Parking and the City

Donald Shoup brilliantly overcame the challenge of writing about park-

ing without being boring in his iconoclastic 800-page book The High Cost
of Free Parking. Easy to read and often entertaining, the book showed
that city parking policies subsidize cars, encourage sprawl, degrade
urban design, prohibit walkability, damage the economy, raise housing
costs, and penalize people who cannot afford or choose not to own a
car. Using careful analysis and creative thinking, Shoup recommended
three parking reforms: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2)
charge the right prices for on-street parking, and (3) spend the meter
revenue to improve public services on the metered streets.

Parking and the City reports on the progress that cities have made in
adopting these three reforms. The successful outcomes provide con-
vincing evidence that Shoup’s policy proposals are not theoretical and
idealistic but instead are practical and realistic. The good news about
our decades of bad planning for parking is that the damage we have
done will be far cheaper to repair than to ignore. The 51 chapters by 46
authors in Parking and the City show how reforming our misguided and
wrongheaded parking policies can do a world of good.

Donald Shoup, FAICP, is Distinguished Research Professor of Urban

Planning in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of
California, Los Angeles, USA.
“Don Shoup has done more to revolutionize the way we think about
parking than anybody else on the planet. His latest book tells the story
of the impact his ideas are having on the subject. It is a must read for
anybody who cares about the future of our cities.”
Michael Dukakis, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Northeastern
University, USA
Parking and
the City
Edited by
Donald Shoup
First published 2018
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of Donald Shoup to be identified as the author of the editorial

material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks

or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Shoup, Donald C., editor.
Title: Parking and the city / edited by Donald Shoup.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017057741| ISBN 9781138497030 (hardback) | ISBN
9781138497122 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Automobile parking. | City and town life--Parking. |
Parking meters.
Classification: LCC HE336.P37 P36 2018 | DDC 388.4/74--dc23
LC record available at [Link]

ISBN: 978-1-138-49703-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-49712-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-01966-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Palatino
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
 Table of Contents
Preface xviii

Introduction 1

Part I. Remove Off-Street Parking Requirements 57

Chapter 1. Truth in Transportation Planning 59
Donald Shoup
Chapter 2. People, Parking, and Cities 74
Michael Manville and Donald Shoup
Chapter 3. The High Cost of Parking Requirements 81
Donald Shoup
Chapter 4. The Unequal Burden of Parking Requirements 97
Donald Shoup
Chapter 5. Parking Mismanagement: An Rx for Congestion 101
Rachel Weinberger
Chapter 6. The United States of Parking 109
Seth Goodman
Chapter 7. The Fiscal and Travel Consequences of Parking
Requirements 125
Chris McCahill, Norman Garrick, and Carol Atkinson-Palombo
Chapter 8. The Environmental Impacts of Parking Lots 133
Emma Kirkpatrick, Amélie Davis, and Brian Pijanowski
Chapter 9. Parking and Affordable Housing in San Francisco 141
Bill Chapin, Wenyu Jia, and Martin Wachs
Chapter 10. The Unintended Consequences of New York
City’s Minimum Parking Requirements 148
Simon McDonnell and Josiah Madar
Chapter 11. The Hidden Cost of Bundled Parking 155
C.J. Gabbe and Gregory Pierce
Chapter 12. Parking Policy in Asian Cities: Conventional
but Instructive 161
Paul Barter

v
vi Table of Contents

Chapter 13. Parking and the Environment 171

Mikhail Chester, Arpad Horvath, and Samer Madanat
Chapter 14. The Parking Glut in Los Angeles 177
Andrew Fraser, Mikhail Chester, and Juan Matute
Chapter 15. Less Off-Street Parking, More Mexico City 183
Rodrigo García Reséndiz and Andrés Sañudo Gavaldón
Chapter 16. From Parking Minimums to Parking Maximums in
London 191
Zhan Guo
Chapter 17. Putting a Cap on Parking Requirements 199
Donald Shoup
Chapter 18. Parking Requirements and Housing Development
in Los Angeles 205
Michael Manville
Chapter 19. Parking Reform Made Easy 213
Richard Willson
Chapter 20. Parking Management for Smart Growth 222
Richard Willson
Chapter 21. On-Street Parking Management Versus Off-Street
Parking Requirements 228
Donald Shoup
Chapter 22. Abolishing Minimum Parking Requirements: A Guide
for Practitioners 231
Patrick Siegman
Chapter 23. Buffalo Abandons Parking Requirements 244
Daniel Baldwin Hess
Chapter 24. Solar Parking Requirements 255
Donald Shoup

Part II. Charge the Right Prices For On-Street Parking 259
Chapter 25. Cruising for Parking 261
Donald Shoup
Chapter 26. Free Parking or Free Markets 270
Donald Shoup
Chapter 27. Informal Parking: Turning Problems into Solutions 276
Donald Shoup
 Table of Contents vii

Chapter 28. Progressive Parking Prices 283

Michael Klein
Chapter 29. Progressive Parking Fines 286
Donald Shoup
Chapter 30. Disabled Placard Abuse 289
Michael Manville and Jonathan Williams
Chapter 31. Ending the Abuse of Disabled Parking Placards 298
Donald Shoup
Chapter 32. Ending Disabled Placard Abuse at Parking
Meters: The Two-Tier Solution 301
Donald Shoup and Fernando Torres-Gil
Chapter 33. Parking Charity 307
Donald Shoup
Chapter 34. Popular Parking Meters 311
Donald Shoup
Chapter 35. Parking Limits: Lean Demand Management
in Berkeley 316
Elizabeth Deakin
Chapter 36. SFpark 322
Jay Primus
Chapter 37. SFpark: Pricing Parking by Demand 344
Gregory Pierce and Donald Shoup
Chapter 38. Market-Priced Parking in Theory and Practice 354
Michael Manville and Daniel G. Chatman
Chapter 39. Cruising for Parking: Lessons from San Francisco 361
Adam Millard-Ball, Rachel Weinberger,
and Robert Hampshire
Chapter 40. Optimizing the Use of Public Garages: Pricing Parking
by Demand 370
Gregory Pierce, Hank Willson, and Donald Shoup
Chapter 41. LA Express Park 378
Peer Ghent
Chapter 42. The Politics and Economics of Parking on Campus 389
Donald Shoup
Chapter 43. Cashing Out Employer-Paid Parking 403
Donald Shoup
viii Table of Contents

Part III. Parking Benefit Districts 413

Chapter 44. Parking Matters in Old Pasadena 415
Douglas Kolozsvari and Donald Shoup
Chapter 45. Revitalizing a Downtown with Smart Parking Policies 426
Dan Zack
Chapter 46. Paid Parking and Free Wi-Fi in Ventura 438
Thomas Mericle
Chapter 47. A Parking Benefit District Grows in Houston 445
Maria Irshad
Chapter 48. Parking Benefit Districts in Austin, Texas 453
Leah M. Bojo
Chapter 49. Parking Benefit Districts in Mexico City 464
Rodrigo García Reséndiz and Andrés Sañudo Gavaldón
Chapter 50. Parking Benefit Districts in Beijing 473
Donald Shoup, Quan Yuan, and Xin Jiang
Chapter 51. Residential Parking Benefit Districts 483
Donald Shoup

Epilogue 495

Index 501
 List of Figures
Figure I-1 Office park in San Jose 7
Figure I-2 Parking requirements in San Jose 8
Figure I-3 Size of buildings and the required parking in San Jose 9
Figure I-4 American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for
America’s Infrastructure 13
Figure I-5 An office parking lot lined with apartment buildings 18
Figure I-6 Private parking converted to public parking 40
Figure 1-1 ITE trip generation rate for a fast-food restaurant with a
drive-through window, 1987 61
Figure 1-2 ITE parking generation rate for a fast-food restaurant with
a drive-in window, 1987 63
Figure 1-3 ITE trip generation rate for a fast-food restaurant with a
drive-through window, 1991 65
Figure 1-4 ITE trip generation rate for a fast-food restaurant with a
drive-through window, 1997 66
Figure 1-5 ITE trip generation rate for a fast-food restaurant with a
drive-through window and no indoor seating, 2003 68
Figure 1-6 Six-step process 71
Figure 2-1 Parking and jobs in the Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los
Angeles central business districts 79
Figure 3-1 How parking requirements increase the cost of
constructing office buildings 87
Figure 3-2 How parking requirements increase the cost of
shopping centers 90
Figure 3-3 Seven-unit apartment building on a 50 × 130 foot lot
(47 units per acre) 91
Figure 3-4 Tandem compact parking space in underground garage 91
Figure 4-1 Median net worth of U.S. households, 2011 97
Figure 4-2 Share of U.S. households with zero or negative
net worth, 2011 98
Figure 6-1 Metric used to calculate minimum parking requirements
for high schools 110
Figure 6-2 Metric used to calculate minimum parking requirements
for restaurants 110
Figure 6-3 Parking requirements for high schools 113
Figure 6-4 Required parking for a high school by basis of
calculation 113
Figure 6-5 Median required parking for a high school among large
U.S. cities 114
Figure 6-6 Parking requirements for places of worship 115

ix
x List of Figures

Figure 6-7 Required parking for a place of worship by basis

of calculation 116
Figure 6-8 Median required parking for places of worship among
large U.S. cities 116
Figure 6-9 Parking requirements for offices 117
Figure 6-10 Required parking for an office building, plus downtown
reductions 118
Figure 6-11 Median required parking for an office building among
large U.S. cities 118
Figure 6-12 Parking requirements for restaurants 119
Figure 6-13 Required parking for a restaurant by basis of calculation 120
Figure 6-14 Median required parking for a restaurant among
large U.S. cities 121
Figure 6-15 Parking requirements for apartments 122
Figure 6-16 Required parking for an apartment by number
of bedrooms 122
Figure 6-17 Median required parking for an apartment among large
U.S. cities 123
Figure 7-1 Percentage change in parking, residents, and employees,
1960–2000 127
Figure 7-2 Distribution of parking and buildings in the central
business districts of Cambridge, New Haven,
and Hartford 128
Figure 7-3 Changes in parking and local automobile use between
1960 and 2000 130
Figure 8-1 Example of digitized parking lots from orthophotographs 134
Figure 8-2 Pollutant loads and runoff estimated for pre-development
hydrology versus post development 137
Figure 8-3 Parking space footprint metrics 138
Figure 8-4 Representation of the number of parking spaces available
as a function of demand 139
Figure 11-1 Bundled parking for U.S. renter households 157
Figure 11-2 Garage parking as a component of the average
household’s monthly rent ($913) 158
Figure 12-1 A three-criterion typology of approaches to
parking policies 162
Figure 12-2 Commercial building parking requirements versus car
ownership in 2008 165
Figure 12-3 On-street parking in Dhaka’s CBD (2009) 167
Figure 12-4 Coin-operated parking in central Tokyo 168
Figure 12-5 Asian cities’ parking approaches located on the new
parking policy typology 169
Figure 13-1 Emissions per passenger-kilometer 174
Figure 14-1 Total parking footprint, 1910–2010 179
 List of Figures xi

Figure 14-2 Los Angeles County’s parking supply, 1910–2010 179

Figure 14-3 Los Angeles County’s parking space densities,
1950 and 2010 181
Figure 15-1 Percentage of land dedicated to parking for an 8,000
square foot building 184
Figure 15-2 Number of square meters built, by land use, 2009–2013 185
Figure 15-3 Percentage of total of square meters built, by land
use, 2009–2013 186
Figure 16-1 Controlled parking zones in Greater London 192
Figure 16-2 Post-reform parking supply compared to population
density 195
Figure 16-3 Post-reform parking supply compared to transit
accessibility 195
Figure 18-1 Housing growth in downtown Los Angeles 208
Figure 18-2 Parking spaces provided in ARO housing 209
Figure 20-1 Ontario Mills mall parking lot, Ontario, California 223
Figure 20-2 No parking 223
Figure 20-3 Strategies to reduce the number of parking spaces needed
at a site 225
Figure 20-4 Parking management strategies 226
Figure 22-1 A typical walkable district (Downtown Palo Alto, CA) 232
Figure 22-2 A typical landscape of one-story buildings surrounded by
fields of parking (Dana Point, California) 233
Figure 22-3 Public meeting agenda for the South Hayward BART/
Mission Boulevard Form-based Code 233
Figure 22-4 Parking on Ventura’s Main Street was underpriced and
overcrowded 236
Figure 22-5 Ventura’s downtown public parking garage often
sat half-empty 237
Figure 22-6 Ventura’s first “Class A” office building since the 1920s 238
Figure 22-7 Zoning codes’ stated purposes for minimum parking
requirements 239
Figure 22-8 Zoning codes often require more space for parking than
buildings 239
Figure 23-1 Downtown Buffalo, 2016. Surface parking lots can be
found throughout the CBD 246
Figure 23-2 Parking supply in downtown Buffalo in 2003 247
Figure 23-3 Schematic of mixed-use edges in the Buffalo Green Code 248
Figure 23-4 Acceptability of removing minimum parking
requirements 249
Figure 24-1 A solar parking lot 257
Figure 25-1 Curb parking prices and cruising 267
Figure 27-1 Informal parking on sidewalks 279
Figure 28-1 Progressive parking prices in Albany, New York 283
xii List of Figures

Figure 30-1 Parking occupancy and payment, Hollywood Boulevard,

Los Angeles, 2009 ($1/Hour) 291
Figure 30-2 Occupied parking spaces 292
Figure 30-3 Occupied but unpaid parking spaces 293
Figure 30-4 Occupancy rates on Flower Street, Los Angeles 294
Figure 34-1 Discounts at parking meters 314
Figure 36-1 SFpark pilot and control areas 326
Figure 36-2 Hourly parking rates in SFpark areas 329
Figure 36-3 Meter rate change table: Percent of total meter
operating hours 330
Figure 36-4 Change in parking availability 331
Figure 36-5 Change in parking utilization 332
Figure 36-6 Proportion of early bird, monthly, and hourly parkers 333
Figure 36-7 Changes in parking search time (minutes) 334
Figure 36-8 Daily vehicle miles traveled 335
Figure 36-9 Daily VMT per meter 335
Figure 36-10 Average daily SFpark garage entries 336
Figure 36-11 Double parking vs. occupancy 337
Figure 36-12 Transit speed and double parking 337
Figure 36-13 Average monthly parking citations per meter 338
Figure 36-14 Payment compliance rates by area 339
Figure 36-15 Average meter payment revenue by month,
per meter 341
Figure 37-1 Weekday parking prices at Fisherman’s Wharf, May 2012 345
Figure 37-2 Performance prices balance occupancy on every block 346
Figure 37-3 Average parking prices and occupancy rates on Chestnut
and Lombard streets, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. 348
Figure 37-4 Parking prices on Chestnut and Lombard streets, April
2013, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. 349
Figure 37-5 Distribution of elasticities for 5,294 price changes 350
Figure 38-1 Map of pilot zones, rounds 1 and 3 358
Figure 39-1 Probability of a block being full for different block sizes 364
Figure 39-2 Impacts of rate changes on occupancy over time 365
Figure 39-3 Cruising versus probability that a block is full for three
selected neighborhoods 368
Figure 40-1 Parking prices, occupancy, and revenue 372
Figure 40-2 Average hourly occupancy in SFpark garages 375
Figure 41-1 Total occupancy and unpaid occupancy as percent of
available parking hours 383
Figure 41-2 Unpaid vehicle occupancy as percent of total
vehicle occupancy 384
Figure 42-1 Top deck discount 399
Figure 43-1 Commuter mode share before and after parking
cash out 408
 List of Figures xiii

