Paved Paradise

Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a shocking number of Americans kill one another over parking spots, and we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. Since the advent of the car, we have deformed our cities in a Sisyphean quest for car storage, and as a result, much of the nation's most valuable real estate is now devoted to empty vehicles. Parking determines the design of new building and the fate of old ones, traffic patters and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and…