Urban planners typically set minimum parking requirements to meet the peak demand for parking at each land use, without considering either the price motorists pay for parking or the cost of providing the required parking spaces. By reducing the market price of parking, minimum parking requirements provide subsidies that inflate parking demand, and this inflated demand is then used to set minimum parking requirements. When considered as an impact fee, minimum parking requirements can increase development costs by more than 10 times the impact fees for all other public purposes combined. Eliminating minimum parking requirements would reduce the cost of urban development, improve urban design, reduce automobile dependency, and restrain urban sprawl.

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Urban planners typically set the minimum parking requirements for every land use to satisfy the peak demand for free parking. As a result, parking is free for 99% of automobile trips in the United States. Minimum parking requirements increase the supply and reduce the price ± but not the cost ± of parking. They bundle the cost of parking spaces into the cost of development, and thereby increase the prices of all the goods and services sold at the sites that oer free parking. Cars have many external costs, but the external cost of parking in cities may be greater than all the other external costs combined. To prevent spillover, cities could price on-street parking rather than require o-street parking. Compared with minimum parking requirements, market prices can allocate parking spaces fairly and eciently. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.How can a conceptual scheme that one generation admiringly describes as subtle,¯exible, and complex become for a later generation merely obscure, ambiguous, and cumbersome?Thomas KuhnUrban planners set minimum parking requirements for every land use. These requirements typically ensure that developers will provide enough spaces to satisfy the peak demand for free parking. This article examines: (1) how urban planners set parking requirements, (2) how much the required parking costs, and (3) how parking requirements distort the markets for transportation and land. As a way to eliminate this distortion, I will propose that cities should price onstreet parking rather than require o-street parking.

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