Figure 44-1 The new Old Pasadena 419

Figure 44-2 Sales tax receipts for the city of Pasadena 422
Figure 44-3 Your meter money makes a difference 422
Figure 45-1 Parking on unmetered Broadway; metered parking on
side streets. Photos taken within minutes of each other. 427
Figure 45-2 Downtown Redwood City parking requirements before
code revision 432
Figure 45-3 Downtown Redwood City parking requirements after
code revision 434
Figure 45-4 The restoration of the Mayers Building was made possible
by the in-lieu parking fee program 436
Figure 47-1 Map of Washington Avenue Parking Benefit District 448
Figure 48-1 A two-way cycle track installed on Rio Grande Street
using revenue from the Parking Benefit District pilot 454
Figure 48-2 The West University Neighborhood is full of missing
sidewalks that the PBD can help fund 456
Figure 48-3 A West University Neighborhood street, complete with
pedestrian-scale lights and bike racks 456
Figure 48-4 The streetscape along 23rd Street funded in part through
the PBD pilot 457
Figure 48-5 Map of the West University Neighborhood parking
benefit district 461
Figure 49-1 Illustration of a street before the implementation of
Parking Benefit Districts in Mexico City 465
Figure 49-2 Illustration of a street after the implementation of Parking
Benefit Districts in Mexico City 467
Figure 49-3 Average daily on-street parking occupancy percentages
before ecoParq 468
Figure 49-4 Average daily on-street parking occupancy percentages
after ecoParq 470
Figure 49-5 Sidewalk and a parking meter in Polanco, Mexico City 471
Figure 50-1 A hutong before cars arrived 475
Figure 50-2 Unregulated parking and resulting traffic in a hutong 475
Figure 50-3 Regularized parking spaces in Xisi North 7th Alley 477
Figure 50-4 Public toilet in Xisi North 6th Alley 478
Figure 51-1 Subway station at West 4th Street in Manhattan 487
Figure 51-2 Garages converted into housing 491
 List of Tables
Table 3-1 The construction cost of a parking space 82
Table 3-2 The cost of parking requirements for office
buildings—underground parking structure 84
Table 3-3 The cost of parking requirements for office
buildings—aboveground parking structure 86
Table 3-4 The cost of parking requirements for shopping
centers—underground parking structure 88
Table 3-5 The cost of parking required for shopping
centers—aboveground parking structure 89
Table 4-1 International data on mean and median net wealth
per adult 99
Table 5-1 Neighborhood characteristics 105
Table 5-2 Off-street parking spaces in Jackson Heights and Park Slope 105
Table 5-3 Variables affecting auto ownership and the decision to
drive to work 107
Table 10-1 Estimated parking requirement per 100 units 151
Table 13-1 Parking spaces in the U.S. (in millions) 172
Table 15-1 Previous parking requirements and new parking limits in
Mexico City 188
Table 16-1 Spaces per unit, pre- and post-reform 193
Table 16-2 Total parking spaces supplied versus minimum and
maximum required 194
Table 19-1 Developer response to parking requirements 216
Table 25-1 Cruising for parking 262
Table 28-1 Progressive parking prices 284
Table 34-1 Parking discounts based on car length 313
Table 38-1 Criteria for parking rate changes, SFpark 356
Table 40-1 SFpark off-street parking rate variations 374
Table 41-1 Distribution of average hourly parking rates prior to start
of project and after two years of operation 385
Table 44-1 Old Pasadena parking meter revenues and
expenditures, FY 2012 420
Table 50-1 Automobile ownership in Beijing 481
Table 50-2 Average annual income per household in Beijing 481
Table 51-1 Automobile ownership in New York City 486
Table 51-2 Average annual income per household in New York 487

xiv
 Notes on Contributors
Carol Atkinson-Palombo is associate professor in the Department of
Geography at the University of Connecticut.
Daniel Baldwin Hess is Professor in the Department of Urban and
Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo, State University of New
York.
Paul Barter is adjunct associate professor in the LKY School of Public
Policy at the National University of Singapore.
Leah M. Bojo is an urban-planning and land-use policy professonal in
Austin, Texas.
Bill Chapin is an urban planner in Michael Baker International’s
Oakland, California, office.
Dan Chatman is associate professor of city and regional planning at UC
Berkeley.
Mikhail Chester is associate professor in the Department of Civil,
Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University.
Amélie Davis is an assistant professor at Miami University in Oxford,
Ohio, with a dual appointment in the Department of Geography and
the Institute for the Environment and Sustainability.
Elizabeth Deakin is Professor Emerita at the University of California,
Berkeley.
Andrew Fraser is research assistant professor in the Department of Civil,
Environmental, and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University.
C.J. Gabbe is assistant professor in the Department of Environmental
Studies and Sciences at Santa Clara University.
Norman Garrick is associate professor in the Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at the University of Connecticut.
Rodrigo García Reséndiz holds a Master’s degree in Urban and
Regional Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, with
a concentration in transportation.
Peer Ghent has been the project manager of LA Express Park since
October 2008.
Seth Goodman is an architectural designer and an activist for sustain-
able transportation and urban design.

xv
xvi Notes on Contributors

Zhan Guo is an associate professor in the Wagner School of Public

Service at New York University.
Robert Hampshire is research assistant professor in the University of
Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.
Daniel B. Hess is professor and chair in the Department of Urban and
Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo, State University of New
York.
Arpad Horvath is professor in the Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Maria Irshad, CAPP, is the assistant director for ParkHouston, the on-
street parking operations for the City of Houston.
Wenyu (Wendy) Jia is the manager of systems and capital planning at
the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.
Emma Kirkpatrick is a planner and GIS technician at the Maumee
Valley Planning Organization in Defiance, Ohio.
Michael Klein, CAPP, is the founder and CEO of Klein & Associates. He
was previously the executive director of the Albany Parking Authority.
Douglas Kolozsvari is a principal at Solutions 2050, which provides
consulting services in the areas of air quality, climate change and
parking.
Samer Madanat is dean of Engineering and Xenel Distinguished
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at New York
University, Abu Dhabi.
Josiah Madar is an attorney at the Massachusetts Housing Finance
Agency and a research affiliate at the New York University Furman
Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.
Michael Manville is associate professor in the Department of Urban
Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Juan Matute is associate director of the Institute of Transportation
Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Chris McCahill is an associate researcher with the State Smart
Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Simon McDonnell is the director of research and strategic analysis at
the New York State Homes and Community Renewal (NYSHCR) and a
research affiliate at New York University Furman Center for Real Estate
and Urban Policy.
Thomas Mericle is the city transportation manager for Ventura,
California.
 Notes on Contributors xvii

Adam Millard-Ball is assistant professor in the Department of

Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Ram Pendyala is professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental,
and Sustainable Engineering at Arizona State University.
Gregory Pierce is adjunct assistant professor of urban planning and
senior researcher in the Luskin Center for Innovation in the Luskin
School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Bryan Pijanowski is a professor in the Department of Forestry and
Natural Resources at Purdue University and is the director of the
Discovery Park Center for Global Soundscapes.
Jay Primus works as a transportation consultant. Previously, he led park-
ing management for San Francisco, including the planning, delivery,
operation, and evaluation of the federally-funded SFpark pilot project.
Andrés Sañudo Gavaldón was the parking policy coordinator at
Mexico City’s Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
from 2011 to 2015.
Patrick Siegman is founding principal of Siegman and Associates. He
also as an advisor to San Francisco’s SFpark program.
Fernando Torres-Gil is Professor of Social Welfare and Public Policy
and Director of the UCLA Center for Policy Research on Aging.
Martin Wachs is distinguished professor emeritus of Civil and
Environmental Engineering and of City and Regional Planning at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Rachel Weinberger is a transportation consultant in New York City.
Jonathan Williams, AICP, is a strategic adviser in the City of Seattle’s
Department of Transportation.
Hank Willson is the parking policy manager in San Francisco’s
Municipal Transportation Agency.
Richard Willson, FAICP, is a professor in the Department of Urban and
Regional Planning at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Quan Yuan is a Ph.D. candidate in Planning and Policy Development
at the Sol Price School of Public Policy, the University of Southern
California.
Dan Zack, AICP, was the downtown development manager for
Redwood City, California, from 2003 to 2014. He is now assistant plan-
ning director for Fresno, California.
 Preface to Parking and the City
The American Planning Association published The High Cost of Free
Parking in 2005. Surprising everyone, this 750-page book on parking
was popular enough to reprint, with additions, as an 800-page paper-
back in 2011. Since then, many people have asked for a shorter version
of the book to appeal to general readers who are concerned about the
future of cities but don’t want to buy or read an 800-page book about
parking.
The Introduction to Parking and the City is this shorter, updated ver-
sion of The High Cost of Free Parking. The following 51 chapters then
report on the subsequent flowering of research and action on three
recommended parking reforms: (1) remove off-street parking require-
ments, (2) charge the right prices for on-street parking, and (3) return
the revenue to pay for local public services.
Writing about parking without being boring presents quite a chal-
lenge. Parking and the City is based on my experience as the Editor of
ACCESS, a magazine that bridges the gap between academic research
and practicing planners. Academic research often requires years of
work before the author eventually publishes the results. Developing a
theory, collecting data, and conducting rigorous statistical tests are nec-
essary before an academic journal will accept an article for publication.
Then what happens? A few fellow academics and their students might
read the article and discuss it. But city planners and elected officials
who can use the results to improve public policy will probably never
see the article or even hear about the research.
ACCESS offers academics an opportunity to reach a wider audience.
I invite the authors of policy-relevant research on transportation to
write condensed versions in plain and even lively English. I have used
this same editorial policy for Parking and the City. I invited the authors
of academic research on parking to write shorter versions for a general
audience with high standards for clarity, readability, and even humor.
The goal is to take the vital last step in research: make the information
accessible. By connecting scholars with practicing planners and elected
officials, I hope Parking and the City can catapult academic research into
public debate and convert knowledge into action. I also have invited
local officials who have implemented parking reforms in their cities to
write original chapters that explain their methods and the benefits.
I have accumulated many intellectual debts while assembling this
book. First, I want to thank my wife Pat, who is the best editor any
writer ever had. I also want to thank the many UCLA graduate stu-
dents who have worked on editing all the chapters. If you find the

xviii
 Preface to Parking and the City xix

book easy to read, you can thank, as I do, Eve Bachrach, Sam Blake,
Katherine Bridges, Anne Brown, Kevin Carroll, Jordan Fraade, Cally
Hardy, Dylan Jouliot, David Leipziger, Rosemary McCarron, Lance
McNiven, Evan Moorman, Taner Osman, Heidi Schultheis, Ryan Sclar,
Andrew Stricklin, Jacqueline Su, Ryan Taylor-Gratzer, Trevor Thomas,
Zoe Unruh, Julie Wedig, and Warren Wells. Easy reading is hard writ-
ing, and I hope these student editors have learned from me as much I
have from them. Nancy Voorhees and the Alan and Nathalie Voorhees
Fund generously contributed financial support to employ the long
parade of brilliant student editors. Krystal LaDuc and Edward Gibbons
at Routledge skillfully and patiently converted the manuscript into this
book.
Finally, I would especially like to thank the talented, dedicated, and
wise James Hecimovich, formerly the editor of the Planning Advisory
Service Report series at the American Planning Association. Jim was
also the editor of The High Cost of Free Parking, and I have greatly enjoyed
working with him again.
Both The High Cost of Free Parking and Parking and the City severely
criticize current planning policies. Condemning the way many cities
now plan for parking is an indictment of strategy and tactics, not of
motives. Whatever our differences, I am sure all planners share the
same goal of improving city life. How to go about this task is the endur-
ing question of our profession, and I hope this new book will spur a
debate that brings us to a better answer. After all, that is why we are
city planners.
 Introduction

He told the truth, mainly.

There was things which he stretched,
but mainly he told the truth.
MARK TWAIN, HUCKLEBERRY FINN

At the dawn of the automobile age, suppose Henry Ford and John D.
Rockefeller had asked how city planners could increase the demand
for cars and gasoline. Consider three options. First, divide the city into
separate zones (housing here, jobs there, shopping somewhere else) to
create travel between the zones. Second, limit density to spread every-
thing apart and further increase travel. Third, require ample off-street
parking everywhere so cars will be the default way to travel.
U.S. cities have unwisely adopted these three car-friendly policies.
Separated land uses, low density, and ample free parking create driv-
able cities but prevent walkable neighborhoods. Although city plan-
ners did not intend to enrich the automobile and oil industries, their
plans have shaped our cities to suit our cars. Cars themselves have
also reshaped our cities. As John Keats (1958, 13) wrote in The Insolent
Chariots, “The automobile changed our dress, manners, social customs,
vacation habits, the shape of our cities, consumer purchasing patterns,
and positions in intercourse.” Many of us were probably even conceived
in a parked car.
Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are particularly ill
advised because they directly subsidize cars. We drive to one place to

1
2 Introduction

do one thing, and then to another place to do another thing, and then
finally drive a long way back home, parking free almost everywhere.
Off-street parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars.
In The High Cost of Free Parking, which the American Planning
Association published in 2005, I argued that parking requirements
subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion, pollute the air, encourage
sprawl, increase housing costs, degrade urban design, prevent walk-
ability, damage the economy, and penalize people who cannot afford
a car. Since then, to my knowledge, no member of the planning profes-
sion has argued that parking requirements do not cause these harmful
effects. Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do cause these
harmful effects. Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are poison-
ing our cities with too much parking.
On average, cars are parked 95 percent of their lives and driven
only 5 percent (The High Cost of Free Parking, Appendix B). As a result,
cities require an enormous amount of land for parking. In Los Angeles
County, all the parking spaces that cities require cover at least 200
square miles of land, equivalent to 14 percent of the county’s incorpo-
rated land area and 1.4 times larger than the 140 square miles dedicated
to the roadway system (see Chapter 14 below).
Ultimately, parking requirements can make driving more difficult
because all the cars engendered by the required parking spaces clog
the roads and congest traffic. Los Angeles has more parking spaces per
square mile than any other city on earth (The High Cost of Free Parking,
161-65), and, according to the INRIX 2016 Global Traffic Scorecard, Los
Angeles also has worse traffic congestion than any other city on Earth.
Despite all the harm off-street parking requirements cause, they are
almost an established religion in city planning. One should not criticize
anyone else’s religion, but when it comes to parking requirements I’m a
protestant and I believe city planning needs a reformation.

THREE PARKING REFORMS

Reform is difficult because parking requirements don’t exist with-

out a reason. If on-street parking is free, removing off-street parking
requirements will overcrowd the on-street parking and everyone will
complain. Therefore, to distill 800 pages of The High Cost of Free Parking
into three bullet points, I recommend three parking reforms that can
improve cities, the economy, and the environment:

● Remove off-street parking requirements. Developers and busi-

nesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for
their customers.
 Introduction 3

● Charge the right prices for on-street parking. The right prices are
the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each
block, so there will be no parking shortages. Prices will balance
the demand and supply for on-street parking spaces.
● Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the
metered streets. If everybody sees their meter money at work, the
new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street
parking politically popular.

Each of these three policies supports the other two. Spending the
meter revenue to improve neighborhood public services can create the
necessary political support to charge the right prices for curb parking.
If cities charge the right prices for curb parking to produce one or
two open spaces on every block, no one can say there is a shortage of
on-street parking. If there is no shortage of on-street parking, cities can
then remove their off-street parking requirements. Finally, removing
off-street parking requirements will increase the demand for on-street
parking, which will increase the revenue to pay for public services.
Right pricing is also called demand-based pricing (because the prices
are based on parking demand), performance pricing (because the park-
ing performs better), variable or dynamic pricing (because the prices
vary), and market-rate pricing (because prices balance the demand and
supply for curb parking). I will use these five terms interchangeably.

THE GOALS OF PARKING AND THE CITY

Parking is the Cinderella of transportation. Universities preach equality

but they have a rigid internal status hierarchy, including the status of
research topics. Global and national affairs have the most prestige, state
government is a big step down, and local government seems parochial.
Even within the unglamorous world of local government, parking
occupies the lowest rung on the status ladder. Because most academics
cannot imagine anything less interesting to study than parking, I was a
bottom feeder with little competition for many years. But there is a lot
of food down there, and many other academics have joined in what is
now almost a feeding frenzy. Parking is far too important not to study.
The 51 chapters in this book summarize recent academic research
on parking. Several practitioners have also contributed chapters that
explain their experience with charging market prices for on-street park-
ing, dedicating the meter revenue to pay for public services, and remov-
ing off-street parking requirements. The results show that parking is an
important policy issue, not merely a regulatory detail. Parking affects
almost everything and almost everything affects parking.
4 Introduction

THE MOST EMOTIONAL TOPIC IN TRANSPORTATION

Most people consider parking a personal issue, not a policy question.

When it comes to parking, rational people quickly become emotional
and staunch conservatives turn into ardent communists. Thinking
about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most
primitive part of the brain responsible for making snap judgments
about urgent fight-or-flight issues, such as how to avoid being eaten.
The reptilian cortex is said to govern instinctive behavior involved in
aggression, territoriality, and ritual display—all important issues in
parking.
Parking clouds the minds of reasonable people. Analytic faculties
seem to shift to a lower level when one thinks about parking. Some
strongly support market prices—except for parking. Some strongly
oppose subsidies—except for parking. Some abhor planning regula-
tions—except for parking. Some insist on rigorous data collection and
statistical tests—except for parking. This parking exceptionalism has
impoverished our thinking about parking policies, and ample free
parking is seen as an ideal that planning should produce. If drivers
paid the full cost of their parking, it would seem too expensive, so we
ask someone else to pay for it. But a city where everyone happily pays
for everyone else’s free parking is a fool’s paradise.
Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for
his research integrating psychology and economics, summarized some
of this research in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He examined two modes
of thought. Fast thinking is instinctive, emotional, and subconscious,
while slow thinking is logical, calculating, and conscious. It’s hard to be
rational about an emotional subject, but when thinking about parking,
we should slow down.
I hope Parking and the City will convince readers that parking is worth
taking seriously. Few people are interested in parking itself, so I always
try to show how parking affects whatever people do care strongly
about, such as affordable housing, climate change, economic devel-
opment, public transportation, traffic congestion, and urban design.
For example, parking requirements reduce the supply and increase the
price of housing. Parking subsidies lure people into cars from public
transportation, bicycles, or their own two feet. Cruising for underpriced
curb parking congests traffic, pollutes the air, and creates greenhouse
gases. Do people really want free parking more than affordable hous-
ing, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, good urban design, and a more
sustainable planet? Recognizing that our misguided parking policies
block progress toward many goals that people care deeply about—
from providing affordable housing to slowing global warming—may
spark a planning reformation. Reforms in planning for parking may
 Introduction 5

be the simplest, cheapest, quickest, and most politically feasible way to

achieve many important policy goals.
After this introduction, the following 51 chapters are divided into
three parts that correspond to three recommended reforms. Part I
focuses on removing off-street parking requirements; Part II focuses
on charging the right prices for on-street parking; Part III focuses on
spending the resulting revenue to improve public services. In the rest
of this introduction I will use material from both The High Cost of Free
Parking and the chapters in this book to show why these reforms are
necessary and how they work.

