Parking Puts It On The Map

Cars distort our sense of place

The other day, driving home, I passed a new mixed-use development anchored by a Wegmans supermarket—probably my favorite supermarket chain.

“Oh wow, right, we have a new Wegmans!” I remembered. “I should go shop there!” For a second, I puzzled over why I hadn’t gone yet, and why I had in fact forgotten it was even there. Was I just losing my memory? Oh, wait, no, it came back to me: the parking lot here is supposed to be very tight.

I literally forgot we had a big nice new supermarket 10 minutes away, because it didn’t have a huge, convenient parking lot.

I didn’t ever try to go. I had actually been excited to visit on opening day or maybe opening week. But the Facebook comments on a news item about the supermarket were flooded with complaints about the cramped, overcrowded parking garage. And that was that. The supermarket might as well not exist. There are lots of new developments with supermarkets integrated into apartment buildings around Northern Virginia. I look at them with this hint of curiosity. I don’t think I’ve ever visited any of them.

There’s a mental block here that, obviously, I was susceptible to, but which I now recognize. The simple fact of limited parking, which is a pretty small inconvenience all told, creates this invisible mental wall—this feeling that this is a place you’d better shy away from. Or even, that it’s not for you, or it’s off limits.

For many years I had that sort of feeling about big cities. To this day I feel a little nervous feeling passing a big city on the Interstate, knowing that if I were to pull off, I would not be able to stop easily. I always want to get off I-95 and stop in Philly’s Chinatown to bring some Chinese food home. But the parking situation makes that a major project, so I never do it.

My sense that I should be allowed to bring a car into a downtown with no friction or inconvenience always appeared to me as the city’s vague hostility to me. The city was imprisoning me in my car when I wanted to stop and get out wherever I wanted.

I realized at some point that I had inherited a sort of ideology of suburbia, which merges cars with people and stuff. In Catholicism, a piece of bread becomes the body of Christ. In suburbia, a human being becomes a car.

This ersatz transubstantiation clouds our perception. I always intuitively felt that cities were hostile to cars, which was to say, me. Now I understand that the car, in such a setting, is the freedom to move, but not the freedom to stop.

I think a lot about what suburbanites really mean when they say things about land use, housing, or transportation. What underlying assumptions would make some things they say make sense? And I think a lot of them—a lot of us—think of cars and access as more or less the same thing. If it doesn’t have a parking lot, it really isn’t on the map. The ability to easily arrive at a place by car is what makes it a place. And I think we think of cities as some odd exception: places where you deal with the tricky driving or public transit because you have to be there. That’s the assumption that explains a comment like, “This Wegmans without a parking lot, who the heck is it for? Nobody will go there.” And when it does fill up, there’s a hint of suspicion there. Who are all these people?

Cars simply take up a lot more space than people, and demand a lot more infrastructure. Cars increase the scale of business and infrastructure. It’s not a coincidence that most of the most interesting, textured, engaging places we’ve built precede or exclude the car.

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So I kind of come back to asking myself: am I just saying we should put up with cramped parking garages? Is urbanism just about making daily life a little bit more inconvenient? Am I saying “eat your vegetables”? Well… I think what I’m saying is that car dependence exacts an invisible price: everything we don’t get because of it. And I would trade some convenience for more vitality.

But I also think parking in a garage, or waiting a minute for a spot, is a very ordinary, if slightly annoying, thing. And when I step back, I think it’s kind of absurd that my native attitude is that these things are deal-breakers. It is a little bit like exercising or eating vegetables. Demanding absolute comfort and convenience in all things is something we understand as a weakness in other contexts. The idea that this balancing and these trade-offs should not occur in our built environment is a departure from our intuition that worthwhile things usually involve some discomfort.

But then, again, not exercising or eating well—or avoiding places that don’t roll out the red carpet for your car—come with their own discomforts. Do we really want what we think we want, distilled to its essence?

Maybe Hell is an Interstate Highway with no traffic. And no exits.

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Related Reading:

When You Close a Street, You Open a City

The Train Not Taken

Parking Anxiety

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