This is a great wide-ranging piece about parking, urban design, and the appeal to visitors of those methods used in various southern California cities. But it’s better that that kind of dry sentence, I swear. It starts with an interesting anecdote about the rather famous Disney Hall:

Yet before an auditorium could be raised, a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million—money raised from county bonds. Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate. In aboveground structures they cost as much as $40,000 apiece. Belowground, all that excavating and shoring may run a developer $140,000 per space. The debt on Disney Hall’s garage would have to be paid off for decades to come, and as it turned out, a minimum schedule of 128 annual shows would be enough to cover the bill. The figure “128” was even written into the L.A. Philharmonic’s lease.

(via @hotdogsladies)