I. REMOVE OFF-STREET PARKING REQUIREMENTS

City planners set the parking requirements for every art gallery, bowl-
ing alley, dance hall, fitness club, hardware store, movie theater, night
club, pet store, tavern, and zoo without knowing the demand for park-
ing at any of them. Despite a lack of both theory and data, planners have
set parking requirements for hundreds of land uses in thousands of
cities—the Ten Thousand Commandments for Off-Street Parking (The
High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 3). To paraphrase Charles Darwin,
there is grandeur in the array of parking requirements that planners
originally created for a few land uses or only one. From so simple a
beginning, endless forms of complex parking requirements have been,
and are being, evolved.
Although planners have adopted a veneer of professional language
to justify the practice, planning for parking is learned on the job and
is more a political activity than a professional skill. Consider all the
information planners do not know when they set parking requirements:

● How much the required parking spaces cost.

● How much drivers are willing to pay for parking.
● How parking requirements increase the price of everything
except parking.
● How parking requirements affect architecture and urban design.
● How parking requirements affect travel choices and traffic
congestion.
● How parking requirements affect air and water pollution.
● How parking requirements affect fuel consumption and CO2
emissions.

Cost is an especially important unknown. For example, without

knowing how much the required parking spaces cost to build, planners
cannot know how parking requirements increase the cost of housing.
6 Introduction

Small, spartan apartments cost less to build than large, luxury apart-
ments, but their parking spaces cost the same. Because many cities
require the same number of spaces for all apartments regardless of
their size or quality, the required parking disproportionately increases
the cost of low-income housing. Minimum parking requirements show
that cities care more about free parking than about affordable housing.
Parking requirements reduce the cost of owning a car but raise the
cost of everything else. For example, the parking spaces required for
shopping centers in Los Angeles increase the cost of building a shop-
ping center by 67 percent if the parking is in an aboveground structure
and by 93 percent if the parking is underground (see Chapter 3 below).
This increased cost is then passed on to all shoppers. Parking require-
ments raise the price of food at grocery stores for everyone, regardless
of how they travel. People who cannot afford to own a car pay more
for their groceries to ensure that richer people can park free when they
drive to the store. Parking requirements also help to explain why the
rent is “too damn high.” Chapter 11 estimates that parking require-
ments increase the rent carless households pay for their apartments by
13 percent.
Drivers have to pay market prices for their cars, fuel, tires, mainte-
nance, repairs, insurance, and registration fees, but no one argues that
all these should be free because charging for them would hurt the poor.
People who don’t own cars don’t pay any of these costs. Nevertheless,
cities require people who can’t afford a car or choose not to own one to
pay for parking.
America is a free country and many people seem to think that means
parking should be free. Parking requirements enable everyone to park
free at everyone else’s expense, and no one knows that anyone is paying
anything. Parking is free, however, only because everything else costs
more. Parking requirements are well intentioned, but good intentions
don’t guarantee good results or compensate for unintended harm.
In astronomy, dark energy is a force that permeates space and causes
the universe to expand. Similarly, in urban planning, parking require-
ments are a force that permeates space and causes cities to expand. The
higher the parking requirements, the stronger the dark energy that
spreads cities out and rips them apart. Parking requirements are an
unnecessary evil.

The Pseudoscience of Parking Requirements

When I am invited to a city to speak about parking, I usually start
with an aerial view of a site in that city with too much parking, such
as this view of an office park in San Jose (Figure I-1). Off-street parking
requirements require this pattern of development.
 Introduction 7

Figure I-1 Office park in San Jose

Too much of suburban America looks like this view of San Jose.
We tend to ignore this asphalt blight in our daily life, especially when
we park free in it. Parking is only free to us in our role as motorists,
however, because we pay for it dearly in every other aspect of our lives.
The cost of parking doesn’t go away just because the driver doesn’t pay
for it. In trying to avoid paying for our own parking, we end up paying
for everyone else’s parking.
I then show a page from San Jose’s parking requirements, such as
the one in Figure I-2, which shows the city’s parking requirements for
entertainment and recreation. The many pages of parking requirements
illustrate the New Urbanists’ complaint that conventional zoning is all
about numbers and ratios, with little thought given to how the resulting
city will look.
Parking requirements are so precise and so specific for so many land
uses that most people probably assume planners carefully study park-
ing. Instead, planners are winging it.
Planners are not oracles who can divine the demand for parking.
More often, they act as mediators between opposing political interests.
I have never met a city planner who could intelligently explain why any
parking requirement should not be higher or lower. The demand for
parking is not only more complicated than planners think, but it’s also
more complicated than planners can think (The High Cost of Free Parking,
Chapters 2 and 3). To set parking requirements, planners usually take
instructions from elected officials, copy other cities’ parking require-
ments, or rely on unreliable surveys of the peak parking occupancy
8 Introduction

Entertainment and Recreation

Arcade, amusement 1 per 200 sq. ft of floor area
Batting cages 1 per station, plus 1 per employee
Bowling establishment 7 per lane
Dancehall 1 per 40 sq. ft. open to public
Driving range 1 per tee, plus 1 per employee
Golf course 8 per golf hole, plus 1 per employee
Health club, gymnasium 1 per 80 sq. ft. recreational space
Miniature golf 1.25 per tee, plus 1 per employee
Performing arts production per 1 per 150 sq. ft. of floor area
rehearsal space

Poolroom 1 per 200 sq. ft. of floor area

Private club of lodge 1 per 4 fixed seats on the premises, or 1 per
6 linear feet of seating, plus 1 per 200 square
feet of area without seating but designed
for meeting or assembly by guests, plus 1
per 500 sq. ft. of outdoor area developed for
recreational purposes
Recreation, commercial (indoor) 1 per 80 sq. ft. of recreational area
Recreation, commercial (outdoor) 20 per acre of site
Skating rink 1 per 50 sq. ft. of floor area
Swim and tennis club 1 per 500 sq. ft. of recreation area

Figure I-2 Parking requirements in San Jose, California

observed at a few suburban sites with ample free parking and no public
transit. Parking requirements are closer to sorcery than to science.
Because cars must park somewhere, many people think parking
behaves like a liquid. If the parking supply is squeezed in one place,
cars will park somewhere else. But parking behaves more like a gas;
the number of cars expands and contracts to fill the available space.
More parking leads to more cars. Nevertheless, planners base parking
requirements on the assumption that cars and people come in fixed
proportions, and they often state the requirements in parking spaces
per person: per beautician, dentist, mechanic, nun, student, teacher, or
tennis player. This assumed ratio between cars and people is in turn
based on the assumption that all parking is free. If parking were priced
to cover its cost, the ratio of cars to people would be lower.
Next, I show the size of the parking lots resulting from San Jose’s
parking requirements for a few land uses. When you take into account
the individual spaces and add the access aisles to that calculation, each
 Introduction 9

San José's minimum parking requirements

Restaurant 1,000 8,250

Dance
Hall 1,000 8,250

Skating
Rink 1,000 6,600

Auction
House 1,000 6,600

Animal
Grooming 1,000 1,650

0 1,000 2,000 3,000 4,000 5,000 6,000 7,000 8,000 9,000 10,000
Square feet of building and required parking
Building area Parking area

Figure I-3 Size of buildings and the required parking in San Jose, California

parking space typically requires about 330 square feet of land. For many
land uses, the parking lots are bigger than the buildings they serve
(Figure I-3). There is more space for parking than for people.
The light gray bar on the left represents 1,000 square feet of the build-
ing, and the darker gray bar on the right shows the size of the required
parking lot. For example, San Jose requires 25 parking spaces per 1,000
square feet of dining area in a restaurant, and 25 parking spaces occupy
8,250 (25 × 330) square feet. The parking lot for a restaurant is thus more
than eight times the size of the restaurant itself. Parking requirements
provide parking everywhere anyone wants to go, but they also create
many places where few people want to be. Furthermore, some of this
expensive parking is rarely used. Underused parking has even inspired
an annual photo contest showing half-empty parking lots at shopping
centers on the day after Thanksgiving, one of the busiest shopping days
of the year (Schmitt 2014).
Parking requirements make the city friendly to cars but not to
people—drivable but not walkable. As Jane Jacobs (1962, 19) wrote,
“The more downtown is broken up and interspersed with parking lots
and garages, the duller and deader it becomes, and there is nothing
more repellent than a dead downtown.” We want more out of our
streets than just traffic and free parking. We also want prosperity,
safety, health, walkability, and pleasure.
10 Introduction

If citizens demand off-street parking requirements, however, I think

the right ones are the lowest ones that are politically possible after
planners have made a strong case for low or no parking requirements.
Planners can suggest many ways to reduce parking requirements. For
example, developers can include bicycle parking spaces and on-site
parking spaces for shared cars, offer cash-out programs for commuter
parking, and offer free transit passes to all residents of an apartment
building (see Chapters 19, 20, and 43, and The High Cost of Free Parking,
Chapter 10). These programs can justify targeted reductions in park-
ing requirements even where political concerns do not allow removing
them.

The High Cost of Parking Requirements

Parking requirements resemble what engineers call a kludge—an awk-
ward but temporarily effective solution to a problem, with many moving
parts that are clumsy, inefficient, redundant, hard to understand, and
expensive to maintain. Microsoft users will easily understand this con-
cept. Planners should recognize that off-street parking requirements
are a kludge designed to prevent a shortage of free on-street parking.
Parking requirements are superficially plausible but fundamentally
wrong. To paraphrase Anthony Downs (2004), using parking require-
ments rather than prices to balance the supply and demand for parking
is like adjusting the position of a picture on the wall by rebuilding the
wall rather than by shifting the picture.
Parking requirements are like barnacles on a ship, accumulating one
at a time and slowing the ship’s progress. These requirements have sev-
ered the link between the cost of providing parking and the price that
drivers pay for it. They increase the demand for cars, and when citizens
object to the resulting traffic congestion, cities respond by restricting
development to reduce traffic. In sum, cities require parking and then
limit the density of people to limit the density of cars. Free parking has
become the arbiter of urban form, and cars have replaced people as
zoning’s real density concern.
In disputes about exactly how many parking spaces a city should
require for every land use, each side makes solemn claims backed
by dubious evidence. Parking requirements may look scientific, but
compared with the current science behind parking requirements,
Scientology is science and the Wizard of Oz was a scientist. Parking
requirements are a step up from astrology, but they are several
steps short of the Farmers’ Almanac. They give pseudoscience a bad
name.
Planners often use “motivated reasoning” to justify the parking
requirements required by elected officials who want enough parking to
 Introduction 11

ensure they won’t be yelled at about parking shortages. Planners must

create arguments for conclusions already reached. Assumptions are the
starting point of most parking requirements, and the person who makes
the assumptions determines the outcome. Instead of reasoning about
parking requirements, planners are forced to rationalize them and must
feign expertise they don’t have. Setting the parking requirement for any
land use is like searching in a dark room for a black cat that isn’t there
and claiming that you have found it.
Planners typically assume that all residents come with a car and
require enough off-street parking to house the cars. Most residents usu-
ally do come with a car, but that is only because requiring plenty of
off-street parking ensures that most residents will own a car. Parking
requirements thus result from a self-fulfilling prophecy that everyone
needs parking. Everyone needs parking because parking requirements
engender an oversupply of cars that are then used to justify the need for
parking requirements.
Urban planners cannot say how many parking spaces every apart-
ment building needs any more than they can say how many cars every
family needs. Because the number of available parking spaces affects
the number of cars a family will own, the number of cars a family
owns cannot predict the number of parking spaces that planners should
require. The supply of parking creates its own demand, and planners
estimate the demand for free parking as the way to require supply. It’s
as if planners required storage space in every residence based on their
estimate of all the stuff they think people will store in the required
space. Requiring every building to provide ample parking encourages
everyone to buy a car.
All the required parking takes up a lot of space. Each off-street park-
ing space typically occupies about 330 square feet (half for the parked
car, and half for the access aisles). Because there are at least three off-
street parking spaces per car in the United States (Chapter 8), and three
parking spaces occupy about 990 square feet (330 × 3), there are at least
990 square feet of off-street parking space per car. In comparison, there
are about 800 square feet of housing space per person in the United
States (Moura, Smith, and Belzer 2015, 11). The area of parking per car
in the United States is thus larger than the area of housing per human.
Most of this parking is free to motorists because its cost is bundled into
higher prices for housing and everything else.
Parking requirements result from complex political and economic
forces beyond the control of city planners, such as demands for high
parking requirements from residents who oppose nearby develop-
ment. Nevertheless, planners enable the pseudoscience of parking
requirements and the public bears the cost. When it comes to parking
requirements, planners have used Pandora’s box as a toolkit.
12 Introduction

Evidence from In-Lieu Fees

Off-street parking requirements are counterproductive because cities
can’t fix traffic congestion and air pollution by subsidizing cars. We
can use cities’ in-lieu parking fees to suggest the subsidy for cars.
Some cities allow developers to pay a fee in lieu of providing the
off-street spaces required for a new building; the cities then use the
revenue to provide public parking spaces (The High Cost of Free Parking,
Chapter 9). The willingness to pay in-lieu fees rather than provide
parking spaces shows that a developer wants to provide less parking.
To justify their in-lieu fees, some cities calculate the cost per park-
ing space added by new public garages (The High Cost of Free Parking,
Chapter 6). For example, in 2016 Palo Alto, California, calculated that its
public parking garages cost $67,429 for every parking space added. Palo
Alto therefore charges developers $67,429 for every required private
parking space not provided.
This in-lieu fee reveals the cost of parking requirements. Palo Alto
requires four parking spaces per 1,000 square feet for commercial
uses. Because the in-lieu fee is $67,429 per space, the in-lieu fee is
$269,716 (4 × $67,429) per 1,000 square feet of commercial area. The in-
lieu fee thus adds almost $270 ($269,716 ÷ 1,000) per square foot to the
cost of a new building that doesn’t provide parking. This added cost is
like an impact fee to pay for parking (impact fees on new development
pay for the costs of providing public services to the new development).
The in-lieu fee hides the cost of parking by bundling it in the cost
of development. In-lieu fees unveil the high, hidden cost of parking
requirements.
Palo Alto also levies impact fees on new buildings to pay for parks,
libraries, and public safety facilities: $5.04 per square foot of building
area for parks, $0.27 per square foot for libraries, and $0.58 per square
foot for public safety facilities (City of Palo Alto 2016). Palo Alto’s in-
lieu parking fee of $270 per square foot thus dwarfs the impact fees that
it imposes for all other public purposes combined. If impact fees reveal
a city’s priorities among public services, Palo Alto’s highest priority is
free parking.

America’s Report Card

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers issues its
Report Card for America’s Infrastructure showing the condition of 16
infrastructure categories. Figure I-4 shows the Report Card for 2017.
The grade point average was D+.
If the civil engineers included parking in their Report Card, it
would probably earn an A+. The Good Intentions Paving Company
 Introduction 13

2017 Infrastructure Grades America’s

Cumulative
Infrastructure
AVIATION D PARKS AND RECREATION D+ Grade

BRIDGES C+ PORTS C+
DAMS D RAIL B D+
DRINKING WATER D ROADS D
A EXCEPTIONAL
ENERGY D+ SCHOOLS D+ B GOOD

HAZARDOUS WASTE D+ SOLID WASTE C+ C MEDIOCRE

INLAND WATERWAYS D TRANSIT D– D POOR

F FAILING
LEVEES D WASTEWATER D+

Figure I-4 American Society of Civil Engineers Report Card for America’s
Infrastructure

has produced great parking, and off-street parking requirements have

hidden its cost in higher prices for everything else.
Although public infrastructure is an essential input for all economic
activity, the U.S. probably spends more to subsidize parking than for
all the rest of its transportation infrastructure combined. The estimated
total subsidy for off-street parking in the U.S. in 2002 was between
$127 billion and $374 billion (The High Cost of Free Parking, 205–208). In
comparison, the total public infrastructure spending (capital, operation,
and maintenance) for transportation by federal, state, and local govern-
ments in 2002 was $190 billion (Congressional Budget Office, 2015).
Therefore, the total subsidy for off-street parking was somewhere
between 67 percent and 197 percent of total public infrastructure spend-
ing for highways, mass transit, rail, aviation, and water transportation
in the U.S. Users pay for much of the public spending for highways,
mass transit, rail, aviation, and water transportation through gasoline
taxes and other fees, but parking fees paid by drivers pay for less than
4 percent of the cost of parking (The High Cost of Free Parking, 208–210).

