How parking minimums have led to maximum driving - and how to reverse the trend

Planning codes that require developers to include a minimum amount of parking in their projects may sound innocuous - but in fact such rules have played a major role in wrecking American communities. That's why the Sierra Club Bay Chapter went on record in May to advocate eliminating all such requirements.

During the construction boom after World War II, minimum parking was written into most American planning codes. Americans were deciding to own cars, and they wanted to be able to drive and park anywhere. This new demand for parking soon conflicted with the desires of existing residents for curb-parking in front of their houses and of businesses for curb spaces for customers or employees. Local legislators were quick to satisfy the desires of their constituents, at no apparent cost, by mandating minimum parking for every new project. Soon the transportation industry was spooling out different suggested minimums for every type of project. Often the requirements were based on observations of a similar use at the busiest time of day or year - and planning boards and local legislators would increase the requirements by a little to be sure that the supply of parking was ample.

Developers were in any case going to provide the amount of parking they believed necessary for the success of their projects, but now they were being compelled to provide even more, to subsidize the desires of voting drivers, of automobile manufacturers, and of gasoline refiners. This was but one of the ways that the automobile, symbol of capitalism, demanded socialized subsidies.

Soon streetcar rails were found to be impeding driving and had to be removed. Parking requirements, along with the loss of transit, hastened the demise of downtowns in small and medium-sized communities. Downtown businesses couldn't expand without providing parking - but downtown land and the construction of new parking were too costly, and so businesses migrated to the new malls. Work sites too started to locate near the new freeways. People who used to walk got in the habit of using cars for shopping and driving to work. Combined with peoples' desires for large home sites and planners' desires to separate each type of use, these trends led us into today's mess of constant driving.

As we build new energy-efficient cities for the future, a key step will be to eliminate minimum-parking requirements.

Howard Strassner