How I Accidentally Became Obsessed with Parking

I’ve always been fascinated with why things are the way they are. Why is a giraffe’s neck so long? Why are the Rockies taller than the Appalachian Mountains? Why do planes only have two engines now when they used to have four? One of my favorite channels growing up was The History Channel, before it became dominated by reality television. I was in it for the history, damnit! It helped me understand why the world around me was the way it is today. As an adult who has traveled much more and seen how other people live, I started asking questions about my own hometown when my wife and I decided to move back to Louisiana. I started wondering why does Thibodaux, Louisiana – a charming city with a picturesque downtown along Bayou Lafourche – have so many parking lots, many of which are empty the majority of the time? It’s not like Thibodaux is unique in this regard, though. Parking lots are everywhere. I remembered riding my bike as a kid through large parking lots, while making the treacherous journeys that children in Thibodaux endure to do seemingly normal things like ride their bike to a friend’s house, but I never really questioned why they existed in the first place. It became something I thought about often: how these parking lots were negatively impacting this place. I had to find out why and I wasn’t sure where it would lead me. Three months later, my initial curiosity turned into something much larger. I’m now drafting a proposed amendment to Thibodaux’s zoning ordinance that would eliminate minimum off-street parking requirements citywide. What follows is my attempt to answer the question that first occurred to me while looking across those empty parking lots: why were they built in the first place? Along the way, that question led me into the history of zoning, the relevant history in Thibodaux, transportation policy, and urban planning – and ultimately to propose changing Thibodaux’s zoning ordinance.

If I wanted to understand why Thibodaux – and most American towns and cities – have so much off-street parking, I had to learn some history. Like any good History Channel episode, the story starts from the beginning, and the first question I needed to answer was: How did automobiles come to dominate city streets that once belonged to everyone?

I learned at the dawn of the twentieth century, as Henry Ford’s Model T helped bring the automobile to the masses, a battle was unfolding on America’s streets. The question wasn’t where cars should park – it was who the streets belonged to in the first place. The outcome would determine who public streets were ultimately designed to serve, pedestrians or – the new kids on the block – the automobile. When I look at the streets of Thibodaux today, the answer seems obvious. Cars won. But before the 1920s the automobile was seen as the intruder, depriving everyone else of their freedom to the street. Not the other way around.

People seeing a car as an intruder was as foreign to me as a service system where workers are paid a full living wage without tips (I’m looking at you, America). It seemed almost unimaginable to me at first, but early twentieth-century courts generally treated public streets as shared public spaces where pedestrians had long-established rights. That attitude is reflected in a 1919 opinion by New York police magistrate Bruce Cobb, who argued “if pedestrians were at their peril confined to street corners or certain designated crossings, it might tend to give selfish drivers too great a sense of proprietorship in the highway.”

New Orleans street cars from Know Your NOLA: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Streetcars (Part 1)

Most city dwellers in contrast to rural farmers walked or used other modes of transport, and the drivers who threatened them were disproportionately wealthy. Add to the fact traffic laws were still in their infancy, it was a recipe for conflict. Imagine a group of kids walking to school when the banker’s wife came barreling down that very same street, which didn’t have a posted speed limit.

Over time, automobile interests successfully shifted public opinion. They popularized terms like “jaywalker,” portraying pedestrians – not motorists – as the ones misusing the street. The kids in the street were now the ones in the way of the automobile. The cost of owning an automobile also dropped drastically. Cities now faced a new problem: where to store these automobiles. Public streets were becoming overcrowded, and curb parking was free, first come first service, and had no time limits. Naturally, employees usually occupied prime spots, leaving none for paying customers. If that sounds familiar, it’s basically how curb parking in downtown Thibodaux still works today (there’s also proven ways for the city to better manage this limited resource and it doesn’t include building more parking). The history of parking regulation is surprisingly rich. Eran Ben-Joseph’s From Chaos to Order: A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot provided me with an excellent overview. The biggest surprise wasn’t that cities wanted more parking. It was who they expected to pay for it. Instead of building and paying for enough parking themselves, cities increasingly required private property owners to provide parking on their own land. The result was a new development pattern that feels completely ordinary today where nearly every home, business, church, school, and restaurant is surrounded by its own dedicated parking lot.

