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yes, minimum parking requirements do limit development

I and many other scholars have argued that minimum parking requirements increase the cost of housing (by taking up land for parking that could be used for housing, and by imposing costs that are passed on to consumers), increase the costs of doing business, and create a variety of other social harms. One occasional counterargument is that because most people drive to work and other destinations, developers would build lots of parking even if such parking was not legally mandated. A recent study discussed in Transfers Magazine shows otherwise, by focusing on recent reforms in Seattle. That city eliminated parking requirements in its most dense areas and reduced parking requirements in some other areas. If minimum parking requirements were irrelevant to developer decisions, developers would have built as much parking as they did before the reforms. In fact, this was not the case. For example, in areas where no parking was required, 30 percent of residential developers built parking-free housing. Even developers who built some parking usually built less than was required under pre-reform standards.

New Report by CMU and AHLA: The Case for Ending Parking Requirements in Downtown Los Angeles

The Center for Market Urbanism released its first policy report in partnership with Abundant Housing Los Angeles.  The paper, written by The Center for Market Urbanism’s Nolan Gray and Emily Hamilton, recommends eliminating minimum parking requirements as part of DTLA 2040, a process which will update both the Central City and Central City North community plans. The draft concept for the DTLA 2040 plan calls for eliminating parking requirements for the Central City and Central City North neighborhoods.  This would build upon the success of Los Angeles’ adaptive reuse, allowing new developments to facilitate affordable, dense, walkable neighborhoods. The paper discusses the history of parking requirements, burdens and damage caused by current parking requirements, and benefits of reforms: Combined with demand-based pricing for on-street parking, the elimination of parking requirements will allow for downtown neighborhoods that are more walkable while also reducing congestion for drivers. Read the Center for Market Urbanism/Abundant Housing LA Policy Paper here   The Center for Market Urbanism is a 501c3 organization dedicated to expanding choice, affordability, and prosperity in cities through smart reforms to U.S. land-use regulation. Abundant Housing LA is 501c3 organization which is committed to advocating for more housing. We want lower rents and a more sustainable and prosperous region, where everyone has more choices of where to live and how to pursue their dreams. LA is one of the most diverse, vibrant cities in America, and we are fighting to keep it that way for current Angelenos, our children, and those who come here to pursue their dreams.  

How Suburban Parking Requirements Hold Back Downtown

A large, empty parking lot

You wake up thirty minutes before your alarm, jerking up after having a nightmare about a car crash. Reluctantly, you clean up, eat breakfast, and hop into your car. Work is only three mile away—easy biking distance—and there are 15 or so people in your neighborhood who work where you work—enough for a commuter bus make sense. But alas, the city required the developer to provide two parking spaces for your townhouse and the cost is hidden somewhere in your mortgage, so why not use it? After spending thirty minutes traveling three miles on the freeway—at least we live in the Golden Age of Podcasting, right?—you arrive at your suburban office park and pull into the garage. The parking is “free,” meaning that your pay has already been docked to cover the cost of the space, so why not use it? Your girlfriend calls shortly after lunch, asking if you want to go on a double dinner date with her friends to a new BBQ place downtown. You agree to join. You’re starving—you left lunch at home and it’s just too time consuming to drive to a decent place—so you hustle downtown. You arrive first, only to find out that there is only on-street parking. Downtown is, after all, exempt from parking requirements, and since street parking is “free,” it’s impossible to find a space during dinner time. You call your dinner partners—each of them is driving separately from work—and suggest another BBQ place downtown that offers subsidized garage parking. This place is a little more expensive, since the restaurateur has to cover some of the cost of offering parking, but you’re all hungry and don’t want to deal with the headache of cruising for street parking. Eventually you all meet and enjoy a nice meal, speculating about how traffic […]

Interview with Parking Guru Donald Shoup

Marcos Paulo Schlickmann, a transportation specialist and collaborator at Caos Planejado, our Brazilian partner website, recently interviewed Professor Donald Shoup, who answered questions about private and public parking issues. Private parking Marcos Paulo Schlickmann: What is your opinion on legal parking minimums?  Donald Shoup: In The High Cost of Free Parking, which the American Planning Association published in 2005, I argued that minimum parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion, pollute the air, encourage sprawl, increase housing costs, degrade urban design, prevent walkability, damage the economy, and penalize poor people. Since then, to my knowledge, no member of the planning profession has argued that parking requirements do not cause these harmful effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do cause these harmful effects. Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are poisoning our cities with too much parking. Minimum parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars. MPS: What would happen if we were to abandon parking minimums? DS: Reform is difficult because parking requirements don’t exist without a reason. If on-street parking is free, removing off-street parking requirements will overcrowd the on-street parking and everyone will complain. Therefore, to distill 800 pages of The High Cost of Free Parking into three bullet points, I recommend three parking reforms that can improve cities, the economy, and the environment: Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers. Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Prices will balance the demand and supply for on-street parking spaces. Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can […]

