See just how much of a city’s land is used for parking spaces

ARTICLE / TOOL

Adele Peters, Fast Company, 20 July 2017

At the moment, cars spend around 95% of the time parked, and only 5% of the time in use. Huge swaths of cities, either in parking lots, garages, or street parking spaces, are used as storage for cars (while, at the same time, many cities struggle to find enough land to build housing to keep up with demand). “There’s this huge space that’s basically wasted,” says Szell.

The high cost of free parking

ARTICLE / SHORT FILM

Will Chilton and Baird Bream, vox.com, Jul 19, 2017

Off-street parking requirements, really, spread throughout the United States faster than almost any other urban planning invention. They arose partly because of the lack of management of on-street parking. If you can’t manage the on-street parking properly you need off-street parking requirements or everybody will say, ‘How could you let this building be built when there’s not enough parking?

To boil an 800 page book down into three bullet points, I have three basic recommendations:

Remove off-street parking requirements.

Charge the right price for on-street parking. By which I mean the lowest price the city can charge and still have one or two open spaces on every block, so nobody can say there is a shortage of parking. In order to reach that price you have to vary it by location and time of day.

But you have done that, make it politically popular, and spend the revenue on public services on the metered streets.


To visit Donald Shroup’s website click here, for CityLab’s profile ‘Parking Is Sexy Now. Thank Donald Shoup’ click here.