Announcing a New and Improved Map of Cities That Have Removed Parking Minimums

(Source: Unsplash.)

It's 2021. Does your city still have mandatory parking minimums?

More North American communities than ever are doing away with this destructive dinosaur of a policy, which enshrines the most wasteful use of urban land into public policy, imposing huge costs on cities in lost prosperity, affordability, accessibility, and quality of life.

At Strong Towns, we're proud of the role we've played in helping local advocates lead the charge to abolish parking minimums. And we're excited to announce our next step.

Today, we're relaunching our crowd-sourced map of cities in the U.S. and Canada that have ended or sharply curtailed their parking requirements. And it's more useful than ever.

We first created the map in 2015 to track the momentum of the growing parking reform movement, and more importantly, to help advocates build the case for change in their own places by identifying peer communities to use as case studies or role models. Anyone who's lobbied a local elected official knows that the first question they ask is, "Who else has tried this?" And so we sought to give you a one-stop location to share the (many) answers to that question with each other.

The map redesign has been a joint project with the Parking Reform Network. Their brilliant volunteers took the lead on fleshing out the map data, including more detailed references and links to the relevant provisions in cities' codes. They also revamped the interface to be searchable by a broader mix of criteria, so you can find just the examples that are relevant to you.

Part of the reason we did this is that the parking reform movement itself has made leaps and bounds in just a few years. It was just four short years ago that Hartford, Connecticut, and Buffalo, New York, became the first major North American cities to completely abolish parking requirements. Since then, the likes of San Francisco, Minneapolis, Edmonton, and South Bend have followed suit—but also dozens if not hundreds of smaller cities and towns. In fact, the terrain has shifted so quickly that the original map, despite a steady stream of user submissions, was becoming an inadequate resource to track these reforms in detail.

So here's a new map. And we encourage you to use it, and to tell anyone you know who's involved in parking policy—as an advocate, as a city planner, as an elected official—to check it out. We hope to continue building this database for years to come, so that it can be a clearinghouse for all of you on the side of parking sanity to build the case for reform in your town.

Has your town or city enacted meaningful parking reform? If so, you can put your city on the map using this form.

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It's #BlackFridayParking week again here at Strong Towns, and that means this week on the site we're spotlighting the harm done to our cities by excessive parking—and specifically, by mandatory parking minimums, which require private land owners to provide parking often far in excess of reasonable demand.

It’s never more obvious that our big-box stores and shopping malls have too many parking spaces than when you visit them on one of the busiest shopping days of the year, the day after Thanksgiving, and they’re still nowhere near full. That’s why we started #BlackFridayParking in 2013 to shine a light on these harmful and wasteful regulations. So grab your camera on Friday and head out to your nearest empty or half-full retail parking lot, and share your findings on social media with the hashtag #BlackFridayParking!

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