Reinventing Transport

Parking minimums are under siege and it's a very good thing.  Most buildings in most cities and towns across the globe are required by law to provide plentiful parking. But parking minimums are a huge mistake. Click here to learn how to subscribe to the podcast. These parking minimums are put in place for understandable but muddle-headed reasons. Parking minimums (also called minimum parking requirements or norms or standards) do not in fact solve the on-street parking problems they are supposed to solve. Instead, they cause immense harm by worsening car dependence, hindering infill development, undermining walkable neighborhoods, blocking transit-oriented development, and by making real-estate, including housing, less financially viable and less affordable. Abolishing parking minimums is not a panacea. By itself, it doesn't necessarily reduce the parking that developers provide in car-dependent locations. But, among its many benefits, eliminating minimums doe...

We should stop planning parking the way we plan toilets. I began with that odd (but true) statement to get your attention, obviously. But I am also serious. Many people think parking policy is boring, which is unfortunate, because boring or not, parking is important. If you care about cities and urban mobility, you really need to pay  some attention to parking. Most local governments really do plan parking the same way they plan toilets (using minimum parking/toilet requirements) and it is disastrous. More on that below. Municipalities do this because of another mistake - treating on-street parking as a public good (and therefore failing to manage it properly). Please take note: parking in cities is generally NOT a public good. These two mistakes cause huge problems: 1. on-street parking problems, which worsen many other mobility and street problems, and  2. a slow-motion disaster of increasingly excessive (but under-used) off-street parking supply whi...

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] Here is a presentation with highlights from the Asian Cities Parking Study that I have mentioned before . I gave this at the ADB Transport Forum in Manila in late May 2010. Barter for ADB Transport Forum 2010 What do you think? Post a comment. You may feel that the policy implications near the end don't necessarily follow obviously from the data in the earlier slides. And you would be right. Some of them are a little speculative. They are based on the wider findings, on the data in the study, on my wider research on parking, and on arguments advanced in the study report itself (out soon I hope).   A parking meter in Guangzhou. It serves two spaces and accepts only contactless card payment.

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] Planning systems treat parking and toilets in very similar ways and for similar reasons (such as to deter people from 'doing it in the streets'). Is this just a funny observation? I guess it is quite funny but I also have a serious point. Planning toilets like we plan for fire-escapes, elevators and plumbing does work quite well ( mostly ). However, planning for parking like we plan for toilets is problematic. Below, I list ways that conventional planning does in fact treat parking and toilets the same. Then I highlight key differences which make planning parking like toilets seem like a very bad idea. First, a list of how parking and toilets are (conventionally) planned in very similar ways: Both are treated as an essential ancillary service that every building will need. It is usually assumed that no fee (or a token fee at most perhaps) will be charged. Remember, we are talking ...

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] Donald Shoup's ' The High Cost of Free Parking ' points towards a profoundly different way of thinking about parking policy. It offers much more than just a nifty way to price on-street parking efficiently.  Conventional parking policy in action in New Zealand Yet, in real-world policy debates over Shoup's parking ideas most people seem to focus only on his call to price kerbside parking for 85% occupancy . That's a pity because his agenda is much more interesting than that. First, a recap on Shoup's parking reform ideas.  He is focused on cities that currently have a conventional suburban-style parking policy, with cheap on-street parking and every building required to have plentiful parking. He is based in Los Angeles and his focus is on American cities. His ideas are also obviously relevant to places like suburban Canada, Australia and New Zealand which have adopted...

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?   Try Reinventing Parking. ] I left a comment at PT's Parking Blog in response to this John Van Horn item and its first comment . My comment ended up quite long. I think it is worth cross-posting here. I have been looking into parking policy around Asia. A report on it should be out next month (with luck). It is true that Mumbai and Delhi have parking chaos and are now trying to follow the conventional suburban parking policy approach of minimum parking requirements with buildings. Dhaka, with car ownership below 50 per 1000 people, is doing the same. In a situation like that, is it really a good idea to force building managers and all of their customers to subsidize the parking of the tiny elite? So far, it is not working very well (see http://reinventingtransport.blogspot.com/2010/04/parking-dramas-in-south-asian-cities.html ). Off-street parking does not magically suck cars off the streets if the streets are easy and...