Government-Created Parking Externalities

In new research on parking policy in the Journal of Economic Geography, Jan Brueckner and Sofia Franco argue that residential developers should be required to provide more off-street parking in places where street parking contributes to traffic congestion. They argue that because traffic congestion is a negative externality, off-street parking requirements improve urban living. But street parking only contributes to traffic congestion when policymakers underprice it. Rather than addressing the externality of a government-created problem with new regulations, cities should price their street parking appropriately. Brueckner and Franco’s argument relies on the assumption that off-street parking will be under-provided without government intervention. They argue that because drivers circle their destination looking for free or cheap street parking, minimum parking requirements make people better off. The authors are correct in arguing that street parking contributes to the problem of traffic congestions. Parking guru Donald Shoup estimates that drivers who are circling around looking for parking spots make up 30 percent of downtown traffic. Cruising for parking imposes an external cost on others by causing everyone to waste time in slow traffic. While, Brueckner and Franco actually cite Shoup’s work on street parking and traffic congestion, they ignore his insight that when parking is priced appropriately, cities can eliminate this externality. The incentive to cruise for parking originates with public policy when city officials provide street parking at below-market prices. When parking prices are high enough, drivers will leave some parking availability on each block, eliminating the cruising problem without the need for minimum parking requirements. San Francisco’s SFPark program provides an example of successful implementation of variable pricing based on demand. SFPark has the goal of maintaining one to two available spots on each block so that drivers don’t contribute to traffic congestion while they’re looking for parking. When street parking is priced high […]

Parking In A DC Bike Lane Is Extremely Cost-effective, For Drivers

This month, the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) published an analysis citing traffic ticket data to illustrate the following point: Of the 723,237 parking tickets issued in this 5 month period, only 2,420 were for parking in bike lanes. That’s about 3 out of every 1,000 tickets. That comes to about 16 tickets per day, spread over more than 70 miles of bike lanes, or one ticket per day for every 4.5 miles of bike lane. This extreme lack of parking enforcement jives with my biking experience, during which I routinely have to dangerously swerve, often abruptly, out of the bike lane into car lane traffic due to a car or truck in the bike lane. I wanted to answer, though: What percentage of bike lane parking violators do DC police actually ticket? Let’s use my anecdotal experience to make some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations. There are 70 miles of DC bike lanes that function 24 hours a day. This comes out to a total of (70 miles) * (24 hours) * (60 minutes / hour) = 100,800 bike lane mile-minutes per day. Here are two measures based on anecdotal evidence: Observed area: My commute to work each day, 95% of which is in bike lanes, takes roughly 10 minutes each way, meaning I experience: ((10 minutes) * (1 mile) * (2 daily trips ) * (95% of trip in bike lanes)) / 100,800 total bike lane mile-minutes = 0.01885% of all DC bike lane mile-minutes per day. Violations: On my commute, I see on average 5 parking lane violations each way for a total of 10 daily violations. These infractions come in many shapes, most often: cars waiting outside a building or sitting idle in traffic, trucks or vans parked while making deliveries, or buses forced to cut across the bike […]

Parking Requirements Increase Traffic And Rents. Let’s Abolish Them.

Everybody in LA can agree on one thing – traffic blows hard. Harder, even, than these guys:               Hate traffic? Blame parking. But here’s a secret: people don’t cause traffic. Cars do. And you know what makes people use cars? Parking. If you’ve got nowhere to put your car when you arrive, you aren’t going to drive, and you aren’t going to contribute to traffic. Research has shown that for every 10% increase in parking, 7.7% more people commute with a car. Hate high rent? Blame parking. That’s a bad start. But it gets worse. Parking is also driving up your rent. Building parking spaces is incredibly expensive – each underground parking spot in LA costs about $35,000. Even if your unit includes “free” parking, you’re paying for the cost of that parking in your rent every month, whether you want to or not. Parking is cheaper to build above ground (if you can call $27,000 cheap), but then it takes up valuable space for apartments. All those dollar signs have an impact–UCLA professor Donald Shoup has calculated that requiring parking reduces the number of units in new apartment buildings by 13%. But parking is even more insidious than that. Often, when a new housing project is proposed, one of the first things that angry people (NIMBYs) yell about is traffic. Sometimes, those NIMBYs successfully stop housing from being built, and we desperately need all the housing we can get to contain our skyrocketing rents. Then why the hell do we require all new buildings to include so much parking? You’d think, then, that developers might stop providing parking. But they can’t, because we did something really, really dumb. We’ve created a system that requires parking to be provided with all new projects. For an apartment […]

