This book about parking will change how you see the world

Los Angeles Times

24-05-2025

My favorite books fall into one of two categories: novels that immerse me in another world, or nonfiction works that transform how I see our world.
When I read the latter, I share what I learned from the book with my partner for months afterward. She jokes that these books become my personality, but it's not really a joke. In grad school, a professor asked us to each share a fun fact about ourselves, and I shared that my favorite book is about parking minimums. (I was studying business, not urban planning, so no one else seemed to find this very 'fun.')
When given the chance to write this newsletter, I knew I had to convince subscribers to check out 'Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World' by Henry Grabar. True to the title, it will change how you see the world — it did for me, at least.
Today, I talk to Grabar about why he became fascinated with parking policy, whether L.A. can pull off a car-free Summer Olympics in 2028 and how the current White House administration is affecting the future of American transportation. I also share some of my other favorite books about transportation and urban planning before checking out the latest news in the book world.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
You cover various urban issues for Slate. Was there a book that inspired your interest in these topics?
The first thing I read about city planning that made me feel like this was a real subject of inquiry and study was Jane Jacobs' famous book, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.' She even has a passage about parking lots as 'border vacuums' and the way that they kind of suck the life out of the surrounding streets. I read that when I was probably 17.
My direct inspiration for 'Paved Paradise' came more out of my reporting for Slate. It just seemed that beneath every single subject, there was a story about parking. Then I learned that many people in the field had already devoted their careers to studying parking. But that just meant there was a lot of interesting material there and a big gap between what professionals understood about the importance of parking and what the general public saw as its role.
You mentioned Jane Jacobs' book. What are some of your lesser-known favorite books about transportation and urban planning?
'Family Properties' by Beryl Satter is a great book about race and housing in Chicago.
'Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age' by Lizabeth Cullen is a biography, but it's also an urban renewal history that offers an interesting and nuanced perspective on the aims of the urban renewers.
'The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York' by Suleiman Osman holds many interesting lessons for our cities today.
As a famously sprawling city, L.A. features prominently in Paved Paradise. Since the book came out, city leaders have promoted the idea of a car-free Olympics. Do you think that's feasible?
That would be great. I hope they stick to that aim. It's going to be challenging, of course, but at the same time, if there's one thing we know about mega-events, it's just very, very difficult on a spatial level to get everybody where they're going if everyone arrives in a single-family vehicle.
I was at the Olympics in Paris last year, where I met [L.A. Mayor] Karen Bass very briefly. She seemed inspired by what was happening there. But it's hard to make a point-by-point comparison between Paris and Los Angeles because they're such different cities. At the same time, I do think planners in L.A. grasp this will be a much more fun event if it can summon some of that public-spiritedness that was on display in Paris, where the venues and the fans zones were all connected, rather than these isolated sites that are only accessed by car.
Since you published your book, Donald Trump has returned to the White House. To what degree does the federal government affect how much, at a city level, we are able to chip away at our parking-dependent infrastructure?
The federal government is a huge player in the way our cities and streets look. There are a lot of city and county transportation departments wondering what will happen with these projects where money was allocated by Washington or they were expecting it to be allocated later.
If there's any silver lining to it, to accomplish their transportation goals, cities are going to have to do more with less and rethink some of the policy decisions they've taken for granted that are in their control, like parking policy.
Is there another topic in this realm that you hope to turn into a book someday?
I'm working on another book that follows the construction of a series of multifamily buildings from start to finish. By embedding with these projects as they make their way through the acquisition of the land, the design of the building, the zoning, the permitting, the financing and finally the construction, I'll be able to identify and illuminate some of the barriers to having enough housing that go beyond whether it is permitted by zoning, which I know is a hot topic in California.
I'm trying to look across the country because this is increasingly a national problem, and there are variations from place to place in the issues that come into play.
Now for some other books that have, to varying degrees, become my personality…
'Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet' explains how highways affect wildlife in ways both obvious (roadkill) and obscure (traffic noise pushing birds away from their habitats). Author Ben Goldfarb also highlights the creative solutions road ecologists are coming up with to help animals navigate our car-centric world.
If you've had an address your whole life, you've probably never thought much about it. 'The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power' changed that for me. Author Deirdre Mask digs into the consequences of not having an address, the dark reasoning behind why we began numbering homes and so much more.
In 'Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation,' author Paris Marx pokes holes in many of the silver-bullet transportation solutions we have today, from autonomous vehicles to electric scooters, arguing these efforts often overlook the most vulnerable in our society and sometimes create more problems than they solve.
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's buzzy book about Joe Biden's diminished capacities and the associated cover-up is 'reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids,' Leigh Haber writes in her review of 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again.' Times television and media business reporter Stephen Battaglio spoke with Tapper about the book. 'I have never experienced the ability to get behind the scenes in so many different rooms as for these recountings as I was for this book,' the CNN anchor said. 'I felt like people needed to get this off their chest. It was almost like they were unburdening themselves.'
Media mogul Barry Diller's memoir, 'Who Knew,' hit shelves this week. Here are the four biggest revelations.
In his new book, 'Is a River Alive?,' Robert Macfarlane questions the way we treat nature by visiting three threatened rivers in different parts of the world.
With his 40th novel, 'Nightshade,' out this week, author and former Los Angeles Times reporter Michael Connelly shared what keeps him writing at 68 years old.
In his new book, 'Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight,' David A. Kessler argues Big Food has purposefully engineered ultraprocessed foods to be addictive. The Times spoke with Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, about healthy long-term weight-loss strategies, guidelines for using GLP-1s safely, the body-positivity movement and improving lifespan.
If you haven't gotten enough book recs by this point in the newsletter, The Times has also compiled 30 must-read books for summer.