The Unequal Burden of Parking Requirements

Cities require parking for every building without considering how
the required spaces place a heavy burden on poor people. A single
parking space, however, can cost more than the net worth of many U.S.
households. Table 3-1 shows an estimate that the average construction
cost (excluding land cost) for parking structures in 12 U.S. cities in 2012
14 Introduction

was $24,000 per space for aboveground parking and $34,000 per space
for underground parking.
By comparison, in the U.S. in 2011, the median net worth (the value
of assets minus debts) was $7,700 for Hispanic households and $6,300
for Black households (see Figure 4-1). One space in a parking structure
therefore costs at least three times the net worth of more than half of
all Hispanic and Black households in the country. Because cities require
parking spaces at home, work, stores, restaurants, churches, schools,
and everywhere else, there are several required parking spaces for every
household, and the costs are passed on to all consumers.
Off-street parking requirements have produced an environment
where most people feel they need a car to get a job, go to school, and
shop. In a misguided attempt to provide free parking for everyone,
cities force poor people to pay for parking spaces they can ill afford and
often don’t use. Free parking has the veneer of equality, but it increases
inequality. It is wasteful and unfair.
Cities have a limited amount of money to spend on helping poor resi-
dents, and subsidizing parking is not the best way to spend this money.
Free parking has two grave flaws as a way to aid poor people. First, free
parking will not aid the poorest residents who cannot afford to own a
car. Second, free parking will mainly aid the richer residents who own
most of the cars. Nevertheless, cities seem willing to pay any price, bear
any burden, and meet any hardship to ensure the survival and success
of free parking. Cities have expensive housing for people but at least
three parking spaces for every car (see Chapters 6, 13, and 14).
Parking requirements may seem fair, but they produce unfair results.
To assess the financial reserves available to households, in 2015 the
Federal Reserve Board (2016, 22) conducted a survey asking respondents
how they would pay for a $400 emergency expense. Forty-six percent
said that they would have to cover the expense by selling something, or
borrowing the money, or would not be able to come up with the $400 at
all. Although almost half of all families live from hand to mouth, park-
ing requirements compel every household to pay for several off-street
parking spaces even if they don’t own a car.
City planners cannot do much to counter the inequality of wealth
in the U.S., but they can help to reform their cities’ off-street park-
ing requirements that unfairly place heavy burdens on the poor (see
Chapter 4). The planning profession should issue a recall for parking
requirements.

Every Sin Is Forgiven If It Is Done with Our Permission

Removing off-street parking requirements has yet another advantage: It
reduces the opportunities for corruption. When cities require off-street
 Introduction 15

parking, they can issue planning variances that grant exceptions from
parking requirements; that is, the city can allow a business to provide
fewer than the required number of parking spaces because of a special
circumstance, which is sometimes a donation to influence a bureaucrat
or politician. When cities establish parking requirements, city officials
have something to sell—a reduction in the parking requirement.
Just as the medieval Catholic Church sold indulgences for the remis-
sion of sins, cities can sell planning variances. In Dostoyevsky’s The
Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor of Seville explained why the
Church was popular even though it threatened Hell as the punish-
ment for minor sins: “Every sin will be forgiven if it is done with our
permission.” Similarly, if cities require off-street parking, officials can
forgive the sin of providing fewer than the required number of parking
spaces.
Seeking a parking variance from city hall resembles buying an
indulgence from the medieval church. Money goes in; favors come out.
Removing the parking requirements will remove the temptation for
elected officials to sell variances that allow sinfully few parking spaces.
Beyond saving money, removing the parking requirements will
reduce the risk of development. Requiring developers to ask for a park-
ing variance increases the risk of their projects because everyone has the
legal right to oppose the variance and extract concessions, even when
parking is not the opposition’s real concern. Opposition to a parking
variance makes it appear that everyone wants–demands–more parking
when parking is only a pretext and what the opponents really want is
to stop development. If a city allows development without parking, the
objections to granting a parking variance will vanish and developers
can propose financially viable projects.

Maximum Parking Limits

We often recognize the fine line between sensible planning and a fool-
ish blunder only after we have crossed it. In the future, I think planners
will look back at our predatory parking requirements the way we now
look back at the urban renewal programs of the 1960s—they seemed
like a good idea at the time but they created a disaster.
Some prescient critics foresaw the grave consequences of parking
requirements. In 1927, Hawley Simpson, who was a founding member
and then president of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, pre-
dicted that requiring off-street parking would create many problems
(The High Cost of Free Parking, 279–80). He wrote, “Rather than assist-
ing in solving the street traffic problem, it may very probably have
the opposite effect by inducing a large amount of unnecessary vehicle
usage. Free storage is an economic fallacy.” Lewis Mumford (1963, 23)
16 Introduction

warned, “The right to have access to every building in the city by private
motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually
the right to destroy the city.” Unfortunately, city planners ignored these
warnings. Parking requirements were not just a misguided step onto
the slippery slope toward command-and-control planning. Many cities
have landed in the ditch at the bottom of the hill.
In the aftermath of urban renewal programs and minimum parking
requirements, some U.S. cities’ downtowns began to resemble images of
medieval Romans camping in the ruins of an ancient and superior civi-
lization. Fortunately, many cities have reversed course. San Francisco
now has maximum parking limits with no minimum requirements in
its downtown, while Los Angeles has minimum parking requirements
with no maximum limits. Someone has to be wrong.
Maximum parking limits are justified if the traffic is so congested and
the air is so polluted that a neighborhood can’t safely handle any more
cars. But a problem with maximum parking requirements is how to set
them. The simplest reform of U.S. zoning would be to declare that all
the existing off-street parking requirements are maximums rather than
minimums, without changing any of the numbers. If minimum require-
ments specify what a city considers enough parking spaces, what is the
harm in prohibiting more than enough parking spaces?
The successful experience of cities that do have maximum parking
limits in their Central Business Districts (such as Boston, Chicago, New
York, and San Francisco) is clear evidence that bankers will lend and
developers will build in areas with parking maximums. The CBDs in
these cities have much more development than the CBDs in cities that
still have minimum parking requirements, such as Detroit and Phoenix.
One banker told me he was willing to lend for a building with limited
parking if it is in a district where all the other buildings also have lim-
ited parking. Maximum parking limits mean that bankers and develop-
ers have a city-imposed disarmament treaty in their competition to woo
tenants with free parking.
Removing minimum parking requirements is much easier than
reducing them or imposing maximum parking limits because planners
don’t have to invent the lower minimums or new maximums, justify
them, and then administer them. In many cities, removing minimum
parking requirements will also probably be much more important and
much less controversial than imposing maximum parking limits. Zhan
Guo studied what happened when London replaced parking mini-
mums with maximums in 2004 (see Chapter 16). Before the change most
developments provided no more parking than the minimum required,
whereas after the change most developments provided much less than
the maximum allowed. After the change, the parking supply in new
buildings was only 68 percent of the new maximum allowed and only
 Introduction 17

52 percent of the previous minimum required. The new maximum

limits caused only 2 percent of the decline in the parking supply; almost
all the benefits of shifting from minimum requirements to maximum
limits resulted simply from removing the minimum requirements.

Pretextual Parking Requirements

Some planners say that minimum parking requirements are needed
because they enable cities to reduce the parking requirements in
exchange for community benefits, such as affordable housing. For
example, California requires cities to reduce the parking requirements
for residential developments that include a specific share of afford-
able housing units (see Chapter 17). Reducing parking requirements
as an inducement to provide affordable housing shows how unneces-
sary the parking requirements are in the first place. Cities would never
reduce the code requirements for safe electrical wiring or fire escapes
in exchange for affordable housing units in a development, but parking
can easily be bargained away because it is obviously not necessary.
Reducing the parking requirements for developments that include
affordable housing, however, has led affordable housing advocates in
California to oppose any general reduction in parking requirements,
even if this would increase the supply of housing and therefore make
all housing more affordable. Affordable housing advocates would lose
a bargaining chip they now use to secure a few dedicated affordable
units in new developments. In this case, parking requirements are used
as a pretext; their stated goal is to increase the parking supply but the
real goal is to place a heavy burden on developers that the city can
reduce in exchange for whatever it really wants (Manville and Osman
2017). This pretext is largely futile because developers usually provide
the required parking and the city ends up with expensive housing and
too much parking.
How can cities remove their minimum parking requirements and
still have the bargaining power that the parking requirements provide?
They can establish maximum parking limits and allow developers to
provide more spaces if they pay a fee for every space they provide
above the limit (The High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 9). Mexico City
adopted a version of this policy when it changed from minimum park-
ing requirements to maximum parking limits in 2017 (see Chapter 15).
Mexico City charges developers a fee for every space provided above
half the maximum number allowed. I do not recommend establishing
pretextual parking maximums to use as a bargaining tool with develop-
ers. Nevertheless, if cities want to use parking as a bargaining tool, it is
much better to bargain from the starting point of low maximum limits
than of high minimum requirements.
18 Introduction

The Upside of Minimum Parking Requirements

If cities tried to micromanage other parts of our lives the way they
micromanage off-street parking, everyone would join the Tea Party.
Nevertheless, the upside is that removing the parking requirements
can do so much good. Figure I-1 showed the asphalt desert created by
excessive parking in Silicon Valley. Many spaces around the periphery
of the parking lots remain vacant all the time. What would happen if San
Jose removed off-street parking requirements, charged demand-based
prices for on-street parking, and used the resulting revenue to improve
neighborhood public services? Property owners might decide their land
is more valuable for housing than for parking. If a city wants more hous-
ing and less traffic, removing off-street parking requirements will help.
Everyone in Silicon Valley complains about expensive housing, long
commutes, traffic jams, polluted air, and the difficulty of attracting
employees. Figure I-5 suggests what could happen to the scene in Figure
I-1 if San Jose removed its off-street parking requirements. Housing
could be built on the periphery of parking lots. A large parking lot can
easily be redeveloped because it has a single owner, has no demolition
costs, does not require new infrastructure, and is near both jobs and
shopping. If apartment buildings were built on the parking lots next to
the sidewalks, anyone walking, biking, or driving by would see a real
city. The smartest way to travel is to be near your destination already,
and this job-adjacent housing would give commuters out-of-car expe-
riences while walking to work.

Figure I-5 An office parking lot lined with apartment buildings

 Introduction 19

The housing can be built without new parking because the existing
spaces can be shared between office buildings and apartments. To avoid
a parking shortage, the cost of parking will have to be separated from the
rent for apartments and offices, so only drivers will pay for parking (The
High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 20). Residents who work in a nearby
office building may find they can live with only one or even no car. They
will have the option to rent an apartment without paying for two park-
ing spaces, an option that parking requirements now prohibit. The new
housing can’t cause gentrification or displacement because no one lives
on the parking lots now. The acres of surface parking offer the possibil-
ity of something much better, but parking requirements make the vision
in Figure I-5 impossible. If cities remove the parking requirements at
office parks, shopping malls, and big box stores, the peripheries of their
parking lots can become sites for infill development.
Converting parking spaces into housing sites can reduce traffic
congestion because more people could walk, bike, or ride transit to
their destinations. Some of the remaining automobile travel could be
in shared cars or through Lyft and Uber. The asphalt landscape in
too much of America is not walkable, beautiful, or sustainable, but it
can be reformed and transformed. Removing parking requirements can
produce a cascade of benefits: shorter commutes, less traffic, a healthier
economy, a cleaner environment, and more affordable housing. And
the benefits don’t stop there. If we reform our misguided planning for
parking, and therefore our overreliance on the personal car, vast park-
ing lots can evolve into real communities. Economic objectives are often
said to conflict with environmental objectives, but parking reforms can
easily serve both objectives at once. Parking reforms that make sense on
economic grounds also make sense on environmental grounds.
The money now spent on cars and fuel can be spent on other things.
Cars and fuel are often imported, but we cannot import apartment
buildings. Spending less for cars, fuel, and parking, and spending more
for housing will increase the demand for labor in a host of profes-
sions, such as architects, carpenters, electricians, engineers, gardeners,
glaziers, lawyers, locksmiths, painters, plumbers, real estate agents,
roofers, surveyors, and even urban planners. Parking lots employ few
people but building on parking lots will boost the whole economy.
Parking requirements make U.S. cities look different from the
European cities that many Americans admire. Most U.S. cities put a
floor under the number of parking spaces to satisfy the peak demand
for free parking, and then put a ceiling on development density to limit
vehicle trips. Many European cities do the exact opposite; they put a
ceiling on the number of parking spaces to avoid traffic congestion and
put a floor under allowed development density to encourage walk-
ing, cycling, and public transport. In sum, many European cities limit
20 Introduction

parking and require density, whereas most U.S. cities limit density
and require parking. U.S. buildings are now connected more closely
to their parking than to the cities around them. Unfortunately, city
planners have ignored the Hippocratic oath “First, do not harm” as a
guiding principle in planning for parking.
Many successful business districts were built before cities began to
require every business to have its own off-street parking. In cities that
do require off-street parking, some business districts succeed if the city
uses in-lieu fees to finance public parking structures so that businesses
do not have to provide their own on-site parking (The High Cost of Free
Parking, Chapter 10). Developers pay a fee for every required parking
space they do not provide. Beverly Hills, Old Pasadena, and the Third
Street Promenade in Santa Monica (all in California) are good examples.
Try to think of any successful shopping street where every store has its
own on-site parking.
Off-street parking requirements without the option to pay in-lieu
fees leave no way to develop a successful group of stores except as a
shopping mall. No one can build a street of shops of the sort that was
common before cities began to require each building to provide its
own parking. Only inside the better malls can most Americans find the
dense, pedestrian-friendly shops that off-street parking requirements
have made impossible everywhere else. Off-street parking require-
ments promote malls and devitalize cities. Parking requirements favor
cars, and removing those requirements will level the playing field.
Some critics argue that removing an off-street parking requirement
amounts to “social engineering” and a “war on cars.” Instead, park-
ing requirements are the social engineering and a war on walking. All
the required parking spreads buildings apart so people need cars to
get around. Removing a requirement that restaurants must provide 10
parking spaces per thousand square feet of floor area, for example, is no
more a war on cars than removing a requirement that everyone must
eat 10 hamburgers a month would be a war on hamburgers. Removing
a parking requirement does not interfere in the market, and it is not a
war on cars.
When it comes to off-street parking, I’m pro-choice. Cities should not
require developers to give birth to unwanted parking spaces. Parking
requirements were a bad idea, poorly executed, and it is easy to see the
disastrous results—asphalt everywhere and a lack of life on the streets.
It is hard to see the good results that parking requirements prevent but
Figure I-5 shows how cities might look without parking requirements.
The upside of the mess we have made is that we have an accidental land
reserve available for job-adjacent housing. If cities remove their unwise
parking requirements, we can reclaim land on a scale that will rival the
Netherlands.
 Introduction 21

Parking requirements are a top-down decision by city planners and

elected officials to replace many independent decisions by residents,
developers, lenders, buyers, and travelers. Zoning now forces cities to
gorge on parking. Stopping this force feeding is not the same thing as
putting the city on a parking diet.
Even President Obama weighed in against off-street parking
requirements because they “impose an undue burden on housing
development.… These requirements have a disproportionate impact on
housing for low-income households because these families tend to own
fewer vehicles but are nonetheless burdened by the extra cost of park-
ing’s inclusion in the development” (The White House 2016, 16). And
as Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, has
argued, reforms in land and housing are the key to a fairer economy.
Because parking requirements commit so much land to cars and raise
the cost of housing so much for people, reforms in parking require-
ments may be the most politically feasible way to reduce inequality (The
High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 19).
Cities have three good reasons to remove minimum parking
requirements: We can’t afford them, we don’t need them, and they
do immense harm. Wishing that parking requirements did not exist,
however, is not a strategy for removing them. Parking requirements
respond to a real problem but they are the wrong solution, and cities
cannot remove their parking requirements without also better manag-
ing on-street parking. Cities require off-street parking so they won’t
have to manage on-street parking. The chapters in Part II focus on
charging the right prices for on-street parking to prevent congestion at
the curb without requiring off-street parking.

