The Best Argument for Parking Mandates (Is Still Wrong)
(Source: Pexels.)
When I lived in San Francisco, more than a decade ago now, I didn’t own a car. But I did rent one periodically. I’d do this maybe three or four times a year, if I was going to be taking a trip to the mountains or the coast, or if I was about to have an out-of-town guest I would want to efficiently show around the Bay Area.
Whenever I did rent a car, I went through a predictable, unpleasant ordeal. I would go get the car, bring it back to my neighborhood, and then spend upwards of 20 minutes searching for parking. I would circle block after block, on which every single curbside parking space was full. Occasionally I would think I had found one, only to read the sign, “NO PARKING FRIDAY MORNINGS 6 AM – 10 AM. STREET SWEEPING.” I would glance at my phone, confirming that it was indeed 11 p.m. on a Thursday. Heavy sigh. Shift back into drive.
Finally, through sheer persistence, I would find something, and then I would walk the several blocks home to my apartment. Because I was only an occasional car renter, I viewed this as simply part of the cost of the activity. Had I owned a car, I would have bought an annual permit which offered me a much broader range of legal places to park in the neighborhood. But I still would have contended with moving my car for weekly street sweeping and the like. I had many friends in San Francisco who rarely used the cars they owned, but who went through the once weekly “gotta-go-move-it-tonight” ritual.
For those San Franciscans whose cars are more important to them on a daily basis, maybe because of a job that involves hauling stuff or a challenging child care schedule, it is necessary to secure parking that doesn’t involve the unpredictable hassle of circling blocks for an open space. This means intentionally living in a place with its own designated off-street parking or paying for a monthly space in a garage. The options are out there. They are not free. They are simply part of the cost of living in a place like San Francisco, which is high for many reasons. Parking is not the foremost reason.
I revisit this now because Strong Towns is once again in the thick of the parking reform fight. One of our five core campaigns is to eliminate parking mandates and subsidies in all of North America. We have endorsed groundbreaking legislation in Minnesota that would end these mandates statewide, in every large city and small town.
This legislation has brought out the critics with a range of arguments, many of them less than cogent. (The most common type of online critic of abolishing parking mandates doesn’t seem to understand the difference between “ban parking mandates” and “ban parking.” It will still be perfectly legal to build a parking lot or garage, folks.)
The case for parking reform is broad, with something for everyone. This one simple policy change stands to benefit the financial health of local governments, the viability of small businesses, the affordability of urban housing, and efforts to build climate resilience and manage stormwater more effectively. It also has obvious appeal to those who simply don’t want government to micromanage what individuals do with their private property. Off-street parking mandates are almost pure pseudoscience, based on arbitrary formulas with little relation to demonstrable parking needs.
The coalition is so broad, and the case so strong for repealing these harmful mandates, that it’s tempting to get smug or self-righteous. That’s not my style. I want to be able to persuade lawmakers who are on the fence to vote for this, and that means understanding what, if any, credible fears they’re hearing about from anti-parking-reform constituents. And having a respectful answer to those.
I’m a believer in steelmanning: engaging with the most cogent, compelling argument against your own position, rather than with a weak “straw man.” The steelman case for parking mandates is still, in my opinion, wrong. But I get it. It makes sense to me when I think about my experiences in San Francisco.
Will Street Parking Be Overrun?
The most consistent fear I hear from reasonable skeptics of ending parking mandates is always the same: it’s that public, on-street parking will be overrun by private cars, once private apartments and businesses start to be built without their own parking facilities. Eventually, finding any parking at all might become an ordeal like what I described in San Francisco. At that point, it may be expensive or challenging to find ways to retrofit more parking into a neighborhood that genuinely needs it.
A standard line from parking reform advocates is, “Property owners know how much parking their tenants need better than city bureaucrats do, and they’ll build the amount that will actually get used.” The first half of that statement is questionable: I think a lot of owners genuinely don’t know (though they are probably closer to knowing than the bureaucrats are). And in any case, the second half is often false.
The argument from parking reform skeptics that I think is actually correct (although I don’t take it to the same conclusion they do) is that property owners, if not required to build parking, will deliberately undersupply it as long as they know their customers will use off-site parking (such as curbside spaces), instead.
Why not outsource the cost of your customers’ parking to the public? Why not just let your apartment tenants search the neighborhood for street parking? If you’re confident enough that you can still lease up the building, might as well save the money.
There are places where this is a reasonable expectation and places where it isn’t. It’s not likely to happen in the ultra-car-oriented suburbs. In these places, developers are going to provide parking anyway because their customers will demand it. (They just won’t be obligated to provide enough for every Black Friday shopper in the multiverse.) There isn’t a culture in which parking on the street a couple blocks away and walking is understood to be acceptable.
