Something You Should Know
Why Parking is Such a Problem & How Microbes Influence Our Lives - SYSK Choice
Sat, 03 May 2025
Are you one of the many people who enjoys a morning cup of coffee? If so, listen to the beginning of this episode which explains why you should smell your coffee when you drink it because it can help you think better and be more productive. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6881620/ In many urban areas, the number one use of land is for – parking. In fact, the United States has 4 parking spaces for every car. So, it makes you wonder then why it is so hard to find a parking spot when you need one. You are about to find out why from my guest Henry Grabar. He is a staff writer at Slate, and author of the book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (https://amzn.to/3RyHcbq). Listen and you will understand why parking is such a big deal. Microbes are those tiny organisms you can’t see without using a microscope. This includes things such as germs, bacteria, and fungi. Microbes have a reputation of being something dangerous – that can cause illness. While that is true for some microbes, most of them don’t cause harm and some are even good for you. This should come as good news since you have trillions of microbes on you and inside of you. Here to take us on a journey through the invisible world of microbes is Jake Robinson. He is a microbial ecologist and author of the book Invisible Friends: How Microbes Shape our Lives and the World Around Us (https://amzn.to/44pGRwR) Many people claim to have food allergies – that actually don’t have them. They just think they do. What they really have is a food intolerance and there is a big difference. Listen as I explain. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/food-allergy/expert-answers/food-allergy/faq-20058538 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can smelling coffee improve your productivity?
Yeah, you know, I find it personally not my favorite type of architecture. And what's funny is I think a lot of Americans share this sense that we don't build things the way we used to, that there's this kind of sense that like both for residential and commercial architecture, that there was this golden era in American history where we built things we liked and we stopped doing that.
And I would suggest to you that one of the main reasons we stopped doing that was that we imposed the obligation to provide parking. And providing parking just creates unattractive buildings. It creates buildings that are separated from the street by a huge parking lot. It makes it basically impossible
to renovate any historic structures because you have to provide a certain number of parking spaces. So you basically have to demolish the building next door. And if you've looked at like a new office building or condo tower in an American downtown, look at the bottom like six to eight floors. I almost guarantee you they are used for parking.
And in fact, there are some buildings that like by the number of floors are more than half parking. So what you're really building is a parking garage with a little bit of apartment or a little bit of office on top.
So I find it surprising that parking is the number one land use in many communities. What else about parking would I find surprising?
Well, I think one of the ones that always grabs me right away is that there are between four and nine parking spaces per vehicle in this country. So that means that the national parking stock is only 25% full at its fullest moment. And of course, some of those cars are in motion.
So when you think about how full parking is, how hard it is to find a parking spot, there is just an unbelievable quantity of parking in this country.
And so I think that that's one of the things that grabs people right away is, you know, we could pave a small state with the amount of land we have dedicated for parking, which suggests that perhaps building more parking is not the solution to making it easier to find a parking spot.
Wait a minute. How can that be? Because that is not people's experience frequently that there's all this abundant parking. It's often very difficult to find a parking spot. So reconcile that.
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