	This time,
0:28.3	they are figuring out the cultural mystery of parking. Henry just wrote a book about parking. He's obsessed with it. And he's trying to answer the quintessential first world problem question.
0:33.8	Why is it so hard to find a damn parking spot? It turns out there are more than enough empty spots to go around, way more,
0:40.3	and our endless quest for parking has made some of our biggest problems worse.
0:45.5	All right, here's the show.
0:50.7	Boy, that's a cake unit. Yeah. The other day I did something foolish.
1:01.5	I drove into Manhattan.
1:04.3	It was foolish because then I needed to find a place to park.
1:08.2	Oh, I think I see a spot.
1:09.6	It's right there.
1:10.6	It's... Oh, it's sorry. It's a hydrant. Someone was just
1:14.5	blocking the hydrant. So, okay. If you drive, you know the feeling of looking for a spot and not
1:21.7	being able to find one. Okay, no, we're finding a parking space. Okay, then we can go to the museum,
1:26.7	but we have to find a parking space first, okay?
1:28.8	You know that frustrating, powerless sensation that your one precious life is slipping through your hands
1:36.8	because instead of living it, you are stuck in your goddamn car looking for a parking space.
2:17.7	Oh, look, this person looks like they're... Let me roll down their one. Let's see. Here, here. Hello? Can you... Are you leaving? No. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, here's this. Like, this person's leaving. Do you think we can get it? Do you think we can get it? Oh, no, this guy just got his first. All right, all right, all right, all right. It's horrible, and no one knows that better than my colleague, Henry Grabar. Many Americans say finding a good parking space is the difference between a good day and a bad day. day. Henry's the author of the new book, Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World.
2:23.3	Okay, everyone knows a lot about parking.
2:26.2	Everyone's an expert because we've all done it our entire lives.
	...

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