Your (and More) Thoughts on Parking Anxiety
Your (and More) Thoughts on Parking AnxietyWe have to relearn, almost intellectually, what cities areI wrote a couple of weeks ago about parking, and why the prospect of waiting for a parking spot, or finding one a little further away, strikes such intense fear into the hearts of suburbanites (including, sometimes, myself):
I got some interesting comments on this that I’d like to share and dig into a bit. Here are a few Twitter reactions: And: And: A comment:
Another:
Another:
And one more:
These are all great—when the comments are as good as the articles (I hope the articles are this good) that’s really gratifying. Thank you, if anyone reading this is one of those commenters! That last bit, about genuinely being stuck in a city with nowhere to park, is familiar to me too, and is probably the original source of this anxiety: having experienced that feeling once or twice, every possible parking shortage feels like it could turn into that. To this day, I still feel something like that when I drive past a city. I think of passing Philadelphia on I-95, which is the largest city I frequently drive past (D.C. too, of course, but you can see Philly really well from the Interstate.) I get this slight feeling of menace, like these are off-limits places. Like they’re not for me. The actual source of that feeling is not crime, which it might be for some folks—it’s basically parking! The thing is, cities are for people; they’re just not for cars. They’re not for pulling up right in front of each business I want to patronize. That does mean that it’s a lot of logistical trouble to go to the city for just one thing. It closes it off—to motorists—as a place to casually pop into at leisure. Which diminishes its importance in our minds. And so the special (and very expensive) convenience of a shopping center with a bountiful parking lot becomes not only an expectation, but also a sort of ideology. That expectation of driving everywhere and parking easily basically strikes—almost at a metaphysical level—at the heart of what cities actually are. I wonder how much of the anti-urban sentiment in America comes down to some form of this. I wonder to what extent we have to relearn, almost intellectually, what cities are, because the suburban experiment—the suburban revolution—has so effectively wiped away that memory in just a few generations. Related Reading: Fifty Million Private Realms Might Be Wrong Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 500 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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