Pii: S0965-8564(99)00007-5

Urban planners typically set the minimum parking requirements for every land use to satisfy the peak demand for free parking. As a result, parking is free for 99% of automobile trips in the United States. Minimum parking requirements increase the supply and reduce the price ± but not the cost ± of parking. They bundle the cost of parking spaces into the cost of development, and thereby increase the prices of all the goods and services sold at the sites that o€er free parking. Cars have many external costs, but the external cost of parking in cities may be greater than all the other external costs combined. To prevent spillover, cities could price on-street parking rather than require o€-street parking. Compared with minimum parking requirements, market prices can allocate parking spaces fairly and eciently. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. How can a conceptual scheme that one generation admiringly describes as subtle, ̄exible, and complex become for a later generation merely obscure, ambiguous, and cumbersome? Thomas Kuhn Urban planners set minimum parking requirements for every land use. These requirements typically ensure that developers will provide enough spaces to satisfy the peak demand for free parking. This article examines: (1) how urban planners set parking requirements, (2) how much the required parking costs, and (3) how parking requirements distort the markets for transportation and land. As a way to eliminate this distortion, I will propose that cities should price onstreet parking rather than require o€-street parking. 1. The shaky foundation of minimum parking requirements Where do minimum parking requirements come from? No one knows. The ``bible'' of land use planning, F. Stuart Chapin's Urban Land Use Planning, does not mention parking requirements in Transportation Research Part A 33 (1999) 549±574 * Tel.: +1-310-825-5705; fax: +1-310-206-5566; e-mail: [email protected] www.elsevier.com/locate/tra 0965-8564/99/$ ± see front matter Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0965-8564(99)00007-5 any of its four editions. The leading textbooks on urban transportation planning also do not mention parking requirements. This silence suggests that planning academics have not seriously considered ± or even noticed ± the topic. This academic neglect has not prevented practicing planners from setting parking requirements for every conceivable land use. Fig. 1 shows a small selection of the myriad land uses for which planners have set speci®c parking requirements. Without training or research, urban planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for bingo parlors, junkyards, pet cemeteries, ri ̄e ranges, slaughterhouses, and every other land use. Richard Willson (1996) surveyed planning directors in 144 cities to learn how they set parking requirements. The two most frequently cited methods were ``survey nearby cities'' and ``consult Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) handbooks''. Both strategies cause serious problems. 1.1. Survey nearby cities Although surveying nearby cities seems a sensible way to set parking requirements, the Planning Advisory Service (1971), pp. 1±3) explains a serious problem with this approach: Since the establishment of the principle that zoning ordinances may legally require the provision of o€-street parking, ordinance drafters have been asking questions like: ``How many spaces should be provided for a drive-in restaurant?'' ± or any other land use for that matter. The question is typically answered by relying upon what ordinances for other jurisdictions require... The implicit assumption is that other areas must know what they are doing (the ordinances were adopted, after all) and so it is a relatively safe bet to adopt a parking standard ``close to the average''. This may simply result in a repetition of someone else's mistakes. Nevertheless, the planner who needs to present a numerical standard by the next planning commission meeting cannot answer the original question by saying, ``I don't really know'' (italics added). Setting parking requirements by relying on what other cities require not only risks repeating someone else's mistakes, but also fails to reveal where the requirements came from in the ®rst place. 1 See Chapin (1957, 1965), Chapin and Kaiser (1979) and Kaiser et al. (1995). 2 See Dickey (1983), Hanson (1995), Meyer and Miller (1984) and Papacostas and Prevedouros (1993). Fig. 1. Selected land uses with minimum parking requirements. 550 D.C. Shoup / Transportation Research Part A 33 (1999) 549±574