But street parking is broadly normal in a specific kind of place. I’m talking about places that were built pre-World War II with a dense, walkable urban fabric, but that these days are not quite dense and transit-rich enough for people to forgo car ownership altogether. The places that cars have been awkwardly shoehorned into despite that the urban layout isn’t optimized for them.
This includes many neighborhoods of cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia. It includes a lot of Los Angeles (which is a denser city than you think it is). It includes lively, popular, older neighborhoods in the shadow of the downtowns of Midwestern cities—places like Uptown and Stevens Square in Minneapolis, where I have absolutely circled multiple blocks looking for parking (even though 90% of Minneapolis has an overabundance of street parking).
It also includes a lot of historic small-town main streets. Street parking is likely ample just a few blocks away in these places, but there can be a localized tight supply.
You can live without a car for many day-to-day errands in these places. But most people still own cars. And since a very large share of homes and businesses in these places don’t have private parking already, because they were built before the era of near-universal parking mandates, most people park those cars on the street.
Absent additional action from the local government, it is not only possible but likely that in these places, ending parking minimums will exacerbate the squeeze on the street parking supply. I wrote more in the past, in fact, about these growing pains in San Francisco, which abolished its parking mandates in 2018.
Dealing With the Squeeze: Cities Must Actually Manage Public Parking
The question, then, is what we do about it. And this is where I diverge from the critics of parking reform.
To a certain type of critic, this situation is basically a tragedy of the commons. Public parking is a free, shared resource, paid for by taxpayers. And the incentive for any individual private business or apartment owner is to freeload off the public. Why provide the parking you know you need, if the city is right there providing it for you? When every property owner applies this same logic, the commons gets overrun.
If your starting point is that public parking is by nature a free, common resource, then the implications of parking reform are that taxpayers are being asked to subsidize developers and business owners by providing “their” parking for them.
The first time I saw this assertion, on Twitter/X, I was baffled. It seemed a crazy logical contortion to argue “this is just a taxpayer giveaway to developers” about not requiring developers to provide a specific amenity to tenants out of their own pockets. Some hotels don’t have pools: is the fact that people swim at public pools and beaches an implicit taxpayer subsidy to the owners of hotels too stingy to build a pool? It seemed ludicrous to me.
I had to work through the underlying logic to get it. To the people making these assertions, parking isn’t an amenity. It is a necessary, inseparable part of a functioning business, house, or apartment, as intrinsic as indoor plumbing and electricity. Not requiring parking, in their eyes, amounts to allowing developers to offer an incomplete and unusable product, forcing the public to absorb the externality.
The thing is, parking isn’t like this, though. It is entirely possible to enjoy a night out at a restaurant, complete a series of errands, or live in an apartment, without parking your car on the premises, even if you do have a car. This is a genuine mindset shift for an American culture in which a car is often less a useful appliance, and more a “prosthetic device,” in the words of Jeff Speck.
This is the fundamental philosophical difference that parking reform exposes. It’s the reason that Strong Towns has a core campaign labeled “End Parking Mandates and Subsidies” instead of just mandates. Free curbside parking, in a place where the market-clearing price of parking is greater than $0 (hint: if people are circling the block for a space, this is the case), is a subsidy. Free public parking lots and garages, or those that operate at a loss, are a subsidy. And parking mandates are a different sort of subsidy, providing parking through what is effectively a tax on private development.
If you can’t envision a world without these subsidies—if you think frictionless driving and parking are necessary enough to a successful city that the choice is only “Have private developers subsidize parking, or have taxpayers do it,” then parking mandates make a certain sort of sense.
If you are a civic leader not philosophically invested in car centricity, but you share the more prosaic concern that public parking will be overrun, the solution is simple: proactively manage public parking. Where there is a scarcity, install meters and charge a market-clearing price. If this leads to concerns about equity for poorer drivers, long-term parking permits can be offered free or at a deep discount for local residents of a working-class area.
Cities can operate pay lots on the periphery of a popular, congested area. They can even run shuttles to help deliver customers to the door of a business, as former Strongest Town Contest winner Lockport, Illinois has done.
The private market also can and will step in to offer parking where there is demand for it. I’ve written about how technology makes it easier than ever for the owners of a little bit of asphalt to monetize that asphalt. There are problems the market can’t solve, but providing parking—at a fair market price—isn’t one of them.
All of these incremental steps are very possible, but they require recognizing that scarce land has a value—and a price.
Abolishing parking mandates doesn’t mean that your local government will no longer have to spend any time thinking about parking, or dealing with tricky questions involving parking. But it does mean you’ll have a range of options for dealing with the issue that actually involve weighing trade-offs, and that are rooted in recognizing urban land—including curb space on your public streets—as valuable and finite.
The result will be that in some places, it remains easy and quick to park. In some places, like my old neighborhod in San Francisco, it won’t be. But that will be because the trade-offs are worth it.
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.