But Where Will I Park?
A few years ago, a friend of mine attended a birthday party at a popular bar in Minneapolis's Lynlake neighborhood, a fairly dense urban area where space is at a premium. Among the other invitees was a couple who live in the outer suburbs of the Twin Cities. Partway through the party, the host received an apologetic text from the couple. Paraphrased, it read:
We tried to come, got all the way there but there was literally no parking! So we had to turn around and go home. Hope you have a great birthday and see you soon!
My friend initially told me this story because he figured I'd find it good for a laugh. (I did. There was in fact plenty of parking near this venue: they could have found a spot in a garage on the same block, or an open space for free on a residential street a couple blocks away—maybe 4 or 5 blocks on an especially busy Saturday night.)
The exchange, though, actually illuminates a very common cultural and knowledge gap about how we use our cars in different types of environments, however. The couple that said there was "literally no parking" were neither stupid people, nor too lazy to walk a short distance. Rather, what their text really meant was, "We got there and didn't understand how to park."
This couple had lived their whole lives in places where "how you park" is that you go to the business you intend to patronize, and you park in its parking lot. 100 percent of the time. They may have understood in theory that in the city it doesn't work that way, but in practice, the prospect of figuring it out on the fly was intimidating. They're not alone: the stress of parking (much more than the monetary expense, I reckon) is a major deterrent for many suburban and rural dwellers to even visit big cities, and is part of why political support is so scant among drivers for policies that would reduce parking supply.
At Strong Towns, we've described a parking lot as virtually the worst use to which you can put a piece of urban land. We've published dozens of articles on the high costs of our cities' addiction to free parking. We've urged that every city eliminate its parking minimums, and start pricing parking at a fair market rate, so that parking can be adequately weighed against other, potentially more productive uses of land. Our oversupply of free parking is financially ruinous—it results in cities that have been eaten alive by parking lots at the expense of value-generating land. It cannot be sustained.
A nation of strong cities and towns would thus be a nation with a lot fewer parking spaces. But that raises a common question among our suburban and rural readers. And not just readers either. My colleague Lauren recently challenged me to answer the following question:
What is the Strong Towns vision for how suburbs/rural areas would relate to urban ones if urban spaces significantly reduced car use and automobile-centric street allocation? As much as the vision for a less auto-centric urban culture is beautiful and appealing, I'm often, as a countryside-dweller, left wondering where I park when I go into the city.
The simple answer to this question is that you would pay to park in places you don't pay now, and potentially pay significant prices. There's nuance worth exploring, though. Let's do so through four hypothetical trips by fictional characters, all taking place twenty years from now.
A Fantasy Time Warp to 2040: Driving and Parking in a Strong Towns Future
1. Rural area to small city.
The Knutsen family lives on a small farm 13 miles outside Brainerd, Minnesota. It's 2040, and over the past twenty years, Brainerd has embraced Strong Towns principles with great success. Downtown looks more like it used to in the 1930s, and there are no remaining surface parking lots. Streets have been narrowed to make way for wider sidewalks and bike paths. There is a privately-owned garage downtown in which you pay to park your car. Or you can park at a meter on the street.
The Knutsens make less frequent trips into town, and are more deliberate about those trips. They tend to combine multiple stops, grab lunch at a locally-owned cafe, and make an afternoon-long excursion out of it. This complicates Mrs. Knutsen's former habit of zipping into town for a short errand. But the family enjoys what Brainerd has become: a much livelier destination, and a safer and more enjoyable environment to walk around without the wide, desolate streets and windswept parking lots. The town has also taken charge of its own finances, reducing debt, investing in the schools and parks, and catching up on street and sewer maintenance.
The Knutsens, in fact, have several friends who have moved back into town in recent years, finding it more convenient and sociable. This doesn't work for them as farmers, but they understand the choice. Brainerd's core neighborhoods are nicer than ever, and there is less cookie-cutter development popping up around the picturesque lakes that surround the city.
2. Rural area (or small city) to large city.
The Hernandez family lives in Commerce, Georgia, a small town 70 miles from Atlanta, where Mario Hernandez is an attorney. They like to go to Atlanta to catch a touring Broadway show, eat at one of the city's world-class restaurants, or shop for things they can't find locally. But over the two decades since 2020, it's become a lot more costly to park in Downtown or Midtown Atlanta.
“As much as the vision for a less auto-centric urban culture is beautiful and appealing, I’m often, as a countryside-dweller, left wondering where I park when I go into the city.”
Sometimes the Hernandezes drive to a MARTA station in the suburbs, where they park their car and hop on the train. Sometimes they drive to nearby Athens and catch an inter-city bus: these have become more regular in recent years. If they are visiting a friend in the city, they may meet that friend at the nearest transit station to his house, or use bike-share or ride-share to go the last couple of miles from the train.
What they are doing has long been familiar to visitors to the densest U.S. cities with the highest land values: places like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Even way back in the 20th century, it was common practice to drive to a suburban park-and-ride station and take commuter rail the rest of the way into these cities: you'd have to be crazy to want to drive in Manhattan or Chicago's Loop. What's new since much of America pivoted to a Strong Towns approach is that the same now applies to many other large cities, like Atlanta, that used to prioritize ample car infrastructure for visitors over meeting the basic needs of their own residents.
Americans, by 2040, have increasingly come to understand that the hyper-intense concentrations of people and productive activity that comprise a modern urban downtown are simply impossible, geometrically, if everyone arrives by car. If everyone in Manhattan on a weekday afternoon drove in, you could pave the entire island and still not have room for all the parking. And so the market resolves the issue, where allowed to: parking is expensive, and other options are comparatively affordable.