II. CHARGE THE RIGHT PRICES FOR ON-STREET PARKING

Many people think that parking is like sex—if you have to pay for it,
it’s just not right. It’s also easy to think that parking is like oxygen, so
essential that it’s a human right and should be free for everyone. Free
parking almost is a human right in the U.S. because drivers park free
at the end of 99 percent of their trips (The High Cost of Free Parking,
Appendix B). But even if parking is necessary, it doesn’t have to be
free. Food and housing are also necessary, but we don’t assume they
should be free.
Charging too much or too little for on-street parking can cause a lot of
harm. If the price is too high and many curb spaces are vacant, adjacent
businesses will lose customers, employees will lose jobs, and cities will
lose tax revenue. If the price is too low and no curb spaces are vacant,
drivers searching for a place to park will congest traffic, waste fuel, and
22 Introduction

pollute the air. Consequently, the right price for curb parking is the
lowest price that can keep a few spaces open to allow convenient access.
This is the Goldilocks principle of parking prices—not too high, not too
low, but just right.
With conventional parking meters, the price stays the same through-
out the day but the occupancy rate varies. With dynamic parking
meters, the prices vary but the occupancy rate stays the same—one or
two spaces are open. Goldilocks prices will give all drivers great park-
ing karma and will guarantee front-door access to all businesses.
The curb lane may be much more productive in uses other than park-
ing. For example, in dense neighborhoods a bike station can serve many
more people than the same length of curb used for parking. In a study
comparing a bike station on one side of a street with three curb parking
spaces occupying the same length of curb on the other side of the street
in Manhattan, Metcalf (2017) reported that during an hour almost 200
people arrived or departed from the bike station while only 11 people
arrived or departed from the three parking spaces.
Wherever the curb is used for parking, it is important to price the
parking properly to make sure it is being used properly. Market prices
for curb parking will then help cities compare the value of parking
spaces with the value of wider sidewalks, bike stations, or loading zones,
and better judge the highest and best use of their valuable real estate.

The High Cost of Free Curb Parking

Underpriced curb parking creates an incentive to cruise in already-
congested traffic. Cruising creates a moving queue of cars that are wait-
ing for curb vacancies, but no one can see how many cars are in the
queue because the cruisers are mixed with other cars that are actually
going somewhere. Nevertheless, a few researchers have attempted to
estimate the share of traffic that is cruising and the time it takes to find a
curb space. They have analyzed videotapes of traffic flows, interviewed
drivers who park at the curb or are stopped at traffic lights, and have
themselves cruised for parking.
Table 25-1 shows the results of 22 studies of cruising for parking.
Between 8 and 74 percent of the traffic was cruising, and the aver-
age time to find a curb space ranged between 3.5 and 14 minutes.
These results are selective because researchers study cruising only
where they expect to find it: on downtown streets where traffic is
congested and all the curb spaces are occupied. On streets where open
curb spaces are readily available, no one needs to cruise for parking.
Because curb parking is underpriced and overcrowded in the busiest
parts of most of the world’s big cities, however, the sun never sets on
cruising.
 Introduction 23

Newspapers often report on cruising. For example, consider this

report in the Los Angeles Times (October 13, 2014): “In Los Angeles,
parking your car on the street can be almost as stressful as driving it in
traffic. Day after day, motorists repeat the same drill in the congested
neighborhoods of the city: They weave up and down the streets, eyes
peeled for an empty spot or a driver sitting in a parked car. (Is he
maneuvering out or angling his way in?) Then they circle the block
again and maybe again, getting sadder and madder with each loop.”
Drivers may begin to think the only way to find a parking space is to
buy a parked car.
On-street parking is the most contested public land outside the Gaza
Strip, and the competition for space can be fierce. In one study, the
German Automobile Club set up video cameras at each intersection
in central Freiburg and used them to follow randomly selected cars
traveling from one intersection to another. The researchers estimated
that 74 percent of the 800 cars followed on camera were cruising for
parking and would have parked immediately had they found a space.
The cameras revealed another notable finding: cruising, the researchers
reported, produces psychological changes as drivers creep along in
search of a parking space:
This fixation on a parking space turns many drivers into unscrupulous
maniacs. When all else fails, they will pull into any available space in a
no-stopping zone, on the sidewalk, or even in an intersection (The High Cost
of Free Parking, Chapter 11).
Closer to home, consider parking at a local farmers market. Drivers
aggressively compete for the nearby on-street parking. But in the farm-
ers market itself, everyone is considerate, trying not to get in each
other’s way, waiting patiently when someone else is blocking them,
and saying “after you” when two people get to the counter at the same
time. People’s personalities don’t change in the few minutes it takes to
walk from their cars to the market. Instead, what changes is the tran-
sition from competing for parking in an overcrowded commons to
cooperating in a market where everyone pays for what they buy.
Having an open parking space available on the street is like having
an open pump space available at a gas station. When the government
capped gas prices at the pump in 1979, long lines immediately formed
at gas stations. Drivers had to wait for their turn to fill up. The lines
of idling cars spilling onto the streets showed the mistake of setting
below-market prices for gasoline, and the price caps were removed in
1981. When cities charge below-market prices for curb parking, drivers
have to cruise in search of an open space but we can’t see the lines of
cars waiting for parking. We know some cars are cruising because we
have done it ourselves.
24 Introduction

Suppose we had two kinds of gas stations, private and public. The
private stations sell gas at market prices, but the public stations sell gas
at heavily subsidized prices. The market-priced private stations won’t
have any lines at the pump, but the underpriced public stations will
have long lines at the pump, with engines idling, drivers fuming, and
time being wasted, as with underpriced curb parking.
For each hour that an additional car is parked on a crowded street,
other drivers will have more difficulty finding an open space and will
spend more time cruising for parking. Inci, Ommeren, and Kobus (2017)
estimate that for each extra hour that a car parks at a crowded curb, the
total extra time that other drivers waste while cruising for parking is
worth about 15 percent of what an average worker earns in an hour.
This external cost is only for the additional time spent by drivers who
are cruising, and cruising does far more than waste the cruisers’ time.
Cruising also congests traffic, pollutes the air, endangers pedestrians
and cyclists, and creates CO2 emissions. All these extra costs show that
underpriced parking costs a lot more than right-priced parking.
The U.S. spends about as much to subsidize the parking-industrial
complex as on Medicare, and the parking subsidies encourage addi-
tional driving (The High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 7). To fuel this
extra driving, the U.S. imports oil and pays for it with borrowed
money. Just as we now look back at gas price controls in 1979–1981 as
a well-intended disaster, we will eventually look back at underpriced
curb parking as a far greater man-made disaster that has lasted far
longer.
Some critics may say that using market-clearing prices to allocate
curb parking amounts to rationing. We already ration parking now, but
we don’t do it rationally. Drivers who cruise for free curb parking pay
with time rather than money. Their cruising congests traffic, pollutes
the air, and wastes energy. If drivers pay for curb parking with money,
that money can then pay to clean the sidewalks and repair streets.
Cities that underprice their curb parking are telling drivers to foul the
environment and starve public services.

The Cumulative Costs of Cruising

The driver who occupies the last open parking space on a street creates
a cascade of costs for everyone else because cruising for parking is
nonlinear. There is no problem finding a curb space if one space is open
on a block. When that last space is filled, however, there is no place to
park, and new arrivals have to circle the block in their air-conditioned
or heated cocoons with seats as soft as a caramel mousse. The cruising
cars increase the traffic flow as they troll for open spaces. So filling the
last curb space on a block quickly creates a problem.
 Introduction 25

Traffic congestion is also nonlinear. If the traffic flow increases past

a critical point where cars are bunched too close together, suddenly all
the cars and buses are mired in stop-and-go traffic. The cars’ fuel con-
sumption in traffic is also nonlinear. When traffic becomes stop-and-go,
the cars’ fuel consumption, pollution emissions, and greenhouse gas
emissions per mile quickly increase. And drivers who are distracted
while hunting for parking increase the accident risks for pedestrians,
cyclists, and other drivers. So the car that fills the last open curb space
on a block creates a domino effect of damaging consequences. The mad-
dening shortage of on-street parking also leads to political demands
for off-street parking requirements that have further consequences
throughout the housing and transportation markets. Cruising for free
curb parking is individually rational but collectively insane.
Filling the last open parking space on a block has consequences
similar to those in the proverb about the lack of a single horseshoe nail:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For failure in battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
The lack of an open parking space may seem as minor as the lack
of a horseshoe nail, but the unfolding chain of consequences is simi-
larly disastrous. Failing to charge the right prices for curb parking can
lead to widening dysfunctions in related markets and produce grave
results that few people will trace back to the lack of an open curb space.
By the same reasoning, charging the right prices can produce a cascade
of benefits that few people will trace back to an open parking space.
An open parking space helps everyone, not just drivers. And there is
yet another benefit. Every year, Americans waste 3.14159 billion hours
complaining about parking, and getting the prices for parking right
will save all this lost time.
Now, the mark of a great city is that there are never enough places
to park. With demand-based prices for curb parking, great cities will
have enough places to park and more money to pay for public services.
A few vacant spaces on a crowded street may look underused or even
wasted, but the vacant spaces are valuable because they are vacant.

Debating the Doubters

Despite all the damage done by cruising, convincing cities to charge
market prices for curb parking is hard. I know because I have tried
26 Introduction

for many years in many cities to make the case for market-priced curb
parking. Drivers who want to park for free tend to shout and they
dominate most public debates.
In 2009 I was invited to make a presentation in Santa Rosa, in the
wine country of Northern California. Santa Rosa has a lively downtown
with many good restaurants and a parking problem. I was pleased to
see the large auditorium in city hall packed to hear a professor talk
about parking. I spoke for an hour and explained why I thought Santa
Rosa should charge market prices for its scarce curb parking and spend
the revenue to improve the metered areas.
I pointed out that the city’s parking meters operated from 8 a.m. to
6 p.m., but almost all the curb spaces were empty before 10 a.m. and
full after 6 p.m. I suggested that the city should begin to operate the
meters at 10 a.m. so more customers might come to the coffee shops that
were open early and instead operate the meters longer in the evening
to prevent a shortage of curb spaces for diners. If the meters create a
few open spaces in the evening, people will find it easier to drive to the
many restaurants. Anyone who doesn’t want to pay for curb parking
can park free in Santa Rosa’s municipal garages. If the meters are priced
right, cars will fill most of the curb spaces, leaving only one or two
vacant spaces on each block. If the curb spaces are almost but not quite
full all the time, parking meters can’t be chasing many customers away.
The audience seemed to agree, but the first question came from an
angry man in the top row of seats. He wasn’t foaming but people nearby
seemed to recoil from bits of saliva. He shouted that if the city ran the
parking meters in the evening, he would never come to a restaurant
downtown again. He seemed to think that settled the question.
Elected officials and city planners can’t argue in a public meeting
with an angry citizen about parking because his anger might be the tip
of an iceberg of popular opposition. But I responded that if this guy
didn’t drive downtown, someone who was willing to pay for parking
would take his place. And I asked, who do you think will leave a bigger
tip in a restaurant? Someone who will come downtown only if he can
park free after driving for 20 minutes hoping to see a car pulling out, or
people who are willing to pay for parking if they can easily find a curb
space near the restaurant? I also suggested that if he didn’t want to
pay for parking downtown, he might get a better deal in the food court
of a suburban mall with ample free parking. The audience began to
cheer and clap, no longer the silent majority.
I had dined in restaurants in Santa Rosa the previous two evenings,
and I asked the waiters—as I do whenever I visit a restaurant—where
they park. If the restaurant is in a part of town with parking meters that
stop operating at 6 p.m., the waiters almost always say that they try
to arrive before 6 p.m. when there are a few metered spaces available,
 Introduction 27

pay for the short time until 6 p.m., and then they can park free for the
rest of the evening. That seems good for the waiters, but they occupy
parking spaces that customers could have used. That means fewer cus-
tomers for the restaurants and also fewer tips for the waiters.
Waiters who park at the curb will probably be solo drivers, but two,
three, or four diners may arrive in one car. If a metered curb space turns
over twice during the evening, each space can deliver two groups of diners
to a restaurant rather than one waiter. With more customers, the restau-
rants can expand and hire more waiters. It seems counterintuitive that
waiters will be better off if the parking meters operate in the evenings, but
waiters and everyone else involved will benefit. Some waiters can move
to garages or more distant on-street parking, and restaurant customers
will take their place. The on-street parking will be well used but the park-
ers will be different—they will be customers, not waiters. Business will
improve even if the parking occupancy doesn’t look much different.
One argument against operating meters in the evening is that the
conventional one- or two-hour time limits are inconvenient for custom-
ers who want to spend more time at a restaurant or theatre. For this
reason, cities should remove the time limits at meters in the evening
and allow prices alone to create turnover.
A stronger argument against operating meters in the evening is that
waiters and other service staff who work late hours and earn low wages
cannot afford to pay for parking. For this reason, some cities offer free
or discounted parking passes in municipal garages for evening and
night workers rather than keep the on-street parking free. Because
nights are usually a time of low demand in downtown garages, there
are plenty of off-street parking spaces available. When Santa Fe, New
Mexico, extended its meter hours into the evening, it also began to offer
“social equity” parking passes in municipal garages at half the usual
price for drivers who work for downtown business and have wages of
$15 an hour or less. Portland, Oregon, and Sacramento, California, have
similar programs. Shifting workers to off-street spaces can make the
most convenient on-street spaces available for customers.
Finally, to shorten any debate about how much to charge for on-street
parking, I sometimes ask critics of demand-based prices what principle
they would use to set the prices for parking on every block at every time
of day. Asserting that demand-based prices are unfair is much easier
than coming up with a logical alternative.
It took longer than I expected for Santa Rosa to adopt any of the park-
ing reforms I had proposed. In 2017 Santa Rosa decided to operate the
parking meters from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and to increase the meter prices
in the high-demand areas to $1.50 an hour. As reported in the city’s
newspaper, The Press Democrat,
28 Introduction

The city has been considering progressive parking policies since 2009, when
Donald Shupe, an influential academic on the subject, visited Santa Rosa
and outlined his views. He is the author of a book called “There Ain’t No
Such Thing as Free Parking.” Shupe argued that a community should shoot
for 85 percent occupancy of its parking spaces, and adjust rates to hit that
level if possible (McCallum 2017).

The author misspelled my name and garbled the book's title, but he
nailed the policy proposal: “a community should shoot for 85 percent
occupancy of its parking spaces and adjust rates to hit that level if
possible.”

Perishable Goods
Although perishable may seem a strange word to describe parking, a
parking space is what economists call a perishable good. A perishable
good has fixed costs and cannot be stored. Airline seats and hotel rooms
are examples of perishable goods—an empty seat on an airplane or
an empty hotel room cannot be stored and sold later. Therefore, like
effective management for airlines and hotels, effective management for
parking requires ensuring that the spaces are used efficiently.
Private operators adjust prices of perishable goods to maximize
revenue, but a city’s goal for curb parking should be different. Full
occupancy of curb parking produces unwanted cruising, while low
occupancy means the curb spaces are not delivering customers to the
adjacent businesses. A city must balance the competing goals of reli-
able availability (one or two spaces are open on each block) and high
occupancy (most of the spaces are occupied by customers). If park-
ing demand varies greatly over time, pricing curb parking to balance
supply and demand creates a conflict between the two goals of ready
availability and high occupancy. The key measure in setting prices
should focus on the arriving drivers’ ability to find an open space.
When Seattle began to base parking prices on demand, the city
council directed the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to
“set rates to achieve approximately one or two open spaces per block
face throughout the day. The policy objective is to ensure that visitors
to neighborhood business districts can find a parking spot near their
destination. SDOT may both raise and lower rates in different areas as
appropriate to meet the occupancy target” (City of Seattle 2011). After
the first occupancy counts in the city’s 22 meter districts in 2011, SDOT
increased meter rates in four districts, left them unchanged in seven,
and reduced them in eleven.
Business groups supported the city council because the city switched
from a revenue goal to an outcome goal for setting meter rates. The
 Introduction 29

city continues to earn revenue but revenue is no longer a justification

for raising meter rates. The goal of one or two open spaces per block
is an easy way to explain that the purpose is to guarantee parking
availability and reduce cruising. Because some blocks are short and
have few spaces, while others are long and have many spaces, the
goal of one or two vacant spaces on every block cannot be applied
rigidly.
Given the random nature of arrivals and departures, cities will need
to accept some time during which a street has two or more vacancies
so there will be less time with no vacancies. Instead of aiming for an
average occupancy, a city can aim to keep at least one vacant spot on
every block for at least a certain share of every hour. A city will have
three goals in setting a target occupancy rate for curb parking:

1. Ready availability. Availability can be defined as the share of an

hour (e.g., 50 minutes) with at least one vacant space on the block.
Ready availability means that drivers can usually find a conven-
ient open space.
2. High occupancy. Occupancy can be defined as the average
share of spaces that are occupied during the hour. High occu-
pancy means that the curb spaces are well used and serve many
customers.
3. Revenue. Revenue depends on both the meter price and the occu-
pancy rate. Revenue should not be the primary goal, but there
will be revenue if the program is managed well.

