The High Cost of Free Parking

Booked on Planning

To summarize an 800 page book in three points, cities should charge the right price for curb parking (the lowest price that maintains one to two open spaces), spend the revenue on the neighborhood with upgrades like planting trees, cleaning and upgrading sidewalks, providing transit passes, and remove off-street parking requirements. If we stop to think about the parking situation, we will realize we have been designing cities to accommodate cars for decades, instead of designing cities for the people living in them. As the author Donald Shoup points out however, planners are adept at pivoting to change course in a relatively short time. We have ample resources with all the surface parking lots in our communities to reclaim for housing and other much needed development. We should reconsider what’s the highest and best use of the curb lane, economically speaking, and often the answer is not parking. When approaching parking from an economic position, it is easy to make the argument that free parking is a drain on cities not just financially, but environmentally as well.

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