The End Days of Parking Requirements

At least five states, including North Carolina, are taking kill shots in 2025

cartoon via the Parking Reform Network

By Aaron Lubeck.

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Imagine if the government forced every new apartment to include a free horse stall. Or boat stall. Or made restaurants build extra root cellars that no one actually wanted or needed. Sounds absurd, right? But that’s exactly what cities have been doing for decades with mandatory parking requirements.

But there is good news on the horizon. After parking requirements dictating American land development forms for more than half a century, there are now rumblings in state legislatures across the country that this is all coming to an end—and it’s primarily due to the leadership of a wonky UCLA planning professor, who passed away last month.

SHOUP (THERE IT IS)

Donald Shoup, the world’s leading parking reformer, spent 40 years exposing this basic scam: cities require developers to overbuild parking, subsidizing car ownership at the expense of everything else—housing, walkability, small businesses, the environment. The town claims victory by seeming to get something for nothing just by demanding compliance with these extremely technical and specific codified standards.

But Shoup proved that there’s no science behind it. Zero.

Shoup proved the numbers were made up—pseudoscience cloaked in credentialism and code.

…Planners are winging it. Planners are not oracles who can divine the demand for parking. I have never met a city planner who could explain why any parking requirement should not be higher or lower. To set parking requirements, planners usually take instructions from elected officials, copy other cities’ parking requirements, or rely on unreliable surveys. Parking requirements are closer to sorcery than to science.

Dr. Donald Shoup, The Pseudoscience of Parking Requirements