They paved paradise, put up a parking lot
How American cities are targeting parking to end car-centricity
American cities are grappling with a complex issue: their overwhelming amount of parking spaces. Although many complain about the shortage of parking, the excess of parking has severe social, economic, and environmental impacts on our cities. It takes up valuable space: all of the parking spaces in the US make up an area the size of Connecticut. It costs a lot: A single parking space can cost up to $50,000 to build, a cost that businesses internalize by raising rent and the prices of goods. Most urgently, it’s driving the climate crisis. Overabundant parking encourages driving and steers people away from low-carbon alternatives like biking, walking, and public transportation. With transportation as the leading cause of the climate crisis, all efforts must be made to reduce car use, not increase it further.
Recognizing the dangers of parking, countless American cities have taken steps to reimagine their relationships with parking in recent years. In 2024, even more cities are discovering that parking reform is one of the most unexpected weapons to fighting the climate crisis.
Which came first, the parking space or the car?
American parking codes can be traced back to the 1950s, when many US cities adopted policies to create an excess of parking. The city planners of this era were unapologetically car-focused and created parking space minimums which required buildings to create a certain number of parking spaces regardless of actual demand. For example, a bed and breakfast in Doylestown, OH must build 1.5 spaces for every room, an agricultural auction facility in Montgomery County, MD must build five spaces for every 1,000 square feet of floor space, and naturally, a tubing-related business in Martindale, TX needs one space for every four tubes.
In the decades that followed, the country’s parking spaces climbed, and the graying of American cities ensued. Today, the U.S. has an estimated 2 billion parking spaces – for less than 280 million vehicles – which consume 20% of the average city. Many cities and towns still have a walkable downtown area or main street that exists as a relic of the days before parking minimums. Aside from those havens of walkability, parking lots swallow buildings and squander them away from streets. The dull, sprawling, and distinctly American landscape as we know it got its look from parking codes.
Off-street parking in the downtowns of American cities. (Parking Reform Network)
Escaping Parking Mania
The key to combating the environmental, economic, and social evils of parking depends on innovative municipal policies. Over the past several years, numerous U.S. cities of all shapes and sizes have taken unique paths to reform their parking policy.
The story of Minneapolis’s parking reform journey proves that good local policy can have a broader influence on state policy.
When he was in college, former Minneapolis Park Board member Chris Meyer read The High Cost of Free Parking, a policy guide on parking, for pleasure. In 2015, he gave a copy of the 700-page textbook to each of the Minneapolis city councilors and subsequently, the city eliminated parking minimums in a .5-mile radius around transit stations. Six years later, the city eliminated parking minimums citywide. Meyer and allies expected opposition, but ultimately no residents came to voice their concerns with the policy. When Meyer went on to work as a legislative assistant for Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, he brought 100 copies of The High Cost of Free Parking to the state legislature, awakening others to the power of parking reform. Senator Fateh has now introduced the People Over Parking Act, which would eliminate parking minimums state-wide.
Former Minneapolis Park Board member Chris Meyer purchased 100 copies of The High Cost of Free Parking to hand out at the Minnesota state legislature.
In 2022, Cambridge became the first city in Massachusetts to eliminate its parking minimums. However, the city is not new to policies that reduce car dependency. In 1992, Cambridge implemented its Vehicle Trip Reduction Act and in 1998, the city adopted a parking and transportation demand management ordinance, which is triggered when a business proposes building parking above a certain number of spaces. The ordinance encourages businesses to adopt measures that encourage public transportation and biking. Beginning with the Vehicle Trip Reduction Act of 1992, Cambridge has since implemented several progressive transportation policies. These reforms have had a significant impact; today over a third of the city’s residents don’t own a car, and only 22% drive to work alone. Cambridge is still pushing to reach an elusive goal of .8 cars per household, which it set in 2014, and hoped to meet by 2020. Evidence is strong that further reducing parking could play a role in meeting that goal.
In 2024, even more cities are considering doing away with their parking minimums and adopting new policies to reduce car dependency. Transportation and housing advocates in Boulder, Colorado, are pushing for a repeal of the city’s parking minimums and the implementation of a new transportation demand ordinance. This policy would build off of Boulder’s Transportation Management Plan of 2019, which outlines bold goals of reducing the proportion of car trips, and increasing biking, walking, and transit to 80% of all trips in an effort to reduce emissions from transportation by 50% by 2030.
Unpaving
Parking reforms are not an end-all-be-all solution to parking reform, much less car dependency as a whole. They have strong potential to slow the growth of new parking in cities, and for that reason, are the perfect launching pad for more progressive transportation policies. Once parking reforms are instituted, cities must face the challenge of converting existing parking into new uses.
Countless U.S. cities, including San Francisco, New York, and Boston, have had success converting on-street parking into bike lanes. Doing so can remove hundreds of spaces, depending on the length of the street. The wide void left by former parking spaces allows for bike lane protection and buffer space, which increases bike safety and ridership while improving safety for all by slowing down car speeds. Contrary to the belief of many business owners, converting street parking to bike lanes typically increases business activity in the targeted area.
San Francisco has converted much of its street parking to protected bike lanes.
Parking advocates are also calling to convert residential garages into affordable apartments, a direct solution to the housing crisis known to be caused, in part, by parking.
On a larger scale, several parking lots and commercial garages across the US have been converted into housing developments. Although some of these projects still include some underground or street parking, they aren’t centered around cars to the same extent that traditional developments are. Going even further, some new developments are designed to be entirely car-free, even within some of the most car-centric cities, like Tempe, AZ, and Charlotte, NC.
No city can use parking as a stand-alone solution to its policy challenges, but parking reform has proven to be a valuable tool alongside other measures. Minimizing the influence of parking on our landscapes opens cities to sustainable development, spurring economic activity and paving the way to safer, cleaner cities.