Free parking isn’t free

Last week I wrote a piece for City Journal on how smart parking could allow New York City to implement variable pricing. Street parking sensors allow prices to change to maintain an empty spot on each block, as parking expert Donald Shoup recommends. By eliminating the incentive to drive around looking for parking, this policy could drastically reduce traffic congestion and save drivers significant amounts of time. All of the comments on my post argue that charging for parking according to demand would increase the cost of living in already expensive cities and hurt low-income people. While this argument is very common among supporters of underpriced street parking, it’s false. In actuality, today’s standard policies of underpriced street parking and off-street parking requirements increase costs of living, and low-income people bear a disproportionate share of the costs of these policies. Properly implemented variable pricing systems may not even increase the total price that drivers pay to park their cars. San Francisco has gone farther than any other city to implement variable parking. Its SFPark system updates the prices on the city’s meters periodically with the goal of keeping the occupancy on each block below 80%. While this objective has led to significant price increases for the most in-demand blocks, it has actually reduced the city’s total parking meter revenues because prices were allowed to fall on many blocks to reach the 80% target. Whether they cause total parking meter revenue to increase or decrease, variable parking prices are key to reducing off-street parking requirements, which is a huge cost of development. The political pressure for off-street parking often stems from homeowners who live near commercial destinations. Because people who drive to businesses prefer free parking to paid parking, they may park in a zero-price curb spot in a residential neighborhood near their destination rather than at a […]

Parking is not a public good

Writers at Salon, Slate, and Time have criticized new San Francisco-based apps that allow users to purchase access to a parking spot as another driver is leaving it. The apps MonkeyParking, Sweetch, and ParkModo provide a platform for drivers to let others know when they’re leaving a spot, and reserve the spot until the another user bidding on the spot arrives to pull in. As of last week, the future of these apps is unknown since San Francisco issued a cease and desist order based on the city’s rule against auctioning or leasing public parking spots. All three writers express outrage that the apps’ creators and users are profiting off of government-owned parking spots. At Salon, Andrew Leonard writes: Monkey Parking’s solution intended to generate profit off of a public good by rewarding those who are able to pay — and shutting out the less affluent.  One problem with this line of reasoning is that parking is clearly not a public good. It is both perfectly rivalrous and easily excludable. Unlike a public good, the price system provides the right incentives for suppliers to provide the optimal amount of parking based on consumers’ willingness to pay. While Leonard uses the term public good, he may mean simply a good that the government provides, and he argues that entrepreneurs should not be permitted to profit from these public services. While this argument provokes a populist sense of unfairness, Monkey Parking should be evaluated against the current problem of under-priced curb parking rather than against the assumption that city governments are currently pricing curb pricing appropriately. City governments systematically undercharge for street parking, especially in cities like San Francisco where land is very valuable. These apps are able to profit because the city charges prices for parking below the level that drivers are willing to […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Preface and Afterword

This is the last post in the series on Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. Previous can be found here: Chapters 1 – 4 Chapters 5 – 9 Chapters 10 – 14 Chapters 16 – 18 Chapters 19 – 22 Preface In these two chapters, which Donald Shoup added for the paperback edition of the book, he discusses some of the changes in parking policy since the original edition in 2004. He also reiterates his three prescriptions for saner parking policy: 1) Set the right price for curb parking; 2) Return parking revenue to pay for local public services; 3) Remove parking minimum requirements. He points out that cities that have tried “performance parking” have had successful results. San Francisco’s SFpark is perhaps the country’s most advanced system for performance parking. Curb spaces include sensors that can tell whether or not the space is occupied. Then parking managers can adjust prices remotely to approach the 85% occupancy goal as closely as possible. Shoup argues that performance parking should not be a politicized change. Setting an 85% occupancy target is not designed to raise revenue or to benefit any group at the expense of another. Rather, prices can eliminate parking shortages, so that people pay for parking with money rather than with time spent cruising. These prices also incentivise greater turnover. Nonetheless, he points out that performance parking has opponents: Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for making snap decisions about urgent fight-or-flight choices such as how to avoid being eaten. The same could be said about many land use decisions which do not seem to be made on the basis of rationality. He points out that performance pricing is very unlikely to reduce customers in […]

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