Cities face a trade-off between ready availability and high occu-

pancy. These two goals conflict because raising the meter rates to
ensure at least one vacant space will reduce the average occupancy
rate. Suppose, for example, a city sets prices to ensure a vacant space
on each block for at least 50 minutes during each hour. If at least one
vacant space is available on that block for only 30 minutes in an hour,
the availability target is not met, and the price should increase. This
price increase, however, means that the average occupancy during the
hour will decline.
San Francisco and Los Angeles are the first two cities to set parking
prices by time of day and location, and they adjust these prices every
two or three months in response to the observed occupancy, although
by different rules. During each time period on each block, San Francisco
sets the prices to achieve an average target occupancy rate on each
block, while Los Angeles sets the prices to achieve a target share of the
time with at least one open space on each block.
30 Introduction

San Francisco
In 2011, San Francisco adopted SFpark, a pricing program that aims to
solve the problems created by charging too much or too little for curb
parking. In seven pilot zones across the city, with a total of 7,000 curb
spaces, San Francisco installed sensors that report the occupancy of
curb spaces on every block and parking meters that charge variable
prices according to location and time of day. The meters were also
the first in San Francisco to accept payment by credit cards, and this
convenience provided good publicity for SFpark.
SFpark adjusts parking prices every six weeks in response to the aver-
age parking occupancy during the previous six weeks. If the occupancy
rate on a block was higher than 80 percent during a time period (such
as from noon to 3 pm), the hourly price of parking increases by 25 cents.
If the occupancy rate was below 60 percent, the hourly price of parking
decreases by 25 cents. Consider the resulting prices of curb parking on a
weekday at Fisherman’s Wharf, a popular tourist and retail destination,
after almost two years of price adjustments (see Figure 37-1).
Before SFpark began in August 2011, the price for a space was $3
an hour at all times. With SFpark, each block can have different prices
during three periods of the day—before noon, from noon to 3 pm, and
after 3 pm. By May 2012, most prices had decreased in the morning
hours. Some prices increased between noon and 3 pm—the busiest time
of day—and most prices declined after 3 pm. Prices changed every six
weeks, never by more than 25 cents per hour.
SFpark based these price adjustments purely on observed occupancy.
City planners cannot reliably predict the right price for parking on
every block at every time of day, but they can use a simple trial-and-
error process to adjust prices in response to past occupancy rates. The
only way to tell whether the price is right is to look at the results. The
right price for curb parking is the price that leads to the right occupancy
rate, and it is like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: “I
know it when I see it.” I won’t know the right price for curb parking
until I see the right occupancy.
Did these small changes in parking prices change many drivers’
behavior? Only a few drivers have to change their behavior to pro-
duce the right parking occupancy because most drivers are not trying
to park, and many drivers who do want to park will park off street.
Of those few drivers who want to park at the curb, even fewer will
have to change their behavior to create one vacant space on each block.
Therefore, SFpark does not have to change many drivers’ behavior to
improve parking availability and reduce traffic congestion. If only a
few drivers change their behavior, finding a curb parking space will no
longer resemble winning the lottery.
 Introduction 31

Where the meters are priced correctly, drivers will not need informa-
tion about parking availability on every block because an open space
will be available almost everywhere. Drivers will only need information
about parking prices to choose the best place to park.
Demand-based parking prices are efficient, but are they fair? Thirty
percent of households in San Francisco don’t own a car, so they
don’t pay anything for curb parking. San Francisco uses all its park-
ing meter revenue to subsidize public transit, which helps everyone
who can’t afford a car. SFpark further aids bus riders, cyclists, and
pedestrians by reducing the traffic caused by cruising for underpriced
and overcrowded curb parking. So it’s hard to argue that SFpark is
unfair.
If the price of parking is the same everywhere, no one can save money
by parking in a cheaper space and walking farther. Suppose you want
to park on a street at Fisherman’s Wharf, where prices shifted from $3
an hour all day to different prices on different blocks at different times
of day, ranging from 25 cents an hour on many blocks to a maximum
of $3.75 an hour on one block (see Figure 37-1). Would you rather face
the previous price of $3 an hour on every block, or the prices after
10 adjustments in the first two years of SFpark? If you walk a few blocks
you can pay only 25 cents an hour. That seems like a big improvement
for low-income drivers. People can now walk to save money on curb
parking.
Suppose you are not short of money and you want to park in front of
the address you are visiting. Would you prefer to pay $3 an hour for a
parking spot after cruising several blocks to find it, or would you prefer
the SFpark prices that ensure a vacancy on every block? SFpark can help
everyone, rich or poor.
SFpark also helps to depoliticize parking because transparent, data-
based pricing rules can bypass the usual politics of parking. Demand
dictates prices and politicians cannot simply raise prices to gain rev-
enue. SFpark’s goal is to optimize occupancy, not to maximize revenue,
and prices can go down as well as up. Because most prices had been too
high in the mornings, the average price of curb parking fell by 4 percent
during SFpark’s first two years.
Before SFpark began, skeptics worried that variable parking rates
would create uncertainty and confuse customers. SFpark changed
more than 5,000 prices at the 7,000 SFpark meters in the first year, but
there were no complaints about uncertainty. If inching prices up or
down every six weeks really did confuse drivers, one would expect
someone to complain. Available parking is more important than fixed
prices.
Because parking is more readily available, San Francisco issues
fewer tickets for illegal parking in the SFpark zones. Variable prices,
32 Introduction

more availability, and fewer tickets are far more customer-friendly

than fixed prices, parking shortages, and more tickets. SFpark could
also encourage merchants to post the maps of parking prices in their
stores as a way to improve the drivers’ knowledge about prices and
show them how to take advantage of the price differences to save
money.
In preparing for SFpark, San Francisco conducted a census of its park-
ing spaces and found 275,450 on-street spaces (San Francisco Municipal
Transportation Agency 2014). If laid end-to-end, San Francisco’s on-
street parking would stretch about 1,000 miles, which is longer than
California’s 840-mile coastline. San Francisco has one on-street parking
space for every three people in the city, but only 10 percent are metered.
Expanding SFpark into more areas that have a shortage of curb parking
can better manage this valuable public space and also yield revenue
for public services. In January 2018, San Francisco expanded SFpark to
include all of the city's 28,000 metered parking spaces and to all city-
owned garages and lots.
SFpark will always be a work in progress because the right price
for curb parking is always a moving target and the parking technol-
ogy is improving rapidly. Chapters 36–40 analyze the results of
SFpark.

Los Angeles
In 2012, Los Angeles launched LA Express Park (see Chapter 41), which
resembles SFpark except for one key difference. In Los Angeles, the
price adjustments are based not on average occupancy during a time
period, but rather on parking availability, measured by the share of
each hour in which a block is overused (over 90 percent occupancy),
underused (below 70 percent occupancy), or well used (between 70 and
90 percent occupancy).
Los Angeles contracts with the Xerox Research Centre in Grenoble,
France, to analyze the parking occupancy data and recommend the
price changes. If the block is overused a large fraction of the time
and underused a small fraction of the time, the price increases. If
the block is underused a large fraction of the time and overused a
small fraction of the time, the price decreases. If the occupancy is
neither overused nor underused most of the time, the price does
not change.
A difficult decision arises, however, when there are spikes in demand
at some times but demand is low most of the time. Xerox devised an
algorithm that compares the fractions of time that are overcrowded,
underused, or just right to recommend price changes (Zoeter et al. 2014).
One way to deal with the problem of both congestion and underuse of
 Introduction 33

parking during the same time period is to divide the day into shorter
time periods that will allow more price changes in response to the vary-
ing demand.
LA Express Park has aroused almost no political opposition. Most
drivers don’t even seem to notice that prices are changing. LA Express
Park began with 6,300 meters downtown, and the city has extended the
program to Hollywood, Westwood Village, and Venice.
The technology used for demand-based pricing in Los Angeles
and San Francisco is getting both cheaper and more sophisticated.
Other cities will therefore find it easier to mount similar programs.
Baltimore, Berkeley, and Oakland have begun to charge demand-based
parking prices with simple technology (see Chapter 35). Boston and
Washington, D. C., have also begun to charge demand-based parking
prices with more advanced technology.
The results in Los Angeles and San Francisco show that cities can
make huge improvements even without frequently adjusting prices in
response to demand. Simply extending the operating hours for exist-
ing meters into the evening in places with high demand rather than
turning the meters off at 6 p.m. is a demand-based strategy, and it does
not require any new investment. The meters are already there, so they
will reduce parking and traffic congestion and bring in new revenue
without any new cost.
People who beg for a living work until midnight in many cities but
the parking meters quit work at 6 p.m. Why not run the meters during
the times of high parking demand in the evening and use some of the
money to help the homeless? Similarly, cities can operate their meters
during times of high demand on Sundays. If cities carry the argument
for demand-based pricing to its logical conclusion, they can extend the
hours of meter operation for as long as needed to manage demand, and
thus provide large benefits where meters already exist. If cities put their
meters to sleep at 6 p.m. and on Sunday, they have learned little about
demand-based prices for curb parking.
After several years of experience, cities may be able to shift from
reaction to prediction when adjusting prices, such as with seasonal
adjustments. Like hockey players who skate to where the puck will
be, cities can base parking prices on expected future demand, not
simply on past occupancy. Parking prices will never be a simple joy-
stick that planners can use to manipulate precise outcomes because it’s
almost impossible to get the price of parking exactly right all the time.
Nevertheless, cities can do a far better job than they do now to balance
supply and demand. When parking is overcrowded, it is underpriced,
not undersupplied.
34 Introduction

Equity
A final question about demand-based prices for curb parking is whether
they will penalize the poor. Although the lion’s share of parking sub-
sidies go to people who are not poor, drivers who don’t want to pay
for parking often push poor people out in front of them like human
shields, claiming that charging market prices for curb parking will
hurt the poor. This objection is either misguided altruism or disguised
self-interest.
Are flexible parking prices really unfair to poor people? Let’s look
at the bigger picture. The prices for fresh fruits and vegetables vary to
balance supply and demand according the season. The prices for hotel
rooms vary to balance supply and demand according to location and
time of year. The prices for theater seats vary to balance supply and
demand by location and day of the week. The price of gasoline varies
from place to place and from day to day. Are all these and many other
price variations unfair to poor people? If not, why would parking prices
that vary to balance supply and demand be unfair to poor people?
And how much money are we really talking about here? It’s only curb
parking. Drivers should expect to pay for parking if they take two tons
of metal with them wherever they go.
Admittedly, some drivers do prefer to spend their time circling
the block, congesting traffic, wasting energy, polluting the air, slow-
ing public transit, endangering pedestrians and bicyclists, causing
accidents, and contributing to climate change rather than pay to park.
But faster and cheaper public transit, cleaner air, and safer walking
and biking will help everyone who is too poor to afford a car. The
public services financed with parking revenue will also help the poor.
On balance, right-priced curb parking can help the poor and everyone
else.

Disabled Placard Abuse

California may have been the wrong place to test demand-based prices
for curb parking because the state requires all cities to allow cars with
disabled placards to park free at meters, with no time limit. The plac-
ards are thus permits to park free at any meter for an unlimited time.
Because controls on obtaining or using a disabled placard are lax, 9
percent of registered drivers in California now have a disabled permit,
and evidence of placard abuse is everywhere. Because of the wide-
spread abuse, disabled placards do not guarantee a physical disability.
Instead, they often signal a desire to park free and a willingness to cheat
the system. Placard abusers learn to live without their scruples but not
without their cars.
 Introduction 35

Because many people with disabilities are too poor to own a car,
the all-placards-park-free policy delivers an unnecessary benefit to
placard abusers and to people with disabilities who are not poor.
Far worse, the all-placards-park-free policy has created a culture of
corruption. More of the subsidy for placards probably goes to morally
handicapped placard abusers than to low-income drivers with serious
physical disabilities. The rampant abuse encouraged by free parking
for all placards has made life even harder for everyone with impaired
mobility.
If disabled placard abuse is common on a block that is fully occu-
pied, raising the price will not affect placard abusers, but it will reduce
the number of paying parkers at the curb and make even more spaces
available to placard abusers. Therefore, revenue will decline but avail-
ability will not increase. Placard abuse throws sand in the gears of LA
Express Park and SFpark and helps to explain why they were much less
effective in reducing occupancy on congested blocks than in increasing
occupancy on underused blocks. Increasing the price of curb parking
drives away paying parkers and allows placard abusers to take their
place. Disabled placard abuse is the Achilles heel of demand-based
parking pricing.
Michigan and Illinois have adopted a two-tier system that takes
into account different levels of disability. Drivers with disabilities
that seriously limit mobility can park free at meters, and drivers with
less serious disabilities must pay. Enforcement is simple: drivers
without serious mobility impairment who use the special serious-
disability placard to park free at meters are obviously breaking the
law as soon as they step out of a car and stride away. Other states
require all placard holders to pay at meters. Demand-based prices
for curb parking will produce far greater benefits in states that do not
invite placard abuse by treating placards as permits to park free at
any meter for an unlimited time. Chapters 30–32 analyze the problems
caused by meter exemptions for placards and propose ways to solve
the problem.

Progressive Parking Prices and Fines

Demand-based parking prices can create curb vacancies but cities may
also want to ensure steady turnover. To encourage turnover, a city
can charge progressively higher parking prices for successive hours.
Table 28-1 shows the progressive rate structure in Albany, New York.
The hourly price for the first two hours is $1.25, and the price of each
subsequent hour increases by 25 cents, with no time limit.
Some cities charge progressive prices on game days near stadiums
that generate periodic peak demands. Brookline, Massachusetts,
36 Introduction

charges special prices at meters on Beacon Street close to Fenway Park:

$1 an hour for the first two hours and $10 an hour for the third and
fourth hours, with a maximum of $22 for the day. Washington, D.C.,
has similar progressive parking rates around the Nationals baseball
stadium. Washington also dedicates the extra revenue from the game
days to pay for added public services in the area, such as cleaning and
repairing the sidewalks. If cities charge progressive parking prices on
game days and spend the revenue on public services, stadiums can help
rather than harm the surrounding neighborhoods.
Progressive parking prices are appropriate where a city wants to
encourage turnover, but they are not appropriate at times when the
demand for parking is declining. For example, if the demand for park-
ing is declining during the evening, higher prices per hour for longer
parking durations will be counterproductive. The price may have to
decline over time to keep the spaces occupied during the time of lower
demand.
Some cities have also adopted progressive parking fines to deter
repeat violators who often account for a large share of all violations
(Chapter 29). In Los Angeles, for example, 8 percent of the license plates
that received tickets in 2009 accounted for 29 percent of all the tickets
in that year. Most drivers rarely or never receive a parking ticket, and
for these drivers modest fines are a sufficient deterrent. But the many
tickets for a few repeat offenders suggest that modest fines will not
deter drivers who view parking violations as an acceptable gamble
or just another cost of doing business. If cities raise parking fines high
enough to deter the few chronic violators, they unfairly penalize many
more drivers for occasional, often inadvertent violations.
Progressive parking fines deter repeat violators without unfairly
punishing anyone else. Progressive fines are lenient for the many cars
with one or two tickets a year but punitive for the few cars with many
tickets. In Claremont, California, for example, the first ticket for over-
time parking in a calendar year is $35, the second $70, and the third
$105. For illegally using a disabled parking space, the first ticket is $325,
the second $650, and the third $975.
Progressive parking prices encourage turnover without overcharging
the short-term parkers, and progressive parking fines encourage com-
pliance without penalizing the occasional offenders. Recent advances
in parking technology now make it possible for any city to use these
progressive parking prices and fines.

