Parking Minimums

Get rid of them

Photo by John Matychuk on Unsplash

In 1923, the city of Columbus, Ohio, made a momentous decision. Despite there being fewer than 20,000 cars in the entire country, the city announced new apartment buildings would have to include parking spaces for future tenants. Ever since, parking minimums have proliferated. These policies, and policies revolving around the automobile more generally, have reshaped American cities over the last century.

The more one thinks about parking minimums, the more absurd they seem. If a person wants to build anything from apartments to movie theaters to hiking trails to butterfly breeding facilities, parking requirements will follow. Why? If a company wants to build a retail outlet, how on Earth did we get to the point that the law says you have to provide space for cars, and here’s the kicker, for cars that aren’t even being used? It’s one thing to require roadways and traffic lights and infrastructure that helps transport people from A to B. Parking spots don’t even do that. They for cars that aren’t even on! Nothing else is subject to rules like this. Stationery shops don’t have to provide cell phone chargers. Bowling alleys aren’t required to have dog kenneling facilities. Golf courses don’t have to provide daycare. Yet all are required to have parking spots.

The obvious counterargument is straightforward. Commercial and residential buildings need parking spots because everyone in America drives a car to get places. If businesses don’t have parking spots how will customers get there?

The answer is two-fold. First, if businesses need to have something to exist; fear not. They will build those things. Every single time. No mall is going to be built in a US suburb without extensive parking. Every movie theater will know that they need to have some parking, or else movie watchers will stream from home. This is how the free market works. If something is needed to make a business competitive, it happens. The reality is that most businesses don’t need nearly as many parking spots as they have.

One of the most egregious examples is sports stadiums. They often have parking lots far larger than the stadiums themselves. Levi’s Stadium, the current record holder, has an astronomical 31,500 spaces. Many would say those spaces are needed. After all, how else will fans get to the game? Well, Fenway Park in Boston has no dedicated parking. Wrigley Field has very little. Lo and behold, the Cubs and Red Sox are some of the most popular, and highly valued, MLB franchises. Tens of thousands of fans regularly attend those games. People find a way despite the lack of parking.

Second, saying that parking spaces are needed because the US is built around the car reverses cause and effect. The reason that the US is so car-dependent is because of all the parking minimums. Parking minimums have long exceeded any reasonable metric of demand. The result has been that almost everywhere has an overabundance of parking. As long as parking is forcefully easy, the US will be car-dependent.

Many have bemoaned the lack of public transportation in the US. Fewer have considered why public transportation never takes off. Even in places with fairly decent connections, it generally isn’t very popular. And why would it be? Because the vast majority of Americans need a car to go about some of their errands, they buy one. And once they have one, it’s incredibly easy and cheap to find parking anywhere they want to go. If you’re like me, having to park more than 100 yards away from a destination and/or having to pay more than a few dollars an hour to do so seems untenable. Why isn’t there a spot right outside? Why can’t I store my giant automobile for the evening for free? This unbelievable luxury has become the norm. The vast majority of Americans can park close to their destination and don’t have to pay to do so. Thus, public transportation isn’t popular because it’s usually inferior.

As with so many things, if only people knew the true economics behind forced parking spaces. It may feel like free parking is just that, but as Donald Shoup wrote in his book “The High Cost of Free Parking”, free parking is anything but. There are an astonishing 2 billion parking spaces in the United States. That doesn’t happen for free. The outright cost is high - it costs nearly $30,000 per space to build a parking lot today. Those costs are then passed on to consumers. The biggest cost, however, is in what parking lots replace. How many projects are ultimately shelved because of parking requirements? How many hollowed-out downtowns would fill in if only there weren’t legal requirements, and this needs to be repeated every time, for cars that aren’t even being used? Entire cities have been shaped by parking requirements. Just take a look at this Good Maps view of Hartford, CT:

An entire city that has been handed over to the automobile. A city of which Mark Twain once said, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief... You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.” I doubt he would bestow that same praise today.

Consider the typical American movie theater. They are usually right next to retail outlets, often big-box stores. Those retail outlets are most popular during the day. Movie theaters are most popular at night. Have you ever seen a mixed-use commercial development with a movie theater where every parking spot is filled? Even half filled? Sure, the parking spaces by the big-box store might be full on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and the parking spaces by the movie theater might fill on a Saturday night, but at the same time? Maybe the Saturday before Christmas. Otherwise, it’s just tens of thousands of square feet, often hundreds of thousands, of land that is being wasted.

Like many other issues, this isn’t to say parking spots should be banned - although that case could be made from an environmental perspective. It’s just that parking spots shouldn’t be forced. Instead, let the market decide how many spots are needed. Will this create issues? Of course. Some businesses will deliberately under-build spots and hope their customers draft off other businesses. Sometimes customers might have to (gasp) walk five minutes or pay the equivalent of one hour of minimum wage labor to store their car for the evening. The point is that requiring every bowling alley to have six spots per lane is absurd. It has a real cost both in terms of dollars and forcing our society to be more car-dependent than it wants to be.

Happily, some cities have seen the light. Over the last few years several cities, from Raleigh to Anchorage, have removed all parking minimums. Cheers to that! For the first time, businesses in those places will be able to examine the market and choose the optimal amount of parking. Change will take decades, but over time, more valuable land in urban areas will shift from parking lots to buildings.

Progress at last.