People over parking: The U.S. cities that are reclaiming their streets

May 7 - In a small but growing number of cities across the United States, parking reform is gaining momentum. How a city approaches parking could seem trivial, but it is deeply rooted in issues relating to less carbon-intensive transportation systems, encouraging green spaces and increasing access to affordable housing.

According to Henry Grabar, author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World, the U.S. has over 1 billion car parking spaces and more square footage of space dedicated to parking each car than to housing each person.

Surplus car parking spaces have arisen as a result of the widespread practice of cities setting minimum parking standards, whereby the developer of a new building has to provide a minimum number of parking spaces to get a building permit.

According to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, parking minimums have contributed to extensive land use that encourages driving, higher greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increased infrastructure costs.

The black asphalt required for spaces can pollute water, too: a study published in Environmental Science and Technology , opens new tabdocumented how, when exposed to rainfall, thousands of toxic chemicals can run off into waterways, carrying oil and surface contaminants with them.

The upstate New York city of Buffalo became the first U.S. city to buck the trend by eliminating off-street parking minimums in 2017, saying it would help attract businesses and offices, promote economic development and reduce the city’s environmental impact. Later that year, Hartford, Connecticut, followed suit.

Today Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Portland are among cities that have brought in reforms such as capping the number of parking spaces, increasing fees for residential permits, basing fees on vehicle size and removing on-street parking.

In an email to The Ethical Corporation, Portland’s Commissioner, Mingus Mapps, said the city wanted to “spur more housing production as part of a larger strategy to deal with housing affordability in our region”.

In Seattle, which ended parking requirements for new buildings situated near frequent transit services in 2012, 2020 research found that the reforms have led to 18,000 fewer parking spaces, opens new tab, saving the city $537 million.

Revenues from parking reform are being used by some U.S. cities to pay for public services, such as repairing sidewalks, planting street trees, or subsidizing public transport, says Donald Shoup, urban planning researcher and author of The High Cost of Free Parking. For example, Boulder, Colorado is using downtown meter revenue to buy transit passes for downtown workers.

The Parking Reform Network (PRN) campaign group has an interactive map of North America, detailing 67 citywide parking mandates that have appeared since 2017, though the numbers remain comparatively small.

Tony Jordan, chief executive of PRN, credits the power of community activists as well as urbanist content on social media channels for the success. “The parking reform movement is no longer the domain of wonky academics, it really is a broad group of people who recognise this issue impacts so many other things,” he said.

New York City's mayor, Eric Adams proposed removing minimum parking requirements in September 2023, something that could become law this autumn if the proposal passes the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, according to PRN.

“It shows that there is, especially in transit-rich cities like New York but also in smaller cities and college towns, quite a lot of demand for housing without parking – demand that for years, the market has been unable to meet,” said Grabar.

Even more significant is the fact that some states are starting to put forward legislation. In Minnesota, state Senator Omar Fateh has introduced a bill to eliminate parking requirements across the whole state. California’s Assembly Bill 2097, approved in September 2022, sets out to do the same thing. The Washington state legislature, meanwhile, has proposed a bill that would prohibit cities from imposing minimum parking requirements on new developments near public transport routes.

“The real milestones for me are state-level reforms,” Grabar told The Ethical Corporation. “Those reforms are important because they affect both pro-housing, pro-environment cities and, crucially, many suburbs, which are where most Americans live,” he added.

At a national level, the People Over Parking Act, opens new tab, a federal bill introduced in May 2023 by Californian congressman Robert Garcia, would eliminate outdated parking minimum requirements for new affordable residential, retail, industrial or commercial construction. The National Parking Association, an industry trade group of parking operators, has pledged its support for reducing or eliminating parking minimums too.

However, the bill is still in its introductory phase , opens new taband has not yet passed the House or Senate.

In an interview, Jill Turlo, chief executive of Hartford Parking Authority, pointed out that the only representatives supporting the bill are Democrats: “While I admit that I’m uncertain about the bill’s likelihood of success, I think it would be a strong push at a federal level to encourage growth in public transit infrastructure and a corresponding reduction in emissions.”

Grabar accepts that the movement to abolish parking requirements is up against stiff resistance. “Miami cancelled its parking reform experiment in 2022 with a new law that reinstated the city’s parking requirements. But the real backlash will come when a significant number of developers build housing without parking, causing spillovers. That will be a real test for the parking reform movement.”

PRN points to SeaTac, a community of 32,000 living around the Seattle-Tacoma International airport, which is opposing the Washington state legislation, claiming it would hurt low-income residents and negatively impact the business of professional drivers.

Such claims are misguided by commonplace assumptions, PRN says, especially the misconception that reforms are an attempt to ban parking entirely.

It’s not only in the U.S. where parking is a political issue. During COVID-19, the concept of the 15-minute city as a model for offices, schools, shops and parks to sit closely together amassed conspiracy theories from the alt-right in the UK.

According to reports, some referred to it as an undercover lockdown plot, designed to confine citizens to small districts with heightened surveillance, removing motorist rights. Even an official U.K. government document, opens new tab opposed the 15-minute city amid concerns that it would “police people’s lives”.

Pro-motorist rhetoric became a tipping point for victory in a UK byelection, opens new tab last year, where the Conservative party’s win in Uxbridge leveraged tensions in Greater London over Ultra Low Emissions Zones (ULEZ) to secure votes.

How this will play out in the U.S. during 2024 as an election year is yet to be seen. Miami’s removal of policies to eliminate parking minimums indicates how reform can easily be reversed. As Portland’s Commissioner Mapps said: “There are larger and longer-term questions about how we should fund transportation generally, and these conversations often get politicized.”

This article is part of The Ethical Corporation's in-depth briefing Decarbonising Cities. To download the PDF, click here, opens new tab.