A Funeral Oration for the California Parking Lot
There’s Honor in Anti-Parking Policies—But Killing Off-Street Spaces Also Means Losing Local Revenue, Gathering Spaces, and More
Friends, Californians, fellow drivers, stop honking your horns and lend me your ears.
I come to bury California’s parking lots, not to praise them.
The evil that abundant parking spaces do lives long after the ground is paved over.
So say the honorable officials and wise engineers of California. They tell us that parking consumes huge amounts of property that might be used more productively for business, housing, or transit infrastructure like bus or bike lanes. In L.A. County alone, parking covers 200 square miles. Most parking spaces are empty most of …
