The Long, Painful History of Terrible Parking Policy in One 71-Second Cartoon

If you haven’t been keeping up with Sightline Institute’s excellent series on the scourge of parking minimums, you’ve been missing out. They’ve posted 11 readable and informative articles on the subject. From here, Sightline is pivoting from problems to solutions, and we’ll be sharing their next few posts on Streetsblog, as well as re-posting some of the most revelatory moments from their series so far.

Here’s a quick way to get caught up: 71 seconds of cartoon-watching to understand how such bad decisions get made. It’s the depressingly simple story of how the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ hugely influential “Parking Generation” manual came to cover our country with parking.

If you’d like to take the long way, you can also read roughly the same story in just 1,025 words in the eighth installment of the “Parking? Lots!” series.

Enjoy!