Free Parking Destroys Cities
If you’ve ever had a car, you know how amazing it feels when you realize that the sweet empty parking spot you’ve found is completely free!
From the perspective of a driver, a city can never have too much parking, only not enough of it. And the cheaper, the better!
However, once somebody ceases to be a driver, the parking lot becomes utterly worthless because its only purpose is as a spot to leave a car.
Parking lots are basically asphalt deserts within a city. Nobody wants to go somewhere that only exists for parking. People want to go to parks, restaurants, libraries, stores and other places that are worth visiting.
Unfortunately, since many of our cities are designed to provide as much parking as possible, fewer of these places are allowed to exist.
The biggest issue with catering to cars is that every car-destination must have enough spots to accommodate the maximum number of drivers that spot will ever have.
Solving this problem can be approached using one of two different methods:
Either reduce the demand for driving so fewer parking spaces are needed,
Or increase the supply so there are plenty of places for everyone to leave a car somewhere.
The latter of these two options was quickly adopted by many cities worldwide as a popular ordinance called “minimum parking requirements” (or MPR for short). MPR forces developers to dedicate large portions of their land to parking at no upfront cost of the city. Consequently, every single store, restaurant, park, residential area and any other type of building must reserve a substantial portion of land to parking.
Minimum Parking Requirements are Incredibly Naïve
Minimum parking requirements are incredibly naïve because there is no method for accurately deciding how much parking a building must provide. The metrics are entirely based on guesswork and pseudoscience.
Typically the number of spaces is dependent on the square footage of the building but it can be whatever the city or country believes is relevant: It can the number of beds in a hospital, the number of bays in a car wash, the number of picnic tables in a park, or even the number of occupants at an elementary school (yes, in the US this is an actual requirement even though most children are too young to have a driver’s license). Perhaps the strangest one is for bars as it encourages people to drive to a bar made for drinking and then drive home.
Since these requirements are always trying to estimate a building's maximum capacity they tend to overestimate how much parking must be provided. Because every building has to follow these parking requirements, the space our cities dedicate to parking quickly adds up to the point where there is far more space for parking than drivers will actually use.
All of this space is basically reserved for the off-chance that every building is seeing the maximum allotted number of customers at the same time, which basically never happens...
In a greater extreme, when a store goes out of business the parking lot often does not get demolished and sits empty. An abandoned parking lot only utility is being a spot where a parent can teach their teenage child how to drive…
Why Free Parking is Worse for Businesses
There is a stigma that removing parking will hurt businesses because fewer customers would be able to access the same building at a time. If anything, it actually hurts businesses to have most patrons arrive by car.
In January this year, researchers from The University of Connecticut found that as a city went from having 0.2 parking spaces per person to 0.5 per person, the share of car commuting went from 60% to 83%. Reserving space for parking influences more people to arrive by car which creates a vicious cycle that demands more parking to accommodate the number of drivers.
This trend ends up hurting businesses because there is less land that can be used for…well, the business!
Also, people’s increased spending on cars reduces the amount of money they have for other goods and services.
Parking Lots Makes Cities go Bankrupt
A city needs to establish wealth in its center so it can afford the cost of its own infrastructure and public services around it. This includes, but is not limited to, public transit, road maintenance, sewer systems, garbage pickups, power lines, and road repairs.
When the taxes are used for free parking lots, all construction gets spread out because of the massive space it requires. As roads have to be extended, pipes have to be lengthened, electric lines have to be extended, postmen have to travel further etc. parking lots have the unintentional consequence of increases the cost of maintaining existing infrastructure and the cost of improving existing services.
In simple terms, the more spread out the city is, the more it has to spend on maintain every part of its infrastructure.
Just to add salt to the parking-infested wound, asphalt surfaces have relatively short shelf-life of 25 years before needing to be resurfaced and basically gives nothing back to the city in terms of revenue…
Free parking is only free for the driver. Everyone else is paying a high price! It can be in the form of inferior public services, deteriorating asphalt surfaces, fewer places that are built for people instead of cars, and of course the literal cost of resurfacing all of the parking lots that these cities have.
How Can we Fix the Problems Free Parking has Created?
The main solution is to change the way people traverse the cities.
Perhaps the simplest step is to abolish mandatory parking requirements. Less parking is a powerful encouragement for people to leave their car behind and find other means of getting into the city.
Shifting people away from cars allows more density. As the number of vehicle trips decrease, more space can be reclaimed for meaningful development in spaces that are currently occupied by cars.
These places could instead be homes, businesses, restaurants, parks, libraries, gardens and other communal spaces that make cities much more profitable and people much happier.
There is a tremendous opportunity to rebuild our urban cores so our cities can be filled with places that are meant for people and not merely a spot to leave your car.
As the picture below from New York shows, the effects of removing free parking can literary be seen in a day!
