Driving Ourselves Back to Sanity

When I was starting out on this podcast, I reached out to a bunch of people to get their input on what it should be about.  Some of you were probably saying, I still don't know what it's about. I'm kind of with you there on that, but we're figuring it out. So right away I heard back from my friend, Casey Corn, who said, have you read the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn? She said this book is right in line with what you're trying to do with this podcast.

And I remember hearing about the book. It came out in the early nineties, it's a work of philosophy, kind of draped in a fictional narrative, kind of like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. But I'd never read it. So Ishmael starts off with this unnamed narrator answering a classified ad in the newspaper that reads: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person."

When the narrator does apply in person, he goes to this apartment and he encounters Ishmael, who happens to be a giant adult gorilla who can communicate with him telepathically. So through the course of the novel Ishmael seeks to guide the narrator and all of us along with him at the same time, to an understanding of the myths that our human culture holds dear, which seem to be leading us towards our own destruction, along with the rest of the planet.  Ishmael refers to these beliefs as Mother Culture, which is to be distinguished from Mother Nature.  So my favorite example of a belief that Ishmael attempts to expose to the narrator and to us, as nothing more than the work of Mother Culture is our origin myth. 

So Ishmael asked the narrator to share our culture's origin myth, our human culture's, origin myth. So, of course the narrator, as any of us would explain that we don't really have an origin myth that's for indigenous cultures and, you know, primitive tribes in the like. What we have is a factual series of events that explain how we got here. So Ishmael responds well, of course you wouldn't consider it a myth. No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. It's just the story. 

And the narrator's like, whatever, but it's not a myth I'm telling you. So Ishmael says, okay. Tell me your story. So the narrator tells the story, like our story, right? So 10 or 15 billion years ago, there's the big bang. Then six or 7 billion years ago, our solar system forms. Three and a half, 4 billion years ago, life has formed microorganisms. Evolved into higher forms, more complex forms. Life spread to land there's amphibians, reptiles, and mammals and primates. And then finally, About 3 million years ago, man appears. 

So Ishmael says that's a nice origin myth.  And the narrator says, what are you trying to tell me that this isn't a factual account? This is, these are the facts. And Ishmael says it's full of facts. Yeah. But their arrangement is purely mythical. And now at this point as the reader, I'm thinking, okay, where's he going with this? 

Because I'm firmly in the narrator's camp, right? This is our story. Like, these are the facts of how we got here. And Ishmael breaks it all apart. He responds. You've recited a story you've heard a thousand times. And now you're listening to Mother Culture as she murmurs in your ear. There there child. There's nothing to think about. Nothing to worry about. Don't get excited. Don't listen to the nasty animal. This is no myth. Nothing I tell you is a myth. 

And Ishmael continues to ask, did the entire cosmic process of creation come to an end 3 million years ago, right here on this little planet with the appearance of man? No, of course it didn't. Then why do we tell it that way? As we tell it, the birth of man is a central event, indeed, the central event in the history of the cosmos itself. From the birth of man on the rest of the universe ceases to be of interest ceases to participate in the unfolding drama. Ishmael says everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in, man, man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation. Right?  Well, no, it's kind of ridiculous when you think of it that way, but that's the way we think of it. It's the way we've always thought of it. 

It's pretty amazing to have a book make plain to you in the span of 40 or 50 pages that some belief you've had, that you've taken for granted your entire life, is just kind of silly when you actually think about it. And with our creation myth, the consequences are pretty dramatic. We believe the world was made for us.  In fact,  the entire universe was created just so that we would happen. That's the way we tell the story. And so, one of the big conclusions of the book, Ishmael is that, "if the world was made for us, then it belongs to us and we can do what we damn well, please with it." 

But if it's all just a myth that was made up to make us feel better about ourselves then everything that came after all our beliefs about ourselves, our interactions with each other and with the natural world, need to be questioned and reexamined. And that is kind of the somewhat ambitious goal of this podcast.  So this week, I'm going to dive in and investigate something that many of you might be doing right now, and in just a few minutes, I'll bet I can convince you to think about it quite differently than how you're thinking about it right now. Stick around.

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about the ways we've all been conned about ourselves, each other, and our place in the cosmos. And how we can fight back and together, begin to put the kind back into humankind.

A bunch of years ago, I was driving around Boston and I saw this billboard, which I've since learned, was created by a Dutch company called Tom Tom. And it was on the side of a truck. And it read very simply: " You are not stuck in traffic. You are the traffic." And that got me thinking about how we all think about driving and cars.  

