Sunday reading: Parking lots and work weeks.

Have you ever heard of the Pensacola Parking Syndrome?

Paved, but Still Alive, by Michael Kimmelman (New York Times)

As the critic Lewis Mumford wrote half a century ago, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Yet we continue to produce parking lots, in cities as well as in suburbs, in the same way we consume all those billions of plastic bottles of water and disposable diapers.

What to do?

Meanwhile, I was under the impression that the 40-hour work week was ascribed on one of Moses' tablets? Or was that Santorum's?

Cut the working week to a maximum of 20 hours, urge top economists; Job sharing and increased leisure are the answer to rising unemployment, claims thinktank, by Heather Stewart (The Guardian/The Observer)

... A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: "There's a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none."