Thoughts on Minimum Parking Requirements
After writing my first blog post about parking, I’ve done more research into the history of minimum parking requirements and the negative impacts they’ve had on our towns and cities over the past 100 years. In 1923, Columbus, Ohio was the first city in the United States to add minimum parking requirements to their zoning code, and by the 1950s almost every city started adding them. I suggest reading From Chaos to Order: A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot for a history of parking and the driving forces for these laws. I honestly can’t think of a single piece of zoning code and law that has done more damage to our towns and cities in America. Columbus, Ohio has now even walked back these laws, removing all minimum parking requirements in the Downtown District and along 140 miles of key transit and commercial corridors. Minimum parking requirements guarantee sprawl and cause a whole slew of negative impacts for our towns and cities. Go anywhere in America that isn’t a crumbling historic downtown (car dependency can be contributing to it crumbling, too) and you’ll find mostly empty parking lots everywhere.
Imagine if Disney was designed like American cities are today. Every ride, attraction and building would have its own parking requirements mandated by the park’s “zoning code.” It would probably look like this:
| Attraction / Use | Hypothetical Minimum Parking Requirement |
|---|---|
| Roller Coaster | 1 space per 2 peak riders |
| Dark Ride | 1 space per 3 peak riders |
| Water Ride | 1 space per 2 peak riders |
| Live Theater | 1 space per 3 seats |
| Character Meet & Greet | 1 space per 50 sq. ft. of waiting area |
| Restaurant | 1 space per 100 sq. ft. of dining area |
| Quick-Service Restaurant | 1 space per 150 sq. ft. of floor area |
| Ice Cream Stand | 1 space per 75 sq. ft. of customer area |
| Gift Shop | 1 space per 200 sq. ft. of gross floor area |
| Arcade | 1 space per 150 sq. ft. of floor area |
| Indoor Exhibit | 1 space per 250 sq. ft. of exhibit area |
| Outdoor Show Venue | 1 space per 4 seats |
| Parade Viewing Area | 1 space per 4 spectators |
| Fireworks Viewing Area | 1 space per 4 spectators |
| Restrooms | 1 space per 500 sq. ft. of building area |
You might ask: how are the real minimum parking requirements generated? Well, the answer could be a whole separate blog post, but the gist is that they’re either guesses, taken from other city’s laws or from this handbook, whose statistics are questionable in many places. Here’s my hometowns minimum parking requirements.
Okay – back to our hypothetical Disney park with minimum parking requirements. The table above means the park’s rides and attractions would be pushed further away from each other, separated by their own parking lots as well as other lots for things between like gift shops and restaurants. The area wouldn’t be very walkable. Guests would drive from each ride, irrespective of distance, since most of the infrastructure is devoted to mandated parking lots. After riding Space Mountain, you and your family would navigate a large parking lot, probably with no tree coverage or clear pedestrian paths, to get back in your car and drive to Pirates of the Caribbean, where you’d search for a parking spot, park, and then walk through yet another large asphalt parking lot. Then you’d queue for the ride. Imagine how different the Disney experience would be repeating this all day. Disney would become exhausting, inconvenient, and far less magical. Luckily, Disney has no such parking requirements and is designed for people once you’re inside the park. Because you’re walking, you naturally stop for things like ice cream, browse shops, watch a parade, stumble across a character, or discover an attraction you weren’t planning to visit. Those unplanned moments are often what make the trip memorable. From a business perspective, it means there’s more opportunities for guests to spend more money getting places. However, this hypothetical Disney park with lots of large parking lots is exactly the experience almost every American city gives to residents today, and one of the major driving forces for this urban-sprawl and over supply of off-street parking are these minimum parking requirements. It’s a piece of law that is ripe for deregulation.
Minimum parking requirements are one piece that makes our towns and cities only navigable by car. Like the cars in the Cars universe are real and that’s who we built our cities for. Here’s a good example I found recently in Dallas showcasing this point. This area of the city has been engineered for car dependency.
I’m planning on attending my next local cities Planning and Zoning Board meeting to discuss minimum parking requirements. Below are my reasons for a town or city to remove their minimum parking requirements. As I mentioned previously, I’m in Thibodaux, LA, so some of the points below are specific to my hometown, but they can easily be applied to any other town or city.
- If you own land, you should have the right to use it to its highest and best economic use. Forcing businesses to devote their property to arbitrary sized parking lots is an infringement on reasonable private property rights. A land owner shouldn’t be limited to how much of that land can be used for actual economic uses under reasonable circumstances. 700 Saint Patrick Street is an example of an historic building that is limited on what it can become based on the lot size and the minimum parking requirements, even though historic neighborhoods are next to it. It’s currently vacant.