Like when you're stuck in traffic, you're pissed at the guy in front of you, who's in your way. Well, the guy behind you is pissed at you. Right. And you didn't do anything wrong. Well, guess what? Neither did anybody else. Well, almost anybody else, you know, there's always that asshole who sneaks up on the breakdown lane. As if they're going to get off of the next exit. And then at the last second, they cut back. You know, right back into the travel lane, just before the on-ramp yet you. That guy is doing something wrong. But for the most part. We should all be way more empathetic with our fellow drivers. After all, just about everyone in that traffic jam is trying to do the same exact thing. 

Just get from point A to point B as quickly and painlessly as possible.  And everyone is pissed at the same thing. Namely everyone else. Not themselves, of course, just everyone else. 

But the truth is we shouldn't be pissed at each other. We should be pissed at the very intentional forces that pretty much require most of us to get in a car if we want to get anywhere. And rather than competing with our fellow drivers and treating each other like the enemy. We should be commiserating, realizing we're all in a pretty miserable situation and we should work together to just try to get through it with as little emotional trauma as possible. 

Now one way to do this is to break through the anonymity of the driving experience. Now I often hear people say, well, you know, driving just brings out people's true nature and it ain't pretty. Well, I disagree. Driving is a very unnatural way to interact with other people because it's so anonymous. Now I realize that. Louis CK probably isn't the best person to take lessons on interpersonal behavior from, but he once made a really good point about this kind of thing, using mean kids as an example here, take a listen. 

You know, kids are mean, and it's because they're trying it out.  They, they look at a kid and they go, you're fat. And then they see the kid's face scrunch up and they go, Ooh, that doesn't feel good to make a person do that. But they, but they gotta start with doing the mean thing. But when they write, you're fat, Then they just go, Mmm, that was fun, I liked that.

Now it's the same thing in our cars. Right. We feel permission to behave like assholes because we don't have to deal with the face-to-face consequences like we would in a regular interaction. So I encourage everyone to actually begin to break down that anonymity, to communicate with other drivers more often from car to car in a positive way. And I think you'll find that it makes the entire driving experience much more tolerable. If not even enjoyable. So, for example, when you're emerging into traffic, just give a wave to the person who let you in, regardless of whether or not they intentionally let you in. Or if you do something asshole-ish because we all have at some point, just own up to it and give a little, you know, sorry about that wave to the driver you offended.  

But here's my favorite piece of advice to make driving more humane. When you're behind someone at a stop light and they're texting or whatever it is they're doing. And they don't notice that the light has changed to green. You've got multiple options. One, you could do nothing and just wait for them to notice and move forward. Too, which is the more common response you could lean on the horn, which is a very aggressive way to communicate your displeasure and will no doubt elicit some kind of hand gesture in response.  But here's another possible reaction to that and I would recommend that this is the best way to do it, and this is something we should all begin to do. And that is simply just give two quick honks. Just a little beep beep. And that's it. It is so much less accusatory. 

It's almost friendly. It's just a little, Hey,  in case you haven't noticed the lights turn green. And I think what you'll find is instead of you now being pissed at that person in front of you, you're kind of like, Hey, you know, here's a little reminder to get moving. And instead of that person being pissed at you, he probably feels a little bit guilty and may even give you a little apologetic wave, which you can recognize because all five fingers are raised instead of just one. And you both can go on your merry ways.  So with just that one little extra beep you've removed so much negative energy from the world and replaced it with a little bit of driver-to-driver collegiality, which otherwise wouldn't have existed. So this kind of behavior can quickly begin to change your view of your fellow humans as you experience more and more positive interactions throughout the day while driving of all places. It reminds me of a wonderful quote from the Dutch theologian Henry Nowan. He said "You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking."  And I think you'll find as you live your way differently through driving and interacting differently with different drivers. You may begin to inhabit a new kind of thinking that people aren't all a bunch of assholes. 

Now beyond the emotional impact of driving, there are so many other externalities that make it just so awful. It's kind of amazing that people still think about cars and they think freedom. Right. It's kind of like, there's this ad campaign for the Chumash Casino out here in California up above Santa Barbara . I'll cue up the music for it.  So picture, if you will, this beautiful bucolic outdoor scenes, the bird flying overhead there's mountains in the background and plunk down right next to this big old tree is someone sitting at a slot machine.  And the tagline fades in above him: "Welcome to Freedom."  Really?  Really, that's freedom? 

