Interview with Oliver Milman
“These parking minimums have helped kill cities,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School who accused political leaders of making downtowns “look like bombs hit them” by filling them with parking lots.
“Getting rid of parking minimums is an amazing step, it’s a piece in the puzzle of climate policy,” said Wagner, who pointed out that transportation is the largest source of planet-heating emissions in the US. “There’s a major rethink going on now which is good for cities and for families.”
“There’s been this decades-long process of hollowing out cities essentially to favor the rich and those in the suburbs who drive everywhere,” said Wagner.
“Driving has been subsidized with this negative regulatory intervention into the market through parking minimums, which has helped make housing less affordable and is killing the climate. It’s mind-boggling to think about how long it took for the tide to change, but it is changing.”
Quoted in: “Shifting gears: why US cities are falling out of love with the parking lot” by Oliver Milman, The Guardian (26 December 2022).
Related: Wagner, Gernot and Matthew Lewis, “The Next Step on Climate Action: Parking Reform,” Bloomberg CityLab + Green (22 September 2022); “Parking Reform and Climate Change” Living on Earth (Week of 21 October 2022).