Last Friday night, I made the eminently foolish decision to go place a takeout order from the Guadalajara Grill on North Oracle.

I knew it would be ridiculously busy (it always is), but I wanted to say “hi” to Senora Vera, who is one of the coolest people in all of Tucson.

She owns the place, along with the original location on Prince Road. A few years back, I coached her daughter, Maya, to two state championships in the high jump. Let’s just say that when I coached her, I wasn’t demonstrating the technique myself.

I turned right from Oracle into the parking area about a block away by the Tucson Federal Credit Union. I figured that I would have to walk, but as I drove north looking for a parking space, I was amazed that there wasn’t one open space. When I got to the end by the restaurant, I turned east onto Sahuaro Vista and there were parked cars as far as the eye could see on both sides of the narrow street.

I made the circuit a couple times and was ready to give up when a car pulled out from a space right in front of the restaurant’s doors. I pulled into the spot and felt this obscene sense of accomplishment. I looked back and saw that the guy who had been behind me was beating on his steering wheel in anger like he was William H. Macy in “Fargo.”

After placing the order and being told that it would be a half hour, I found a spot along the wall to lean against (there weren’t any open seats in the waiting area; no parking there, either). I always have a book to read in those situations — first, so that I can learn something and second, so I don’t have to talk to people. In a stroke of Serendipity (with a capital “S”), the book I was reading was “Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” by Henry Grabar.

It sounds like the nerdiest book of all time, something that my daughter (who is a civil engineer) would be reading. Actually, she is now; I finished it and gave it to her. It is one of the most jaw-dropping books that I have read in a long time. Among the stuff that I learned (in just the first couple chapters):

In the United States, more land area is used for parking than for housing. Think about that for a while; it’s insane.

More people die every year in the United States in disputes over parking than die in the entire world from shark attacks. (We’re all going to die, but I don’t want to die in a stupid way. I would hate to drown because I used to be a lifeguard at the beach, and I’ve always been a good swimmer. I don’t want to die from weather — lightning strike, frostbite. And I damn sure don’t want to die fighting over a parking space.)

If you teach at Cal Berkeley, you can get a free, reserved parking space on campus…if you win a Nobel Prize.

Between the years of 1950 and 1980, Los Angeles County added 850 new parking spaces…every day!

All the parking in LA County adds up to over 200 square miles.

Here in Arizona, the addition of a mandatory garage increases the cost of a new house by over 25%.

By best estimates, in America, there are six parking spaces for every single car. They’re just not where you need them to be.

Chapter by chapter, this book is a hoot and a nightmare. There is the story of the construction of a small apartment building in a small town in Southern California. After the unholy confluence of planning boards, zoning commissions and neighborhood groups did its worst, the builder of the modest 10-apartment building was forced to build an underground garage with 53 parking spaces in it.

Then there are the parking lot attendants in Philadelphia, who, one by one, formed a coalition of thieves that stole millions of dollars before finally getting busted. Oh, and how about the geniuses in Chicago who leased their city’s 36,000 parking meters to Morgan Stanley and a bunch of investors. The city actually lost money when the investors hiked the price of metered parking and had the nerve to bill Chicago for potential revenue lost whenever a street was closed for a street fair or a parade.

My daughter told me that the winds are blowing in the opposite direction these days. Many states and communities are doing away with minimum parking requirements. Attempting to address the affordable housing shortage and climate concerns, California has a new law banning minimum parking requirements for new commercial or housing developments if they are within a half-mile of a major public transit stop,

I highly recommend this book. It’s crazy!

When I got home, I turned on the TV. I’m finishing up the final season of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” In one scene, Mrs. Maisel’s ex, Joel, is buying a former convent, which he and his partner will be converting into a nightclub. His partner is skeptical of the deal, but Joel extols the virtue of the place — two stories, great location, and so on. The partner says, “It’s awfully expensive,” to which Joel replies, “We’ve got parking!”

This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2023.

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