Sophisticated Parking Technology

Parking was for many years the most stagnant industry outside North
Korea. Now, however, nothing in parking is the last word for long. The
 Introduction 37

parking industry is taking advantage of everything Silicon Valley has

to offer, and the humble parking meter has improved rapidly in recent
years. Meters now accept payment by credit cards and cell phones.
They can charge different prices by time of day or day of the week,
depending on demand. Parking officials can remotely reconfigure the
price schedule in any neighborhood, and the new rates are sent wire-
lessly to all the meters in the neighborhood. They can be multilingual
and guide the users through transactions, displaying messages such as
“Please insert your card other side up.”
Parking occupancy sensors have also evolved rapidly. The first gener-
ation of sensors used in San Francisco and Los Angeles were embedded
in the pavement and had to be dug up or abandoned when the batteries
needed replacement, but new forms of occupancy sensing have devel-
oped. Some single-space meters have occupancy sensors embedded in
the meter heads, which lower the power requirements and simplify
the battery replacement. Parking enforcement vehicles equipped with
cameras to record license plate numbers can also count the number of
parked cars. Fixed-mount cameras can also analyze parking occupancy.
The technology of metering and occupancy sensing is becoming
cheaper and better so fast that programs like SFpark and LA Express
Park will be much easier for other cities to adopt. We may soon consider
coin-in-the-slot parking meters as primitive as the Wright brothers’ first
airplane at Kitty Hawk.
Two new technologies—occupancy sensors and variably priced
parking meters—may change parking and transportation as pro-
foundly as the invention of the cash register in the nineteenth century
changed retail commerce. They can unlock the immense value of land
now devoted to free parking and bring transportation into the market
economy. The adage that “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”
fits parking perfectly. Setting the right price for on-street parking is
much cheaper than requiring developers to supply ample off-street
parking. Only on-street parking management can solve on-street park-
ing problems.
Performance pricing requires surprisingly little information. Planners
compare the actual parking occupancy with the desired occupancy and
nudge prices up or down accordingly. Because free parking is the per-
fect medium for political pandering, politicians are not the right people
to set parking prices. An impersonal rule to seek the optimal occupancy
becomes the new apolitical way to set prices. Cities can depoliticize
parking by combining new technology with the old law of supply and
demand.
Performance pricing for curb parking is not a simple plug-and-
play operation, but most cities will soon have the technical capacity
to charge prices that ensure one or two open curb spaces most of the
38 Introduction

time on every block. The new parking technology makes smart parking
policies possible, and the new smart policies increase the demand for
the new technology. Intelligent transportation technology is the key to
intelligent parking management.
Technology will continue to change the way we park. Finding and
paying for parking is migrating to the internet and the dashboards of
connected cars. Just as drivers now expect their navigation systems to
choose the best routes for trips, they may soon expect these systems to
give them turn-by-turn directions to the closest and cheapest parking
available at their destinations, and to pay for parking automatically
with bits rather than quarters. Before cars learn to drive themselves,
they should be able to find and pay for parking. When cars learn to find
and pay for parking, parking demand will respond to parking prices
more accurately and drivers will be able to save money by parking a
few blocks from their destination and walking the rest of the way (The
High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 18).
License plate recognition systems may become the future of parking
management as cities move toward virtual payments by cell phones or
connected cars, and doing away with on-street meters may completely
change the parking game for governments (Chapter 34). Wireless pay-
ments for parking are also more resilient after natural disasters, like a
flood, because there is no on-street meter hardware to repair.
Better technology can also reduce the hassle in paying for parking,
which is often as important as the price of parking. A friend once
told me that she avoids going downtown because of the difficulty of
finding a parking spot, estimating how long she’ll be there, preparing
beforehand by making sure she has coins, and having to leave after an
arbitrary time limit. Anywhere else in the city, she can give no
thought to the logistics of parking. It’s not so much the cost of parking
(because it’s not expensive), it’s the bother and threat of a costly ticket
if she lingers too long at a store or a restaurant. Getting the prices right
and making payments simple are both important in parking manage-
ment. Parking should be friendly but not free.
If curb parking isn’t properly priced, it won’t be properly used.
With performance parking prices, drivers will find convenient
places to park just as easily as they find convenient places to buy
gasoline. Before they buy a car, people will have to consider how much
they will have to pay for parking, just as they now consider the costs
of the car itself, gasoline, insurance, registration, and repairs. And
anyone who thinks about driving a car will have to consider the cost
of parking at the destination. Parking will become a natural part of the
market economy.
Transportation network companies (Uber and Lyft) and driverless
cars are two new technologies that can reduce the demand for parking.
 Introduction 39

Reduced car ownership will reduce the political support for off-street
parking requirements, and a reduced parking supply can increase the
price of all parking. Shifting toward market-priced parking will there-
fore hasten the shift toward shared and driverless cars.
Any shift from privately owned cars to shared and driverless cars
will convert the fixed costs of ownership (including parking) into
marginal costs of driving or being driven. If driverless and shared
cars increase vehicle travel, however, they will increase traffic conges-
tion and thus make it even more important to charge the right price
for using the roads—the lowest price that will prevent traffic conges-
tion. The technology for congestion pricing is already here, and cities
such as London, Singapore, and Stockholm already use it. As with
charging for parking, the problem of charging for roads is not techni-
cal but political. To solve the political problem, cities might consider
Traffic Benefit Districts, which are similar to Parking Benefit Districts,
except the revenue comes from congestion tolls rather than from curb
parking (The High Cost of Free Parking, Appendix G; King, Manville,
and Shoup 2007).

Price Therapy
If performance prices for on-street parking don’t work well, a city can
easily revert to fixed prices, but off-street parking requirements have
major, almost irreversible, effects. To use a medical analogy, perfor-
mance prices resemble physical therapy while parking requirements
resemble major surgery. Because physical therapy is much cheaper and
does much less damage if it turns out to be the wrong choice, many
physicians first recommend physical therapy to see if it can resolve a
problem before they resort to drugs or surgery. Planners should try
price therapy first before they require asphalt and concrete to solve
parking problems.
City planners have diagnosed a shortage of free parking as a failure
of the market to supply enough parking spaces. Their recommended
remedy has been to require more off-street parking, which has a high
cost in money, distorted land use, and disfigured cities. Because the
demand for free parking is so much higher than the demand for mar-
ket-priced parking, cities must require many more off-street spaces
than the market would provide if the scarce on-street spaces were
priced properly. The ample supply of required off-street parking then
leads to more cars and driving, which increase traffic congestion and
create the demand for wider roads. The original misdiagnosis of too
few off-street parking spaces rather than a failure to price on-street
parking properly has weakened cities and harmed the environment.
The resulting traffic congestion has led many people to blame cars
40 Introduction

as the source of the problem. Cars can produce many more private
benefits, far fewer social costs, and much more public revenue if cities
price driving and parking properly.

Converting Free Private Parking into Paid Public Parking

If cities remove off-street parking requirements, drivers who visit a
new business without free parking will be tempted to park in the
lot of another nearby business that does provide free parking. Most
businesses with free parking do not want to police their lots and
chase away drivers who are not their customers, so they understand-
ably want cities to require new businesses to provide ample off-street
parking.
Preventing unauthorized drivers from parking in a free lot is dif-
ficult, but businesses in some cities have found a new way to solve
the problem without off-street parking requirements. They contract
with commercial parking operators to manage their lots as paid public
parking and split the resulting revenue (The High Cost of Free Parking,
700–701). Customers and employees continue to park free, but non-
customers must pay, and the formerly free-for-everyone lot begins to
earn revenue. When a business is closed, all its parking spaces are avail-
able to the public. This arrangement generates revenue and increases
the supply of public parking available for drivers who want to visit
nearby businesses (Figure I-6).

Figure I-6 Private parking

converted to public parking
 Introduction 41

A major difficulty with metering the spaces in private lots has been
the difficulty of enforcing the drivers’ responsibility to pay at the
private meters. If private operators cannot issue enforceable tickets
for violations, the only legal way to ensure compliance is to boot or
tow the violators, which is expensive, inconvenient, and unpopular
with both drivers and merchants. Toronto has solved this problem by
allowing private parking operators to issue municipal parking tickets
for meter violations in private parking lots (Toronto By-Law No. 725-
2004). The private operators must send their staff to complete a required
private parking enforcement course, and the city then deputizes these
staff to issue municipal tickets. The city specifies the required signage,
sets the fines for violations, and receives all the ticket revenue. The
private operators therefore issue tickets to secure compliance, not to
profit from the ticket revenue. Drivers can contest the municipal tickets
issued in private lots in the same way they contest tickets at on-street
meters. As another solution, a city's parking enforcement officers can
give tickets for violations at off-street meters in the same way they
enforce on-street meters, and the city keeps the revenue. Extending
municipal enforcement to formerly free private parking takes advan-
tage of the existing public protocol for enforcement and creates a new
public-private partnership that benefits both parties.
One big advantage of converting free private parking into paid public
parking is that drivers demand fewer spaces when parking is priced. If
cities remove off-street parking requirements, large free parking lots
can morph into smaller paid parking lots, releasing valuable land for
infill development. The market will slowly reclaim land from free park-
ing and people will displace cars.
Everybody wants something for nothing, but we should not promote
free parking as a principle for urban planning, transportation, or public
finance. Using prices to manage parking can produce a host of benefits
for cities, transportation, and the environment. The right prices can
produce the best parking for the most people at the lowest possible cost.
Information wants to be free but parking wants to be paid for.
We now have the right technology to charge the right prices for
parking. Part III of the book focuses on using Parking Benefit Districts
to get the right politics.

III. PARKING BENEFIT DISTRICTS

Elected officials may know that charging market prices for curb park-
ing is the right thing to do, but they don’t know how to get reelected
after they do it. Market-priced parking looks like an expensive way to
commit political suicide. Because people are so used to free parking, the
42 Introduction

notion that there might be something wrong with it sounds crazy. And
if market prices for curb parking work so well, why haven’t more cities
tried them? When it comes to parking, many people don’t like the way
things are but they also don’t like change. What can create the desire
for change?
The money fed into a parking meter seems to disappear into thin air,
and no one believes the revenue will benefit them personally. There is
pain but no gain. Politically, it is as if the meter money were inciner-
ated. Most drivers will place a higher value on the immediate, tangible
benefit of free parking than on the possible long-run benefits of better
public services or lower taxes that would be made possible by charg-
ing higher prices for curb parking. Cities can transform the politics of
parking, however, by using the curb parking revenue to pay for public
services in the neighborhoods that generate it. If each neighborhood
keeps its curb parking revenue to pay for local public services, residents
may support desubsidizing curb parking because they want a safer and
cleaner neighborhood.
To create local support for user-paid parking in commercial
areas, some cities have created Parking Benefit Districts that spend
the meter revenue for public services in the metered areas. These
cities offer each district a package that includes both priced parking
and better public services. Everyone who lives, works, visits, or owns
property in a Parking Benefit District can see their meter money at
work, and the package is much more popular than the meters alone.
Localizing the parking revenue will generate local support for the
parking meters.
Parking Benefit Districts are a form of “political engineering,” a term
coined in the 1970s to describe the practice of spreading the contracts
for a military project, such as a new fighter plane, to as many con-
gressional districts as possible to maximize the number of Congress
members who support the project. Parking Benefit Districts resemble
political engineering because they spread the cost of paying for parking
among a dispersed array of drivers and concentrate the public benefits
within the metered districts (The High Cost of Free Parking, Chapter 17).
The right parking policies require the right parking politics.
The pain of paying for parking is individual but many of the benefits
are collective. The best way to show these collective benefits to local
stakeholders is to spend the revenue for added public services on the
metered streets. If each neighborhood keeps the parking revenue it gen-
erates, a powerful new constituency for market prices can emerge—the
neighborhoods that receive the revenue. These stakeholders who ben-
efit from the public services paid for by parking meters will know who
they are, and they will see a good reason to support the meters. These
same stakeholders will lose something they value if the city doesn’t
 Introduction 43

charge for curb parking, so they may support operating the meters as
long as needed to manage the demand for parking.
If drivers from outside the neighborhood pay for curb parking
and the revenue benefits the residents, charging for curb parking can
become a popular policy rather than the political kryptonite it is today.
Rather than an eat-your-spinach edict that drivers must pay for park-
ing, Parking Benefit Districts can persuade residents that they want to
charge for parking. Some people will always object to any new policy,
especially those who think that cities should never do anything for
the first time, but the new revenue for local public services can change
minds.
To explain this proposal, I will summarize how it can work in two
settings: commercial areas and residential neighborhoods. Chapters 16
and 17 in The High Cost of Free Parking explain the proposal in full.

Parking Benefit Districts in Commercial Areas

The best way to recommend parking reforms may be not to mention
parking at all. It’s not enough to say the city got parking wrong because
cities get a lot of things wrong. Instead, planners can ask the stakehold-
ers in a district what new services they want the government to provide.
For example, their highest priority may be to repair broken sidewalks.
After the stakeholders have identified their highest priorities but have
no way to pay for them, planners can suggest a Parking Benefit District
as a way to finance the public services. The stakeholders can then decide
whether to install parking meters to pay for the public services they
want. For the stakeholders, parking reform is the means, not the end.
I am not saying that putting parking revenue into a city’s general
fund won’t produce public benefits. The important political issue is the
perception of benefits. Residents won’t see any benefits if the revenue
goes into the general fund, but they can easily see the benefits if the
revenue stays on the metered streets. If meter money pays for side-
walk repairs the stakeholders want, for example, they may recommend
meters they previously opposed when they thought the money would
disappear into a black hole. This scenario describes what happened in
1992 when Pasadena, California, installed parking meters and dedi-
cated the revenue to pay for public services on the metered streets.
Pasadena’s original business district, Old Pasadena, had become a
commercial Skid Row, with wonderful historic buildings in terrible
condition. The city proposed installing meters to regulate curb parking,
but the merchants opposed them. They knew their employees occupied
many of the most convenient curb spaces but feared that meters would
drive away the few customers they had. To defuse opposition, the city
offered to spend all the meter revenue to pay for public investments
44 Introduction

in Old Pasadena. The business and property owners quickly agreed

to the proposal because they saw the direct benefits, and the desire for
public improvements soon outweighed the fear of meters.
Businesses and property owners began to see the parking meters
in a new light—as a source of revenue. They agreed to the then high
rate of $1 an hour for curb parking and to operating the meters in the
evenings and on Sunday. The city also liked the arrangement because it
wanted to improve Old Pasadena. The city needed $5 million to finance
an ambitious plan to invest in Old Pasadena’s streetscape and to con-
vert its alleys into walkways with access to shops and restaurants, and
the meter revenue would pay for the project. In effect, Old Pasadena
became a Parking Benefit District. The business and property owners
bought into parking meters because they were bought off with the
resulting revenue.
The city worked with Old Pasadena’s Business Improvement District
to establish the boundaries of the Old Pasadena Parking Meter Zone
(PMZ) where the parking meters were installed. Only the blocks with
parking meters benefit directly from the meter revenue. The city also
established the Old Pasadena PMZ Advisory Board, consisting of busi-
ness and property owners who recommend parking policies and set
spending priorities for the zone’s meter revenues. Connecting the meter
revenues directly to added public services and providing for local con-
trol are the two elements largely responsible for the parking program’s
success.
The city installed the parking meters in 1993 and borrowed $5 mil-
lion to finance the Old Pasadena Streetscape and Alleyways Project,
with the meter revenue dedicated to repaying the debt. The bonds paid
for new sidewalks, street furniture, trees, and lighting throughout the
area. The city turned dilapidated alleys into safe, functional walkways
with access to shops and restaurants. Old Pasadena boomed and sales
tax receipts shot up. Two other business districts in Pasadena then
petitioned the city to install parking meters with revenue return to pay
for public improvements (Chapter 44, and The High Cost of Free Parking,
Chapter 16).
Parking meters have two natural sources of opposition—the driv-
ers who park at the curb and the businesses these drivers patron-
ize. That’s why it is important to create support for the meters by
localizing the revenue. If residents, merchants, and property owners
can see the public improvements, they are more likely to support the
meters. Without this local public spending financed by the meters, it
is hard to see the benefits of meters. Drivers who have an easier time
finding a curb space don’t know it’s because of the meters. Drivers
who suffer less traffic congestion don’t know it’s because there is less
cruising for free parking. People who breathe cleaner air don’t know
 Introduction 45

it’s because less cruising produces less pollution. A city has to show
direct local benefits to convince most people that they want parking
meters. To paraphrase William Butler Yeats, advocates for parking
meters lack all conviction while the opponents are full of passionate
intensity. Parking Benefit Districts can create the conviction to charge
for curb parking and deflate the opposition’s passionate intensity.
Performance pricing converts the costs of cruising into public ben-
efits. People can see some of the benefits, such as clean sidewalks and
trimmed street trees. Other benefits—reductions in traffic congestion,
air pollution, and carbon emissions—remain invisible. The visible ben-
efits of parking-financed local public services will create popular sup-
port for parking reforms that also have widespread invisible benefits.
When it comes to political support for priced parking, merchants are
far more interested in a sustainable business district than in a sustain-
able planet.
Doing the right thing is more important than doing something for the
right reason, and the best way to get people to do what's right collec-
tively is to make it right for them to do it individually. Parking Benefit
Districts can give individuals a personal incentive to do what's right for
society. I do not mean to advocate or celebrate self-interest, but rather
to recognize it and take advantage of it. Cities can let the market some
work for the public good—the approach that Brookings Institution
economist Charles Shultze termed “the public use of private interest.”
Parking Benefit Districts are multiplying. Chapters 44–50 describe the
great range of public improvements funded by Parking Benefit Districts
in Austin and Houston in Texas, in Pasadena, Redwood City, and
Ventura in California, and in Mexico City. Pasadena uses meter money
to clean the sidewalks every night and to pressure wash them twice a
month (see Chapter 44). Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Boulder, Colorado,
use meter money to provide free transit passes for all workers in the cen-
tral business district. (It’s hard to believe these cities would be better off
with hard-to-find free curb parking and expensive public transit rather
than free public transit and easy-to-find priced curb parking.) Ventura
uses the parking meters to provide free Wi-Fi for all the residents, busi-
nesses, and visitors on the metered streets. Neighborhoods with parking
meters have free Wi-Fi and neighborhoods with free curb parking don’t
(see Chapter 46). If parking meters become synonymous with free Wi-Fi
in cities around the world, Parking Benefit Districts may spread quickly.

