Harmful minimum parking requirement regulations

See Donald Shoup, a Parking Guru Who Reshaped the Urban Landscape, Dies at 86: An economist at UCLA, Shoup said free parking carries a high cost, which is borne by everybody by Jon Mooallem of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"Shoup took special aim at the harms of “off-street minimum parking requirement” regulations, whereby municipalities compel developers to include a precise, minimum number of spots dictated by their building’s specific use. Planners lay out these requirements in exhaustive and meticulous tables, but Shoup discovered they were merely “pseudoscience” without any rational or solid empirical basis. In a 1999 paper, “The Trouble with Minimum Parking Requirements,” Shoup scoffed at the notion that “[w]ithout training or research, urban planners know exactly how many parking spaces to require for bingo parlors, junkyards, pet cemeteries, rifle ranges, slaughterhouses, and every other land use.” In fact, those he surveyed confessed they often just copied the requirements of surrounding communities.

Shoup compared the practice to bloodletting and treating wounds with lead—“a poison prescribed as a cure.” The consequences were corrosive: creating all that space for parking pushed buildings apart, decreasing density, making neighborhoods less hospitable and walkable. Plus, it was phenomenally expensive to build. (Estimates have put the cost of a single aboveground space at $20,000 or more—and much higher for underground spots.) The cost of that “free” parking rippled through a city, raising the costs of living in those buildings, renting those storefronts and shopping at those stores."

[Mandates for free parking] "stemmed from fear that people wouldn’t live or shop in an area that didn’t have enough parking. But Shoup demonstrated that fear was more of a superstition, based on a misapprehension about parking itself. “Most people think parking behaves like a liquid,” he wrote. “If the parking supply is squeezed in one place, cars will park somewhere else. But parking behaves more like a gas. The number of cars expands to fill the available space, and more parking leads to more cars.” (Mandates for free parking was in the print version)

When parking spots were free, people knocked themselves out trying to claim one—a phenomenon Shoup called “cruising for parking.” In one study, Shoup and his students made 248 car trips into Los Angeles’s Westwood Village and found they had to circle the block 2.5 times on average before finding a spot. Extrapolating out, this meant Angelenos were driving an extra 950,000 vehicle miles a year, within just that 15-block area, enough to make 36 trips around the earth. (Emulating his work, the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives asked every driver stopped at a red light in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn where they were going. Forty-five percent were simply looking for a place to park.)"

"Shoup’s policy prescriptions were straightforward: Get rid of minimum parking requirements; bring the price of on-street parking in line with demand, enough to maintain one or two empty spots on every block; and funnel the resulting revenue into upkeep and other public services for the immediate area, creating what Shoup called a “parking benefit district,” to bring residents and local businesses on board."