When Are Parking Debates Just A Smokescreen for Hate?
Drivers love to shut down new housing and development proposals if they think they’ll lead to a shortage of parking. In a new paper, though, researchers found that proposed mosques draw substantailly more public pushback over car traffic than other houses of worship – and that might not be a coincidence.
Today on the Brake, we speak to researcher Adam Millard-Ball about how bias shows up in our planning process, and what happens when “community engagement” goes wrong — even if a new development isn’t the target of an explicitly Islamophobic campaign, like some mosques are.
And along the way, we dig into sticky questions about how to balance cities’ rights to build the walkable communities we deserve and neighbor’s rights to have their voices heard — especially when what they have to say is harmful.
Read a transcript of this podcast (with some AI typos) here.