Parking Benefit Districts and Business Improvement

Districts
Curb parking revenue is a benefit in search of a beneficiary; the
funds need the right recipient to generate political support for market
46 Introduction

prices. In commercial areas, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs)

are logical recipients. In a BID, property owners tax themselves to pay
for supplemental public services beyond the level provided citywide.
In essence, BIDs are a form of cooperative capitalism, and they pro-
vide public services that cities either do not provide (such as sidewalk
cleaning) or do not provide at a satisfactory level (such as security).
BIDs have a good track record, their legality is well established, and
their operating principles are familiar to public officials and business
owners. BIDs are therefore ready-made recipients for curb parking
revenue.
Earmarking curb parking revenue to fund BIDs and giving the BIDs a
say in setting the parking prices for their area will encourage business-
like management of the parking supply. Each district can examine how
other districts deal with curb parking, and they can weigh the benefits
and costs of alternative policies. BIDs can recommend the parking
meter rates because their members observe the meter occupancy every
day on every block, and they see the effects of occupancy on their busi-
nesses. BIDs have every incentive to get the prices right because their
members will be the first to benefit from good decisions and the first to
suffer from bad ones.
Cities can even give BIDs full responsibility for managing the park-
ing meters, setting the prices, and collecting the revenue. Bangalore,
India, adopted this strategy in its Brigade Road business district
(Center for Science and the Environment 2016, 31). The Brigade Shops
Establishments Association paid for installing parking meters for
85 spaces. Half the meter revenue goes to the city government and
the other half remains in the district to pay for managing the system.
Business leaders have strong incentives to charge appropriate prices
at the meters. If the price is too high and there are many open park-
ing spaces, the empty spaces fail to deliver customers to the shops.
If the price is too low and there are no open spaces, customers will
complain about a parking shortage and the district could earn more
revenue by charging higher parking prices. Allowing BIDs to manage
on-street parking may be especially appropriate in cities where inef-
ficiency or corruption have blocked managing on-street parking
properly.

Equity Concerns
An equity problem arises if business districts with higher parking
demand have higher parking prices and therefore earn more money
for public services. One way to avoid this inequity is to use what in
public finance is called “power equalization.” The city can return equal
revenue per parking meter to every Parking Benefit District.
 Introduction 47

Suppose the average citywide meter revenue is $2,000 per meter per
year. In this case, the city can offer to spend $1,000 a year per meter
for added public services in every Parking Benefit District and spend
the other $1,000 a year for citywide public services. All neighborhoods
with Parking Benefit Districts will therefore receive equal revenue per
meter for added public services and all neighborhoods without Parking
Benefit Districts will receive better public services. The federal and state
governments use similar formulas to distribute gasoline tax revenues
among lower levels of government. For example, the federal govern-
ment distributes most federal gasoline tax revenue to the states that
generate it (return to source) and distributes the rest to fund special
projects throughout the country.
Parking Benefit Districts that earn more revenue will subsidize those
that earn less, and they will also subsidize the rest of the city. This shar-
ing arrangement retains the local incentive to install parking meters
but distributes the revenue equally, which seems fairer than the usual
policy of installing parking meters in the parts of the city that have
parking problems and spending the revenue everywhere else.
There are also worldwide equity concerns. When I was speak-
ing in Florida recently, residents told me they worry that rising sea
levels caused by global warming will flood their cities (the high-
est point in the state is only 345 feet above sea level). I said that free
parking is a subsidy for burning fossil fuels. I then asked whether they
thought global warming would be a smaller problem if cities around
the world charged market prices for curb parking and eliminated off-
street parking requirements. Or should all cities instead adopt Florida’s
policies of free curb parking and high off-street parking requirements?
If Floridians won’t reform their own parking policies to help forestall
global warming, why should the rest of the world worry about flood-
ing in Florida?
Florida is strengthening its coastal defenses to protect against rising
sea levels. Charging for parking can generate the needed funds and
also reduce carbon emissions. It’s much easier to price curb parking
than to price carbon emissions, so advocates for carbon pricing should
also advocate parking reforms. Climate change’s potential to harm
everyone on Earth makes underpriced curb parking and off-street park-
ing requirements unwise not only locally but also globally.
Parking requirements reflect planning for the present but not for the
future (The High Cost of Free Parking, 171–73). They are politically desir-
able in the short term but the opposite of what cities need in the long
term. Parking requirements create great places for cars but not great
cities for people or a great future for the Earth.
48 Introduction

Religious Concerns
Beyond equity concerns about dedicating revenue to pay for public
services on the metered streets, there are also religious concerns (The
High Cost of Free Parking, 494–95). San Francisco provides an important
lesson. In January 2013 the city began to operate its parking meters on
Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. Previously, it was hard to find an open
curb space on Sunday in almost every commercial area in the city.
Some drivers would park in metered spaces on Saturday afternoon
and not move their car until Monday morning. After the meters began
operating on Sunday, it became much easier to find curb parking near
neighborhood businesses on Sunday.
Nevertheless, responding to complaints that church members had to
“pay to pray,” in April 2014 the city resumed free parking on Sunday.
If San Francisco had shared some of the Sunday meter revenue to
improve public services in the metered neighborhoods, the prospect
of losing public services could have generated political support for
the Sunday metering. Merchants and residents who benefited from the
public services might have insisted on the separation of church and
parking. The laws of supply and demand do not miraculously stop
operating on Sunday.
Some pastors may fear that charging for parking on Sunday will
reduce church attendance, which it can. In his book, Going Clear, about
the links between Scientology and Hollywood, Lawrence Wright
related how L. Ron Hubbard recruited movie stars to publicize the
church. One recruitment strategy was to establish the Celebrity Center
in Hollywood, where notable actors and musicians had their own pri-
vate entry. A few celebrities did join, but one got away:

Rock Hudson visited the Celebrity Center but stormed out when his auditor
had the nerve to tell him he couldn’t leave until he finished his session,
although the matinee idol had run out of time at his meter. The exemplary
figure that Hubbard sought eluded capture (Wright 2013, 140).

An Enabling Act for Parking Benefit Districts

If state legislation does not authorize Parking Benefit Districts, some
cities may hesitate to establish them. In 2016, the Massachusetts leg-
islature passed the Parking Advancements for the Revitalization
of Communities (PARC) Act, which explicitly authorizes cities to
charge market prices for on-street parking and to establish Parking
Benefit Districts to spend the revenue (Section 22A of Chapter 40 of
Massachusetts General Laws).
 Introduction 49

[Parking] fees shall be established and charged at rates determined by the

city or town. Rates may be set for the purpose of managing the parking
supply. The revenue therefrom may be used for acquisition, installation,
maintenance and operation of parking meters and other parking payment
and enforcement technology, the regulation of parking, salaries of parking
management personnel, improvements to the public realm, and transpor-
tation improvements including but not limited to the operations of mass
transit and facilities for biking and walking.

A city or town may establish one or more parking benefit districts, as a geo-
graphically defined area, in which parking revenue collected therein may be
designated in whole or in part for use in said district through a dedicated
fund. … A parking benefit district may be managed by a body designated
by the municipality, including but not limited to a business improvement
district or main streets organization.

The act’s language is simple. Cities can charge demand-based prices

for curb parking and spend the revenue to improve public services in
the metered districts. Other states could adopt similar legislation that
will encourage cities to establish Parking Benefit Districts.
The PARC Act took effect in October 2016. In January, 2017, Boston
launched two performance parking pilot programs. The meter rates
are based on parking demand, and the city will reinvest a share of the
revenue increase in the metered districts (City of Boston 2017).
Cities in Massachusetts now have a great opportunity to create
Parking Benefit Districts because the state had previously prohibited
cities from using meter revenue to fund general public services. The
new Parking Benefit Districts will therefore not take meter revenue
away from other public services, which should simplify the politics of
establishing them.
The Massachusetts legislation combines San Francisco’s demand-
based pricing policy and Pasadena’s revenue-return spending policy.
This combination can depoliticize curb parking in two ways. First,
the pricing policy relieves the city council of voting on every price
change. The city council sets policy by choosing an occupancy goal,
and then gives the parking authority the responsibility to set prices
to achieve this goal. Parking demand then sets the prices, without
political intervention. Second, dedicating meter revenue to paying for
public services on the metered streets relieves the city council of voting
whether to install every new meter. If the city council returns all or
a share of meter revenue to pay for services on the metered blocks,
neighborhoods can decide for themselves whether they want park-
ing meters and added public services. Parking Benefit Districts are a
bottom-up rather than a top-down policy.
50 Introduction

Parking Benefit Districts in Residential Neighborhoods

Cities have established Parking Benefit Districts in commercial areas
but have not yet done so in residential neighborhoods. Most on-street
parking spaces are in residential neighborhoods, however, and the
greatest opportunities for public improvement may lie in these neigh-
borhoods (see Chapter 51).
In residential neighborhoods, Parking Benefit Districts resemble con-
ventional Parking Permit Districts except for three features. First, the
number of permits is limited to the number of curb spaces. Second,
drivers pay market prices for the permits. Third, the permit revenue
pays for neighborhood public services. In neighborhoods where most
residents park off-street or do not own a car, the prospect of better
public services—a cleaner and greener neighborhood—may persuade a
majority to support charging market prices for on-street parking.
On-street parking revenue can pay to clean and repair sidewalks, add
security, bury overhead utility wires, and provide other public services.
Few residents will pay for curb parking but everyone will benefit from
the public services. Because cities do not now charge for on-street park-
ing in residential neighborhoods, Parking Benefit Districts will not take
any existing revenue away from other public services. Money will come
right out of the ground.
Richer neighborhoods that have higher parking prices will earn
more money for public services. Cities can avoid this inequality and
still provide the local incentive to charge for parking permits by
using power equalization as proposed earlier for commercial Parking
Benefit Districts. All neighborhoods that charge market prices for
their curb parking will receive equal revenue for public services (see
Chapter 50).
If a block has 20 parking spaces that can each earn $2,000 a year to
pay for public services, for example, free parking subsidizes parking on
the block by $40,000 a year. If the city already charged market prices for
curb parking on a block and spent an extra $40,000 a year to improve
public services, few would say the city should spend $40,000 a year
less on public services in order to subsidize hard-to-find parking for
20 cars. Some activities justify public subsidies, but parking a car is not
one of them.
If laid end to end, the 3 million curb parking spaces in New York
would stretch almost halfway around the Earth and would cover about
17 square miles of land, 13 times the size of Central Park. Because 97
percent of New York’s on-street parking is unmetered, the parking
subsidy must be astronomical. If only half of New York’s 3 million
on-street spaces were in Parking Benefit Districts and they earned an
average revenue of $2,000 per space per year (that’s only $5.50 per day),
 Introduction 51

the total revenue would amount to $3 billion per year. Half of that could
go to improve neighborhoods, and the other half could pay for citywide
services, such as renovating the subway system (see Chapter 51).
Many people seem to think the best reason to do anything is that it’s
best for them individually. Planners should therefore be realistic
about devising policies so the stakeholders receive personal benefits.
Parking Benefit Districts can produce many social benefits, rang-
ing from less traffic to less global warming, but these benefits alone
will not persuade many people that they ought to pay for parking. The
narrow local benefits like cleaner and safer sidewalks in front of their
homes can persuade self-interested residents to support market prices
for curb parking. The streets will be paved with possibilities.
Parking Benefit Districts are evolutionary, not revolutionary, and
they require little change in the way cities conduct business. In commer-
cial areas, they combine Business Improvement Districts and parking
meters. In residential areas, they combine Parking Permit Districts and
market prices. Parking Benefit Districts combine familiar institutions in
a new way, and they are bold but understandable. The more they look
like what cities already do, the more they can make a radical change.
And they can be tried out a few blocks at a time.
Some critics may complain that charging for curb parking will privat-
ize public land, but the government owns the land, uses a market to set
the prices, and spends the revenue on public services. Parking Benefit
Districts are markets without capitalism, more like market socialism
than privatization, and they are small scale and democratic (The High
Cost of Free Parking, 447–450). Market prices can’t solve every problem,
but they can solve the parking problem.
Parking Benefit Districts won’t be necessary if a city’s public infra-
structure is in good shape, public transport works well, traffic is not
congested, the air is safe to breathe, housing is affordable, and neigh-
borhoods are walkable. But many cities do have serious problems that
we have been trying to fix for decades, and we are now on the sixth or
seventh generation of fixes. We have tried every silver bullet: urban
renewal, high-rise public housing, rotating restaurants, world fairs,
public parking structures, development banks, and light rail. Parking
Benefit Districts are modest and cheap in comparison to previous fixes
and are worth a try.

Residential Parking Benefit Districts and Affordable Housing

Almost every proposal for new housing in an old neighborhood now
comes bundled with a dispute over scarce curb parking. Current
residents fear that new residents will compete for the free on-street
parking and make their already difficult parking situation worse. As a
52 Introduction

result, cities require new housing to provide enough off-street parking

to prevent crowding the curb. But if parking permits restrain parking
demand to fit the available curb supply, new housing will not crowd
the curb. Cities will then be able to eliminate their off-street parking
requirements and allow developers to provide less parking and more
housing.
Most residents probably won’t ask for a PBD because they want
to increase the supply of affordable housing, but they may ask for a
PBD because they want to improve their neighborhood. As a byprod-
uct, removing off-street parking requirements will remove a major
barrier to affordable housing. Granny flats (also called second units
and backyard cottages) are an especially promising form of housing
that can flourish if cities remove off-street parking requirements in
residential neighborhoods. Second units provide a simple, relatively
inexpensive, and nearly invisible way for homeowners to create addi-
tional housing.
On-street parking congestion is not the only reason why neighbors
may object to second units, but it is a major reason and a politically
powerful one. If cities can remove parking as an objection to second
units, the other issues (such as concerns about noise or attracting low-
income residents to high-income neighborhoods) can be discussed
more openly. Parking Benefit Districts that mitigate the parking con-
cerns of neighbors can thus reduce the political opposition to second
units (The High Cost of Free Parking 462–64; Brown, Mukhija, and Shoup,
2018).

CONCLUSION

Charging market prices for curb parking makes perfect economic sense,
but politics are even more important. John Kenneth Galbraith warned
about the danger of focusing on the economics and neglecting the
politics:

In making economics a non-political subject, neoclassical theory destroys

the relation of economics to the real world. In that world, power is decisive
in what happens. And the problems of that world are increasing both in
number and in the depth of their social affliction. In consequence, neoclassi-
cal and neo-Keynesian economics regulates its players to the social sidelines.
They either call no plays or use the wrong ones. To change the metaphor,
they manipulate levers to which no machinery is attached (Parker 2005, 616).

Parking Benefit Districts combine economics and politics in a new way

to gain popular support for parking reforms.
 Introduction 53

Assembling support for parking reform is like opening a combina-

tion lock: each small turn of the dial seems to achieve nothing, but when
everything is in place the lock opens. Diverse interests across the politi-
cal spectrum can support a combination of three reforms: (1) remove
off-street parking requirements, (2) charge market prices for on-street
parking, and (3) spend the revenue for neighborhood public services.
On-street parking is a missing market in the economy, and neighbor-
hoods are a missing level of government. Charging the right prices for
on-street parking can fill the gap in the market, and Parking Benefit
Districts can fill the gap in government (The High Cost of Free Parking,
Chapter 17). Conservatives often want more markets, while liberals
often want more government. Parking Benefit Districts give both more
markets and more government, but a new kind of both: market prices
for on-street parking and parking-financed public services.
Conservatives sometimes underestimate how individual choices
have collective consequences, and liberals sometimes underestimate
how economic incentives affect individual choices. Parking Benefit
Districts can mediate between these two views. Charging market prices
for curb parking will lead drivers to make travel choices that benefit
society, and the parking-financed public services will benefit everyone
in the neighborhood.
Repealing off-street parking requirements and replacing them with
market prices for on-street parking may at first glance seem a herculean
task, almost like Prohibition or the Reformation, too big an upheaval
for society to accept. Nevertheless, the repeal-and-replace strategy
should attract voters across a wide political spectrum. Conservatives
will see that it reduces government regulations and relies on market
choices. Liberals will see that it increases spending for public services.
Environmentalists will see that it reduces energy consumption, air
pollution, and carbon emissions. New Urbanists will see that it ena-
bles people to live at higher density without being overrun by cars.
Developers will see that it reduces building costs. Drivers of all political
stripes will see that it guarantees convenient curb parking. Residents
will see that it improves their neighborhoods. Elected officials will see
that it depoliticizes parking, reduces traffic congestion, allows infill
development, and provides public services without raising taxes.
Finally, urban planners can devote less time to parking and more time
to improving cities.
The following 51 chapters explain how repealing off-street park-
ing requirements, replacing them with the right prices for on-street
parking, and spending the resulting revenue to improve neighbor-
hood public services may be the cheapest, fastest, and simplest way to
improve cities, the economy, and the environment, one parking space
at a time.
54 Introduction

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