It's kind of the same with cars, really cars, freedom. Now look, Americans spend on average about an hour a day in their car. That's about 350 hours a year. That's like two weeks a year. Now, how much of that time do you actually feel free? Right. Not much. It's certainly not the norm such as you would immediately equate driving and freedom. 

I mean, one reason is that the average cost of owning a car is now over a thousand dollars a month. It's hardly free. Then there's gas prices, which are high, but to be fair, not nearly high enough to cover the actual cost of a gallon of gas. When you take everything into account, like the cost of extraction of the oil, transporting the oil, pollution, illnesses from the pollution, even the cost of cleaning up oil spills. When you put all of that together the cost of a gallon of gas is really about $15 a gallon. So, whatever you're paying, you're still actually getting a pretty good deal. And then there's parking.  Parking's a little bit like that creation myth that I talked about at the top of the show. We kind of believe it just is the way it is almost as if it's governed by some sort of natural law. But when you realize how intentional parking regulations are and how dramatic the consequences of those regulations are, you realize we should be doing much, much better. There's a wonderful book that came out last year by Henry Grabar called Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World.  You can get this book from your local library or lots of places that aren't Amazon. And as you read it, you begin to realize that parking regulations touch so many aspects of civic life and impact our landscape probably as much, if not more than any other single element of our built environment. I mean, just look at a shopping mall.

If you look at it from above, you'll see that the parking takes up way more space than the mall itself. And once you start noticing parking, you see it everywhere.  Now Grabar's book was inspired in part by the work being done by the Parking Reform Network, which educates the public about the impact of parking policy on climate change, equity, housing. And of course traffic. I sat down recently with the president of the Parking Reform Network, Tony Jordan, to talk about how parking really does explain the world and how we can make parking and the world a little bit better. 


CB: Hey, Tony. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. 

TJ: Absolutely. 

CB: So just to dive right in, I had read a couple of weeks ago about the New Hampshire primary. Somebody  said it's simultaneously all consuming and completely irrelevant.  And it seems to me that parking and parking regulation is the exact opposite of that.  It's something that most people hardly ever think about, but it's hugely consequential. So I'm hoping you can  explain to someone who has never given a second thought to the consequences of parking regulation, why they should take it seriously. And why bad parking regulation is so problematic  

TJ: That is fantastic. I  always like people to understand a few things. One The cost of parking space, a surface parking space cost thousands of dollars, not including the land it's on. A structured space and above-ground parking space is tens of thousands of dollars and a below-grade space can cost 2 times the cost of a above ground space, so, these are huge costs and they translate directly into costs that we pay, in part of every transaction we make, as part of our rents.  A general rule of thumb is if something costs 10, 000 it needs about 100 a month in rent to pay for. So if your parking space costs 30, 000, someone's got to pay 300 a month to pay for it. 

These also take up huge amounts of space, a parking space, you know, itself is, a couple hundred square feet, but it can't just exist on its own. So with the accessways and driveways, it's about three to 400 square feet per space.

So one and a half parking spaces, which is commonly required for an apartment in the United States it takes up, almost 600 square feet. So you can't just build an apartment in the United States. You have to build an apartment plus an apartment-sized storage facility that usually only can hold a car.  And since the 50s and 60s,  anytime you want to build a building, repurpose a building, start a business, there's a table in your city zoning code buried in there that says exactly some ratio of how many parking spaces you need per either square foot or if it's a, Barbershop per chair in the barbershop.

They are sometimes comical if they weren't so damaging ratios. And, and we've been just requiring this on kind of autopilot for the last several generations. And the impact of this is tremendous because every one of those parking spaces, in addition to the cost and space, it takes up also leads to things like water quality and runoff problems, heat islands. Every parking space is  a home for a car. I like to say parking garage is like a battery for traffic, right? These, these attract traffic and they push everything farther away. So it's, it's really a core.

When you look at a Google overhead view of a city, you can tell what was built before these rules and what was built after it's pretty obvious because what was built after is. You know, sprawly stretched out with a bunch of parking spaces in between and increasingly wider roads to get there.  

CB: Now, you just said parking attracts traffic. Can you explain that a little bit? 

TJ: You know it's just a logical fact the amount of parking in your city currently supports the amount of car trips to your city and so adding more parking can only be an invitation for more cars to come into the city and we quickly then realize well there's no room for these cars on the road and then we spend tens of millions of dollars or billions of dollars widening the roads even more which then just kind of exacerbates the problem. 


