Lots of Parking

John A. Jakle, Professor of Geography at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is the author of City Lights: Illuminating the American Night, which won the 2002 J. B. Jackson Award of the Association of American Geographers. Keith A. Sculle is Head of Research and Education for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Springfield, Together, Jakle and Sculle are the authors of Fast Food: Restaurants in the Automobile Age, The Motel in America (with Jefferson S. Rogers), and The Gas Station in America.

For anyone interested in automobile history and the growth of cities and suburbs, this will be a readable and enjoyable book. It is peppered with facts that will drive friends and relations crazy: the first commercial parking lot appeared in downtown Detroit in 1924; chicago in 1998 issued four million parking tickets generating 175 million dollars in revenue.... There is very little written on this subject and nothing really current, making Lots of Parking a must purchase for all libraries. - Choice ""Comprehensive in both time and space, Lots of Parking is a history of parking across the United States for virtually the entire twentieth century. Jakle and Sculle document in detail almost every twist and turn in the transformation of the landscape, from one having virtually no accommodation for the automobile at rest to today - one hundred years later - when urban built landscapes are dominated by parking spaces and the places and structures that contain them, The book adds significantly to our understanding of both the impact of the automobile on American society and the ways in which our [urban] landscapes have evolved."" - Curtis Roseman, University of Southern California ""Lots of Parking: Land Use in a Car Culture, by geographer John A. Jakle and historian Keith A. Sculle, tackles the car at rest. Jakle and Sculle show how downtowns have to have parking - but tearing buildings down to make space for parking destroys exactly what makes downtowns appealing."" - Knight Ridder Newspapers