3. Suburb to large city.
The same applies to the suburban commuter who in the past has been accustomed to driving into the central city of his or her metro area with little friction or cost. In our imaginary 2040, Grace Chen is a high-school history teacher in Denver, who used to live in a condo in suburban Aurora. But by the early 2030s, she found her driving commute increasingly unbearable, as Colorado's state DOT, in dire budgetary straits, had instituted a moratorium on new highways or freeway lane additions, and political backlash prevented the state from expanding road tolls. Grace took the train in for a while, but after a couple years took the plunge and moved to a Denver neighborhood near her job. Denver has invested aggressively in bus transit and bike lanes. Grace now rides her bike to work on nice days, and drives and parks at the school on rainy or snowy ones. Most of her colleagues still drive, but it's more like two-thirds, not the 90% that it used to be, so the school was able to reclaim a portion of its parking lot for an expansion of the athletic fields.
The same arrangement wouldn't work for everyone, but on balance, more Denverites have begun to do what Grace did, while somewhat fewer have long freeway commutes. The geography of new development has shifted in accordance with demand. Colorado followed Oregon's lead in eliminating exclusive single-family zoning, and the result of that and other reforms has been significant amounts of new housing built in the core neighborhoods of Denver as well as near major suburban job concentrations. Congestion has even begun to ease on the region's freeways, as overall vehicle miles traveled are down. Property values are not doing so hot in the debt-financed exurban boomtowns of the 2010s, but the increased ease of small-scale development has helped keep rents stable in more in-demand areas.
4. Large city to the same large city.
Most suburban and rural areas are still relatively car-dependent in 2040. In addition, even many urban residents who do not drive for every trip still wish to or need to drive for some of them—to visit locations not served well by transit, or for something time-sensitive like getting to a hospital, or to haul something heavy that you can't feasibly take on the bus. Contractors, of course, drive to bring their equipment with them from job to job. Delivery vehicles are on the road at all hours.
Image via Smart Growth America from The Congestion Con
When these people have an easy time finding a parking space, they have neighbors like Jason Breaux to thank. In our 2040 timeline, Jason, who grew up in New Orleans, runs a small but successful Cajun restaurant in Houston. He has witnessed the city’s astonishing transformation over the past few decades, as a famously laissez-faire regulatory culture met a renewed interest in urban living even in famously car-obsessed Texas.
Jason owns a pickup truck, which he uses to haul supplies for his restaurant and to make various essential trips. But he finds himself driving it a lot fewer miles than he used to. He drives to work, but it isn’t far, his daughter’s school is in the neighborhood, and his preferred barbershop, primary doctor, and bank are all on the same minor commercial street a little over half a mile from home.
Houston’s flurry of townhouse and apartment development was followed by the steady growth of neighborhood-based businesses to serve the new arrivals. There are parking meters on that neighborhood main street, so Jason walks or rides a scooter there to avoid paying to park, unless the weather is bad or he’s in a hurry. Business has boomed at Jason’s restaurant, and yet he noticed his parking lot was never anywhere near full, so he took advantage of the city’s 2026 removal of parking minimums to remove some parking and expand his patio space.
Jason doesn’t think a whole lot about urban planning. But a planner might observe that his experience is proof that transportation policy is really land-use policy. In a late 20th-century suburb, a trip to the doctor, followed by a visit to the bank and a quick stop for groceries, would have involved driving and parking three separate times. With these things centered on a walkable, human-scale neighborhood, it doesn’t. Short trips within a single city or even neighborhood are a huge source of parking demand, and the low-hanging fruit for freeing up parking space for better use.
When It Comes to Parking, Less Can Be More
“In a nation of strong towns and cities, we will turn our attention back toward our neighborhoods and their quality of life, and away from designing a place primarily around the prerogatives of those who don’t live or pay taxes there.”
The Strong Towns vision for dealing with traffic and parking problems is not to subsidize ever more and more and more infrastructure to accommodate ever more and more automobile trips. The theoretical demand for mobility is infinite. This is not a war we can win.
So instead, the Strong Towns approach to congestion—and this includes the problem of "literally no parking!" that began this essay—is that you deal with demand at the source. It's like a watershed: you prevent flooding downstream by protecting wetlands upstream, and the urban planning analogy for this is that you deal with huge parking demand in popular locations by reducing some of the need to go park in those locations. This includes mixed-use neighborhoods which make it possible for people to make more trips closer to home, and with a relocalization of some essential services such as schools.
In the big picture, a huge part of the answer to “How will this affect suburban and rural residents who drive into the city?” is that in a nation of strong towns and cities, there will be less functional difference between suburbs, small towns, and cities. In all of those places, we will turn our attention back toward our neighborhoods and their quality of life, and away from designing a place primarily around the prerogatives of those who don’t live or pay taxes there.
It’s not that people who need to drive and park are just to be inconvenienced or that their needs don't matter. Part of what will make it still possible to drive into the city when you really need to is reducing the need for the people who live in the city full time to drive and park everywhere they go. There are many good reasons to drive, so in a Strong Towns world, we can free up a healthier, more reasonable number of parking spaces for the people who actually have those reasons, by creating a world of better options for all other occasions.
When the owners of Lawrence Hall bought the abandoned building, they had a vision of reviving it into a food hall that would support small businesses and help their community thrive. They never imagined that a few parking spots would put their dream on hold for seven years.