Customer Reviews

Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture (Center Books)

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Parking, possibly one of the most boring things to talk about at any discussion, yet this one issue has revamped entire cities, affected how localities spend money, and changed the social and business climate in neighborhoods throughout the US. This book gives a comprehensive chronology of automobile parking in the US throughout the 20th century. The book shows how parking, and the space required for it, is often underestimated, but once allocated for, changes the surrounding environment in many ways that are often harmful.

The book shows how city blocks fall prey to parking, how the presence or absence of it affects surrounding businesses, how it affects flow of both cars and pedestrians, and how an entire business has grown up around the provision of parking to communities. The book shows the development of parking (structures, theory, laws and regulations) throughout urban, rural and suburban areas throughout the 20th century.

Significant events are included, such as the invention of the parking meter in Oklahoma City, the debate over angled versus straight-on stalls, the rise of the parking garage industry, and changes in city rules and regulations over parking. The book also provides several case studies showing how specific cities have been changed due to parking concerns. These include Detroit, L.A., and Boston.

The book is missing several things though concerning this issue. First, the book does not cover how cars have been designed vis-a-vis parking requirements. Second, the book does not give firm numbers as to the costs of different types of parking lots and how this depends on the surrounding architecture, ground, cityscape, and climate. Last, the book should provide statistics comparing how the different states and cities have dealt with parking issues, and how this correlates with rates of car theft, car accidents, automobile collisions, and automobile pollution.

Overall, this is a good book to learn about a largely unknown topic. I recommend it, though it can be quite boring to read.

Let me start by saying two things: First, I am fascinated by America's car obsession and associated land use; and second, I could not finish this book.

I have really enjoyed several books on this subject, but "Lots of Parking" seems to be just a list of statistics about how many parking spaces were available in one particular city over the 20th century. If you flip through the diagrams of this city (which are legion), you get the idea that the downtown core has been given over to parking garages. Okay. That should take something like five to ten pages. The rest is all a weird assortment of anecdotes and statistics; the authors are just showing off how much research they did with no overarching narrative of what is happening to our cities and the people who are parking the cars in all those parking spaces.

It seems like if you're looking for some statistics, you could bypass the book and do the research yourself; the source materials probably aren't as dry as this book.