Why aren’t there more parking spots? You may think as you’re circling the block in your car — as the average American does for 17 hours per year, according to data from INRIX, a transportation analytics company.

The truth is, despite your predicament, there’s actually more than enough parking in the U.S. — too much, in fact. There are eight spaces for every car in the country, according to one estimate, which collectively cover more than 5% of all urban land. So even though parking feels hard to come by for us individual drivers, it’s actually oversupplied on the macro level, country-wide.

A big reason for this is mandatory minimum parking regulations in many cities, which insist that all new housing, office, and retail developments in an area come with a certain number of parking spaces — whether they’re needed or not. This means that parking spaces may sit empty and unused (up to 30% of the time in some cities), squandering real estate that could otherwise be redeveloped into housing, retail, public transit, parks and green space, pedestrian plazas, or utilized for other communal purposes. 

Plus, at a time when we’re trying to collectively reduce emissions, this surplus parking induces people to drive more.  

Now, spurred by a campaign from activists and reformers, city officials are rethinking their mandatory parking minimums — and even the idea that parking should be free at all.

Parking regulations took off in U.S. cities beginning in the early to mid-20th century, when automobile sales were booming. The goal seemed sound at the time: get the sudden influx of  new cars off the streets and into lots instead. In order to accomplish this, municipal governments began requiring that property developers create a certain number of new off-street parking spaces to accompany nearly every new building they constructed. In other words, officials tried to reduce demand for on-street parking by adding more off-street parking, and redirecting drivers there. 

However, these mandatory parking minimums created various unintended consequences. First of all, more parking influences more people to drive, as a 2016 research paper found. Analyzing nine midsize cities over time, the researchers found that as cities grew their average number of parking spaces from 0.2 per person to 0.5 per person, rates of car commutership rose by 23%. This inevitably creates the exact situation nobody wants: more cars on the road overall, more emissions, and more time spent in traffic cruising for parking. 

Second, because the minimums required developers to acquire extra land and hire extra labor to build the lots, they raised prices for developers — costs that got passed on to consumers. According to one assessment, parking minimums can add an additional $60,000 in costs for every unit of housing. Moreover, these new lots are largely inaccessible to the masses. In essence, the construction of off-street parking spaces subtracts from land that could be used for myriad other purposes, including more on-street parking.  

In light of this reality, removing these mandates makes sense. After all, these laws do not stipulate that developers can’t create off-street parking lots; it would simply allow them to provide whatever parking they think is appropriate and cost-effective. Given the cost implications of creating parking, many developers will, if given the choice, choose to do with less — or without. 

Plus, the reduced red tape may encourage developers to build more. It’s an especially appealing outcome at a time when housing prices have risen sharply, driven largely by lack of supply.

“Reforming parking minimums is one of these examples of something that took much longer than I thought it would, but suddenly it is happening much faster, one to two cities a week,” says Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles (and author of the 2005 seminal non-fiction urban development tome “The High Cost of Free Parking”).

In many ways the trend was kickstarted in 2012 by Seattle, Washington, when the city reformed and reduced its parking requirements to correspond with neighborhood density, removing the requirements entirely for multifamily dwellings in certain areas and halving them in others. A 2020 analysis on the impact published in Transfers Magazine found that “developers built 40% less parking than would otherwise have been required,” which, in turn, saved “$537 million in direct construction costs over five years — more than $20,000 per unit — a savings that likely benefited both housing developers and consumers alike.” 

These are encouraging results, so it is not hard to see why many other cities followed suit. In 2017 Buffalo, New York became the first city to do away with parking minimums wholesale. Since then more than 200 cities and towns across the U.S. have altered or abolished their minimum parking requirements according to the Parking Reform Network, a four-year-old nonprofit group of transportation policy experts, engineers, and activists who have been working to “educate the public” on the impact of parking policies and “accelerate the adoption” of reforms (Shoup is among the group’s founders).

A recent addition to the list, and the largest city by population thus far to ditch parking minimums, is San Jose, California. In late 2022, the San Jose City Council voted unanimously to remove its prior mandatory parking minimum regulations: 1.7 parking spaces for every two-bedroom home in multifamily developments and one spot for every 200 feet of retail sales space.

“This wasn’t one of those really controversial issues, there wasn’t a lot of back and forth [ahead of the vote],” says Councilmember Pam Foley, who brought forth the resolution after hearing from housing developers that the minimum requirements were making it more difficult and costly for them to build downtown. Foley says the council was also moved to remove the requirements after studying Shoup’s work. 

“The feedback I’ve heard from residents has been mostly positive,” Foley says. While it is a little too early to tell what the ultimate impact on the city will be, she is encouraged by the initial support. “We’re such a spread out suburban community. If we can do it, anyone can do it. Not only can do it, must do it” for the sake of the environment and housing affordability, she adds.

According to parking reformers, removing mandatory off-street parking minimums isn’t enough: it needs to be complemented by abolishing free on-street parking altogether. 

In Shoup’s view, cities never should have allowed people to park on public streets for free, much less coupled it with mandatory minimums for off-street parking. He compares this dynamic to a hypothetical mandate requiring fast food locations to serve free french fries with every meal, regardless of what the diner ordered.

“If one day, you tried to remove the french fry requirement, people would resist, because it feels like it’s taking away something,” Shoup explains. “They would say you’re ‘declaring war on potatoes.’ Removing free on-street parking is like this. Everyone wants to park for free, including me, but that doesn’t mean we should forfeit the price of everything else — including housing.” 

Instead of free parking, Shoup recommends implementing metering and charging for on-street parking spots in an effort to reduce demand, encourage higher turnover, and instigate a shift to cleaner and more energy efficient modes of transportation such as cycling, walking, or transit. 

While few cities have made a point of installing meters on every single street, as Shoup and his allies would like, some — including San Francisco, Boston, and Washington, D.C. — have  implemented demand-based or “dynamic” pricing for parking meters, where the price rises on busier, in-demand streets. Instead of reducing parking demand overall, this approach shifts it to less crowded blocks, which may be helpful for some popular and high-trafficked areas.

Shoup also advises cities to implement street metering largely without exceptions, even for electric vehicles (EVs), which many cities and businesses have prioritized with designated and exclusive parking spaces. “Electric vehicle parking is just another subsidy for cars,” Shoup says, and cars, as many diagrams and studies have shown, are hardly the most efficient vehicles for transporting people. 

Though it may be unpopular initially with weary urban drivers, Shoup believes that metering for most (or all) on-street parking would ultimately win over the public, if the money generated is spent on making roads more bikeable, pedestrian friendly, cleaner, safer, and more pleasant to use. As demand for cars decreases over time, cities can then start considering a future when parking spaces are converted into whatever that city needs most: rideshare pick-up/drop-off zones, micromobility hubs, transit stations, bike lanes, loading/unloading zones, etc.

That future is finally in sight. Meanwhile, Shoup and his allies have been at this fight for decades, and with their biggest successes having come in the last few, they’re not about to give up any time soon.

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