One of my questions was now answered, but it raised another. How exactly does the law in places like Thibodaux mandate all these large parking lots? The answer lies in off-street parking minimums.

Imagine a small business owner wanted to lease an old historic building that used to be a hardware store to open a coffee shop. You can imagine this person being me. I’ve been telling my wife I think Thibodaux could use another local coffee shop, where it’s not weird to order just a double espresso, with no milk or sugar. Just espresso. I’ve even imagined where I’d put it: an old historic building near one of Thibodaux’s traditional neighborhoods, with sidewalks connecting nearby homes and on-street parking already available. Let’s call it Mocca Joe’s. Unfortunately, changing the building from a hardware store to a coffee shop triggers different parking minimums for “coffee shops.”

The number of spaces is determined by the square footage of the building and nothing else is taken into account – not the surrounding neighborhood, existing on-street parking, nearby businesses, sidewalks, whether many customers are likely to arrive on foot, or any other factor that would determine the real parking demand for the coffee shop. If the land use change requires more parking and space wasn’t already available on the property, I’d be forced to buy an adjacent lot to build more asphalt parking. Building more parking also means building the proper drainage to mitigate storm water runoff and the increased flash flood risk to the surrounding area, increasing costs further for my proposed coffee shop (it also increases the cost of storm water management for the city).

If a neighboring store had parking capacity and the other owner and I wanted to enter into a legal agreement to share parking, there would be further government mandated barriers. For example, Thibodaux requires the two businesses to be within 300 feet of one another, not taking into account pedestrian routes, and prove to the zoning board that their peak parking demand doesn’t overlap. At that point, opening a neighborhood coffee shop starts looking a lot less appealing to me. Not because people don’t want coffee, but because the city has quietly made it much more expensive to serve it.

Starbucks on the other hand can just come into Thibodaux, buy lots near Nicholls State University, build a big parking lot (they build big lots partly to avoid triggering these laws), and serve their coffee. The parking is free but it’s priced into everything else, even if I survive the bike ride there on the unprotected bike lane (the shoulder).

I learned that until recently almost every city in America had these minimum off-street parking requirements for an assortment of land uses in zoning ordinances. Thibodaux’s zoning ordinances require each developer and private property owner to build and maintain an expensive parking lot. For example, a funeral Home’s minimum is 1 space/4 chapel seats + 1 space/300 sf of office. I kept finding stranger things buried in the ordinance. As I kept reading, I found other regulations that made it remarkably difficult for long-established neighborhood businesses to survive. To illustrate how Thibodaux’s zoning code was and still is actively destroying cherished historic neighborhoods that have diverse, walkable urban landscapes and local businesses was the story of Tom’s Bike Shop & Lawn Mowers struggle to repair the store after Hurricane Gustav.

I recently rode my bike to the best neighborhood grocery store in town, L&N.

Tom’s Bike Shop & Lawn Mowers has been around forever. Located on N 7th Street behind the old Ice House (you can similarly thank draconian zoning laws for this building being vacant) in a historically walkable Thibodaux neighborhood. Just down the road is the iconic (at least to me) L&N grocery store. And a bit further The Place, Thibodaux’s only neighborhood bar that seems to have good food, too. I’d argue these types of businesses help create a sense of community. They do more good than harm.

I remember helping my friend bring his family’s lawn mower to Tom’s to get fixed. After Hurricane Gustav wiped out a sizable portion of his store he wanted to build it back bigger and better. The problem was the law wouldn’t allow it. He could only re-build it the exact same way, and even that was capped. You see, since Tom’s store existed before strict zoning districts, Tom’s business was grandfathered into the new C-2 (Single Family Residential) zone. Under traditional zoning codes, Tom’s store is considered a “non-conforming” business and can only maintain that status if it stays exactly the same way. Otherwise, it must abide by the strict zoning rules, triggering things like minimum parking ratios. In this case it was in a C-2 district, so it couldn’t even exist if it lost this status. Before the city allowed these non-conforming businesses to make repairs equal to 100% of the replacement cost of the building (they can’t make improvements to this day), non-conforming businesses were not allowed to make “renovations or ordinary repairs costing more than 10% of the building’s replacement cost.” The Planning and Zoning Commission at the time initially recommended raising it to only 75%, but former Councilman Chip Badeau shot that down since “using specific figures was arbitrary.” Sounds familiar?