Minimum parking requirements make it difficult for developers and architects to design compact, pedestrian-friendly places. By requiring every new development to dedicate significant land to parking, sometimes larger than the footprint of the actual building, these regulations discourage walkability and higher-density development while encouraging an auto-oriented pattern of growth. These laws likely play a role in North Canal Boulevard being built up for car-centric commerce and having less development closer to more historically dense, walkable areas, which are illegal to develop today. Corporate and fast-food chains also use standardized building and parking prototypes to quickly deal with these poor zoning codes and minimum parking requirements. This causes residents to use cars for every trip irrespective of distance because alternatives are unsafe and require navigating large parking lots with no clear way to navigate as a pedestrian or biker. It also means corporations dominate the area, since they’re the only ones that can afford the parking costs. Think of the current strip mall area across from the Civic center, which I’ve written about.
The city already knows parking minimums don’t really work. No single formula can accurately predict the parking needs of every business, on every property, under every circumstance. A 2010 Thibodaux Zoning Review concluded that parking minimums are “sometimes too much and at other times too little.” It goes on to provide a case given by local officials where “a medical clinic that met the parking requirements as delineated in the city’s zoning ordinance; however, the tremendous number of patients visiting the clinic has far exceeded the allotted parking space.” If the required number is frequently wrong, it shouldn’t be mandatory and regulated by the city. The best people to decide how much parking is needed are individual businesses and developers.
Parking isn’t free. Minimum parking requirements increase the cost of buildings, consumes valuable land, causes environmental challenges such as flash flooding and runoff, and raises rents and commercial leases. These costs are ultimately passed down to consumers, tenants, and homeowners. It also disproportionately impacts smaller businesses, since large corporations have ample capital to build as much parking as a city requires. In addition, it increases costs for taxpayers, since more roads, water lines, and drainage systems are needed to support the urban sprawl parking requirements can create.
Minimum parking requirements lower the tax base per acre. Every square foot required by law to be devoted to surface level parking instead of productive development is a square foot that generates little tax revenue. For example, imagine we have two 1 acre lots of land in Thibodaux. One is a 1 story retail building with a large parking lot and another is a two story mixed-use building, where the ground floor is a coffee shop and barber shop, and the second floor apartments. The building has a shared parking lot that takes up a smaller footprint (pretend the apartments are near Nicholls and often occupied by students who don’t own cars). Both lots require roughly the same surrounding city infrastructure but the second lot is likely worth several times more than the first, increasing property tax revenue. Surface level parking is dead weight from a tax perspective, and since both roughly use the same city resources, the increase in tax revenue could be invested back into the surrounding area for things like improving sidewalks, building protected bike lanes and adding bike racks for those living in the apartments above.
Existing on-street parking regulations already address parking concerns. Much of the opposition to approving businesses that do not meet off-street parking minimums stems from fears that vehicles will park in front of residential driveways or on residential streets. However, blocking driveways is already prohibited under existing city ordinances. The issue is one of enforcement, not development standards. If illegal parking occurs, it should be addressed through enforcement of current laws. Some ways I can think of the city could alleviate resident concerns is by making sure curb space is treated as a managed resource by:
- Providing designated parking zones via curb paint, signage, and marking areas where parking isn’t permitted (e.g, near driveways).
- Implement time-limited, permit parking or even parking meters in sensitive residential areas.
- Allow “small-scale commercial by right” in residential areas, where certain uses are allowed without requiring special exceptions or parking studies, for businesses that neighborhoods can benefit from such as coffee shops, barbershops, and pet grooming. These types of local businesses would benefit from foot traffic from local residents.
- Invest in alternative modes of transportation in these areas such as building sidewalks and protected bike lanes along with limiting on-street parking, which would drive more foot traffic and decrease parking demand if done well.
Transportation investments and parking regulations work together to shape how people travel. Parking minimums subsidize one mode of transportation. The city is effectively subsidizing car ownership at a detriment to people who don’t or can’t afford a car, and these residents still pay for the subsidy. Local investments along with these laws almost guarantee car ownership is a minimum requirement to function in the community. Between Lafourche Parish and DOTD, approximately $11–12 million, on average, can be expected to be spent on road improvements each year relative to $90,000/year going toward giving people alternatives such as walking and biking. This creates a feedback loop where:
- Roads are widened and maintained to handle more cars and few safe alternatives are invested in and built.
- Everyone drives to places, irrespective of distance.
- Businesses feel pressure to add more parking.
- The city requires even more parking through minimum parking requirements, pushing parking supply even higher.
- More land is devoted to parking instead of homes or businesses, creating an urban sprawl.
Removing minimum parking requirements doesn’t mean eliminating off-street parking. Instead, it would simply allow the free market to decide how much parking is needed. Businesses are the best suited to decide how much parking makes economic sense for their property instead of requiring a predetermined amount by law. Research conducted by UCLA further strengthens the argument for removing minimum parking requirements. Shreveport has also proposed similar changes and numerous other real world examples exist today, where these arbitrary regulations were removed and ended up improving the city. Below is a map showing all the cities that have already removed minimum parking requirements from their city’s code.
I strongly believe removing minimum parking requirements is a form of deregulation that actually benefits residents, consumers, and small businesses. I’ll leave you with this amazing video done by Rollie Williams that covers this entire topic and is incredibly hilarious and entertaining even for a 30 min video on parking. I highly recommend spending the time to get through it if you care about your own local town and city.