People Over Parking
Every community has at least one (and likely many). You know, that vast empty parking lot that is filled entirely maybe once a year (hello, Black Friday), and on a daily basis is only a small percentage of the way full.
America has a parking problem.
And no, it's not that there isn't enough (sorry to burst your bubble, suburbanites visiting your local downtown). It's that we have too much of it. In fact, it is estimated that the United States has over 2 billion parking spaces. That's enough to cover the entire state of Connecticut. And what makes this number even more absurd is that it is estimated that there are around 286 million cars in America. That's seven spots for every car.
All of this begs the question...why do we devote so much space to parking our vehicles? Isn't there something better we could be doing with all of this space? It's no secret that there is an affordable housing crisis in America right now. What if we just used some of this space to build more affordable housing?
The problem in many cases lies in the fact that the majority of our country's developers and builders are restricted by what is known as parking mandates. These mandates force builders to supply a certain number of parking spaces for different types of uses, and oftentimes, it doesn't even make sense. In some cases, a tiny studio apartment is required to have two parking spaces. Multiple that by a few million, and it all adds up.
Many cities across the county have eliminated parking mandates, either within a certain proximity to public transit, or entirely, and in almost all of these cases, it has been widely beneficial for these communities. But, just recently, Minnesota is looking to become the first state in the nation to eliminate parking mandates statewide, in their historic "People over Parking Act of 2023" legislation. To read it, click here.
So, all of this makes you wonder...what would our communities look like if we built for people instead of parking?
Want to learn more about this topic? Here are a few resources, I encourage you to check out:
The High Cost of Free Parking, by Donald Shoup