If you haven’t noticed, many of Thibodaux’s local businesses are located within the Central Business District (CBD). This district is actually exempt from a lot of these ordinances, including minimum parking ratios. A 2014 zoning overhaul, which was partly the result of local residents’ frustration with a Planning and Zoning Commission’s proposed change to tighten parking ratios even more, established this new district and made the exemption. If parking minimums were supposedly so important, why had the city exempted Downtown? It’s simple: Thibodaux residents and city officials finally realized the historic area couldn’t exist with these laws. Downtown Thibodaux’s dense walkability is effectively illegal to develop today and would have not survived. That would be bad. Thibodaux uses the picturesque downtown area in promotional materials. Not the urban sprawl and large parking lots that dominate North Canal Blvd.

At this point I wondered if I was convincing myself these minimum parking ratios were bad. Maybe they existed for good reason? I put it off for a while but I knew what I had to make myself do next: read academic literature. Not surprisingly what I found was numerous academic, economic, and urban planning studies that confirmed what I suspected. Numerous studies have shown that these mandates are typically based on limited or outdated data rather than actual demand, causing cities to require substantially more parking than many businesses and developments need. They result in higher construction costs, higher housing and commercial rents, more impervious surfaces that contribute to flooding, reduced walkability, and increased car dependency. Rather than preventing parking shortages, many of the researchers argued that cities should allow the market to determine parking supply while managing on-street parking through pricing or time limits where necessary. The free market for parking is a more efficient one than the one where the government mandates a surplus. It does more harm than good. I also learned about a new trend. Many cities, big and small, across the country were beginning to remove minimum parking ratios from zoning ordinances. North Carolina actually banned them at the state level not that long ago.

The only "safe" way to cross N Canal Blvd. There's no crosswalk but a sidewalk on one side.

Once I finished reading my last research paper on minimum parking ratios, I knew I completed my transformation from a man who occasionally wondered about parking lots to a man completely obsessed with parking. I had to do something about it or at least try. All the months of research and learning culminated in my proposed amendment to Article 7 of the City of Thibodaux Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance to reform the City’s minimum off-street motor-vehicle parking requirements and provide greater flexibility in how parking demand is accommodated. I’ve contacted the Planning and Zoning Commission with my proposal and if I give them the $30 fee, I’ll get a chance to appear before the committee with my case and amendment. Will I be successful? Probably not the first go around, but I truly believe in making Thibodaux a better place and removing parking minimums will do just that. Cities aren’t accidents. They are shaped and molded by policy and laws. They might just seem like arbitrary legal documents, but making sure they promote the city I believe most people wish to live in matters. Below is my full amendment to remove Thibodaux’s minimum parking requirements citywide.

Amendment to Article 7

Summary

I’m requesting that the Planning and Zoning Commission consider an amendment to Article 7 of the City of Thibodaux Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance to reform the City’s minimum off-street motor-vehicle parking requirements and provide greater flexibility in how parking demand is accommodated. The proposed policy change is to eliminate mandatory minimum off-street motor-vehicle parking ratios citywide while retaining appropriate regulations governing parking safety, accessibility, design, drainage, and other legitimate public impacts. This amendment aligns with the 2024 SCPDC Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan that recommends removing parking minimums. In addition to removing these minimum parking ratios, the proposal would facilitate and encourage shared-parking agreements, allowing for more efficient use of existing and underutilized off-street parking facilities, such as The Foundry on the Bayou’s underutilized parking lot as an example.