CB: Yeah, it's such a bizarre sort of reversal of the way things should be. So you are the president and the founder of the parking reform network. Can you talk  a little bit about what you're doing to try and fix this problem?  

TJ: Yes.  I'm a founder, I have three co-founders and I'm the president of the organization. we founded this organization in 2019  launched in 2020 

And you realize like your first question, wow, this thing's all around me and what problems it's causing. It was really seen as like oh, don't get into that.  It's controversial or it's too nerdy and I was like, this is so important and it's, fascinating to and so I got involved in zoning and met a bunch of great people in bicycle advocacy and tenants advocacy, because it's an issue that touches so many policy areas.

It's really fun to organize around. And I was thinking about how we can message and educate the public about this. Cause you gotta tell him how much it costs and how much space it takes up and what problems it costs and then how stupid the rules are and they really are stupid like parking requirements for drive-in movie theaters in North Carolina or in Minnesota we found recently parking requirements for parking garages, which makes no sense.

And so these are really ridiculous rules. And I found when you tell people about that, they're like, okay, maybe actually we should get rid of these. And, you know, just general, I think people's awareness around the housing crisis and the, and the climate crisis combined and the traffic violence crisis, you know, people who are concerned about those issues, once they hear about this one weird thing they come to us and we are here to just help people accelerate change in their community. 

CB: Who's pushing back against you? Who's fighting to maintain the status quo and what are they getting out of it?  

TJ: Yeah, great. I've done a little research into this.  I find that actually a lot of the opposition comes from people who benefit from the current situation. Incumbents, so if you are a business that is on a main street and you don't have parking for your business or you have a small amount, you're very concerned that another business is going to come in, attract more customers than your business, and they're going to take up the parking on the street Now, I would say the thing is to manage the parking on street so that there's higher turnover and people can make good decisions about how they get there and invest in transit.

 I think also people who use parking mandates as leverage. In more liberal cities, it's organizations that use parking mandates as a pretext to negotiate more affordable housing or other community benefits in other places, it might be,  people who are trying to preserve a certain neighborhood character or are trying to keep certain kinds of businesses or development out of their community.  So it's kind of like a backdoor lazy way to impose things that you otherwise might not have the authority to impose.  

CB: So you've hinted quite a bit at the economics of parking. And there was one specific statistic that I think you had made, saying that for, for many municipalities, the curb is their most valuable asset.  Can you talk a little bit about why it's so valuable and how the sort of supply and demand of it is mismanaged in so many places?

TJ: I  think that Americans are great consumers. We really recognize value and we really are upset when we pay for things that You know, we're okay if we don't pay for something.  We understand if something's free and it's not a high quality. Well, I got it for free. But if we're paying for something, it's very upsetting when it doesn't work out. And I think too often our curve management policies When we do charge, we charge too little.  So someone still pays, but they still drive around and they can't find a parking space, you know, and, and I think that that a key here is to really go all in and say, look, we're going to solve this problem. Yeah, some people are going to be unhappy, but we're going to then have this revenue source. And it's very critical to not just get dependent on that, because then you're just dependent on car traffic, but to actually you reinvest that money to make cities better.

Whatever that means for your city, probably means more walkable, safer, better transit, you know, better lighting, you know, sidewalks, whatever it is, less trash  apply that revenue towards just making the place where people want to be a better place 

CB: One last question I have is,  besides obviously donating massive quantities of money to the parking reform network, what could people be doing locally to recognize the inefficiencies in their parking regulation and then hopefully try and do something about it?  

TJ: I think we're still at a stage with this issue where a lot of it is just education to talk about it. And don't be embarrassed to talk about it. It's not actually that nerdy.  Just start to make little changes because they do add up, people are watching, your kids are watching your neighbors are watching, people are watching what you're doing. And if you are speaking up or becoming informed, that does lead to action and things changing.  It's kind of like all we can do to stay sane, I think, is to just pay attention and speak up or show up as much as you can.  

CB: That's great. Well, thank you Tony. Thank you so much for taking some time to talk to me Appreciate it.  

TJ: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. 


Well, that's it for this week, everybody. Remember next time you get into your car, try to stop competing with your fellow drivers and start commiserating. And when someone's distracted and doesn't see the green light, rather than leaning on the horn. Be nice and honk twice.  So until next week, be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack. And in addition to honking twice, use your damn turn signal.