That Damned Elusive Parking Spot

Also a coffee shop bathroom, and not knowing what we really want

My latest piece over at Resident Urbanist is about pausing and looking around and thinking about “the urbanism we already have.” What do I mean by that?

I return to an example often cited by urbanists of great use of space: the Trader Joe’s parking lot, by way of an anecdote about parking in general:

Ever had someone say (or thought to yourself), “Trader Joe’s is awesome, but that damn parking lot!”

I’ve had all these thoughts and I’ve heard them expressed before. I think most people see the inconvenience and the amenity separately, and weigh them against each other. I remember a conversation with a friend back in New Jersey. He and his dad went out to breakfast at a nice place in town, when his mom was away. It took them a few minutes to find a parking spot, and then they had a nice breakfast. His dad called his mom as they headed back home, and said something like, “We had a hell of a time finding somewhere to park!” My friend thought this was interesting, that a little bit of momentary parking frustration defined the morning for his dad. I think this is a pretty typical attitude.

For me, going to Trader Joe’s always involves that “am I going to get a spot right away?” question. Sometimes you pull right in. Other times you circle once or twice. Sometimes you get stuck in a line of cars and nobody can move at all for a little bit. It’s frustrating, compared to the virtual guarantee of a spot at most other chain stores in the suburbs.

The thing is, the Trader Joe’s business model—compact stores densely packed with inexpensive but “elevated” products—works in large part because the chain saves a lot of money on commercial rent. They build or find small lots, with as little parking as they can get away with. And as far as I can tell, they actually pass those savings on to customers.

So when a typical suburbanite says something like “I love Trader Joe’s but that parking lot is awful,” they’re failing, as I once did, to see the fundamental connection between the fun and affordable shopping experience and the dismal parking experience. Once you understand how these are linked, you’re an urbanist. You see how the car squeezes and muscles out the serendipity, the variety, the quirkiness, the tight, efficient, and unexpected uses of space.

I give another example in the piece, of an independent coffee shop I like to sit in. I like everything about it, except the single bathroom which always seems occupied when I need it. “If only this coffee shop just had one more bathroom, it would be perfect,” I think sometimes when I have to go. But the urbanist in me grasps that if it had a second bathroom, it might not exist. That might demand a larger, more conventional space (it’s in a light industrial park with a neat assemblage of almost all independent businesses), and such a space might cost too much.

Maybe the prices would go up, maybe the cool factor would be diminished, maybe the place would fill up more and not be a great place to sit and write. Or, more likely, the shop simply wouldn’t pencil out at those commercial rents, and like thousands of other enterprises our land use and regulations foreclose, it would exist only as a dream.

This is the core of my argument, though, about what I think of as urbanist consciousness or urbanist perception:

The inconvenience is sort of like the shadow cast by the amenity. Being an urbanist is learning to deal with the shadows, and even to seek them out in order to find what amenity might be concealed by them.

To be an urbanist is to be able to deny yourself in the immediate term—to cultivate what we once called self-mastery—in order to get something on the other side much more valuable than a big men’s room or a half-empty parking lot:

Before I “was an urbanist”, I would have just seen the inconveniences associated with quirky small businesses. The “but” stuck in my mind. Now I realize that giving up some immediate comfort or convenience often gets you something much more valuable. The other way of putting that is that our demand for never waiting or being inconvenienced, or for having shiny new surroundings, forecloses so much richness, variety, and entrepreneurship in our everyday surroundings.

It’s interesting that with all the discourse about young people being “soft” or “entitled” or what have you, there’s hardly any cultural perception that the expectation of driving everywhere in a climate-controlled vehicle and parking immediately for free right in front of the place you’re going makes it harder for us to put up with the momentary discomforts that might come with a much richer built and commercial environment. Or, for that matter, with the inevitable failure of the car-oriented ideal to actually live up to its promise.

As you can see from this and many other pieces I’ve written, I almost think urbanism is a worldview as much as a set of land-use policies. And I think it’s a lot about self-awareness and gratitude and cultivating patience and forbearance.

But as to this piece, this is what I’ve come to realize, and remind myself, when I feel that frustration:

I imagine being asked to make a wish. I might say, “I wish the Trader Joe’s parking lot were twice as big!” “I wish my favorite coffee shop had a big men’s room that was never fully occupied!” “I wish my favorite Thai restaurant weren’t in a dingy strip plaza!”

“Very well, your wishes will be granted,” the genie might say.

And the Trader Joe’s, the coffee shop, and the wonderful restaurant would all disappear.

That is the cost of the convenience that suburbia and car-oriented transportation train us to expect. I think a lot of us just don’t know we’re paying it.

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Related Reading:

Spread Out or Smashed Together?

Nothing Left to Park For

Going Nowhere Fast

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