Goals

The broad goal of this reform is to reduce regulatory incentives for automobile-oriented, low-density development; support more compact and walkable development; improve conditions for walking and bicycling; and reduce unnecessary costs and land requirements that can disproportionately burden small businesses. The current purpose for Article 7, Section 701 for the City of Thibodaux Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance states: The off-street vehicle parking, bicycle parking and loading regulations of this Ordinance are intended to provide accessible, attractive, secure and well-maintained off-street parking and loading areas, provide the appropriate number of spaces in proportion to the demands of the proposed use, increase public safety by reducing congestions of public streets, and encourage the use of alternative modes of transportation.

The current stated goal is to not necessarily require more parking but instead provide the appropriate number of off-street parking spaces based on actual demand. The current fixed city-wide off-street parking ratios are based on square footage alone, and research has shown this is a poor predictor for parking demand. For example, one analysis of restaurant parking data found that floor area explained only approximately 4% of the variation in observed parking demand. Therefore, they conflict with the stated goals above. If the purpose of the ordinance is to provide the appropriate number of spaces in proportion to the demands of the proposed use, then the City’s regulations should allow parking supply to respond to actual demand rather than requiring the same minimum ratio for similar uses regardless of location. Businesses and property owners are generally better positioned than a citywide zoning ratio to determine how much off-street parking a particular use requires, and the city is best positioned to manage public curb space and address parking-related impacts on public streets, sidewalks, and other public infrastructure. The city should not require every private development to provide enough off-street parking to eliminate all possible demand for public curb parking. Further, another purpose for Section 701 is to “encourage the use of alternative modes of transportation.” As previously stated, these fixed ratios can require more parking than is needed for a particular use or location, while failing to account for differences in actual demand. In practice, it often causes an oversupply of off-street asphalt parking, creating urban environments that actively discourage alternative modes of transportation such as walking or biking. The current code contradicts the stated purpose. Therefore, I’m proposing this amendment so the stated code can more appropriately reflect the current purpose and broad goals above.

Proposed Amendment

Based on the goals above, the proposed amendment would revise Article 7 of the City of Thibodaux Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance. The amendment would remove minimum off-street motor-vehicle parking ratios but would not eliminate regulations governing the design, safety, accessibility, drainage, circulation, or maintenance of parking facilities. Specifically it would:

1. Section 704(A)

   • Delete Table 7.1 and the provisions requiring a specific number of parking spaces based on land use. The city should allow parking supply to respond to the demands of individual uses and the characteristics of the surrounding area.

   • Retain design and safety regulations. For example, this amendment isn’t proposing to remove regulations for space dimensions, accessibility parking, driveway access, drainage, etc.

   • Remove language allowing the Zoning Administrator to determine parking requirements for unlisted uses. Update the language for the section to contain language such as:

     Off-street vehicle parking may be provided at the discretion of the property owner or developer. Where parking is provided, it shall comply with the applicable design, accessibility, drainage, landscaping, circulation, and safety requirements of this Article.

2. Section 704(D)

   Since parking minimums will be removed, the 125% of the minimum will need to be updated.

3. Section 704(E)

   This section currently exists to allow businesses to satisfy the minimum parking ratios. Since the goal of this proposed amendment is to encourage property owners to voluntarily share parking facilities where doing so improves land efficiency, reduces unnecessary pavement, and minimizes storm-water runoff, the proposed amendment to this section would be:

   • Remove the 300-foot limit for parking agreements, replacing it with something such as:

     Shared parking facilities should be connected to participating uses by a safe, continuous pedestrian route. The Zoning Administrator may consider the quality and safety of the pedestrian connection when evaluating whether a shared parking arrangement serves the intended use.

   • Allow for off-street parking facilities to be shared among two or more uses through a voluntary written agreement between the participating property owners.

   • Update the language to encourage shared parking agreements where it reduces unnecessary impervious surface, promotes more efficient use of existing parking resources, and supports compact, walkable development.

   • Update the language to make sure where shared parking is provided, the parking area is connected to each participating use by a safe and reasonably direct pedestrian route.