BEST urges relaxing parking minimums
Donald Shoup argues, “Minimum parking requirements subsidize cars, increase traffic congestion and carbon emissions, pollute the air and water, encourage sprawl, raise housing costs, exclude poor people, degrade urban design, reduce walkability, and damage the economy.”
Strong Towns explains, “Parking minimums are local laws that require private businesses and residences to provide at least a certain number of off-street parking spaces. These requirements are one of the most significant factors shaping how our cities are built and laid out. At Strong Towns, we believe that every community with mandatory parking minimums on its books should seek to abolish them. These rules are not only unnecessary: they are destructive of our communities’ financial strength and resilience. It’s time to put an end to parking minimum laws and allow our cities to become productive places again.”
As part of the City of Eugene’s efforts to legalize Missing Middle Housing, BEST urges eliminating or relaxing parking minimums. In testimony to the Eugene Planning Commission, BEST shared resources on why and how to do so.
“A community with middle housing is a place where people don’t have to circle in their car for hours looking for a parking spot, because they live close enough to the store to walk, or close enough to transit to take the bus.”
—BEST Safe Streets Coordinator Claire Roth to the Eugene Planning Commission, 11/16/21
Local efforts
- Park(ing) Day: Citizens transform parking area to raise awareness of space used by parked vehicles (Register-Guard, 9/17/21)
- Eugene Locals Celebrate ‘PARK(ing) Day’ & Call For Fewer Parking Spaces (KLCC, 9/17/21)
Other efforts
- CFEC RAC Meeting #7, Item 5: Parking and Electric Vehicle Charging Rules (Oregon Dept. of Land Conservation & Development, 8/11/21)
- Salem 2021 Unified Development Code (UDC) Update (Salem Planning Commission)
- Bend Comprehensive Plan and Bend Development Code to Implement HB 2001 (Bend City Council, 9/15/21)
Further reading
- How the Twin Cities Abolished Parking Minimums (And How Your City Can, Too) (Streetsblog USA, 9/2/21)
- Parking Requirements: Cheaper Driving for Costlier Development (Strong Towns, 5/26/21)
- How Parking Destroys Cities: Parking requirements attack the nature of the city itself, subordinating density to the needs of the car (The Atlantic, 5/18/21)
- Everyone Agrees California’s Parking Laws Are Bad for Cities. So Why Do Planners Like Them? (Slate, 5/13/21)
- Cities Need Housing. Parking Requirements Make it Harder (Laura Friedman and Donald Shoup, CityLab, 4/26/21)
- Surrendering Our Cities to Cars Would Be a Historic Blunder: Communities shouldn’t give back the street space that they reclaimed during the pandemic (Janette Sadik-Khan and Seth Solomonow, The Atlantic, 4/16/21)
- A DOT head calls parking minimums “absurd” (The Urbanist on Twitter, 4/2/21)
- The Hidden Costs of “Over-Parking” Our Cities (Sightline Institute, 1/5/21)
- Travis VanderZanden: It’s Time to Prioritize the Third Lane (StreetsBlog USA, 8/14/20)
- Series: Parking? Lots! (Sightline Institute, 6/5/13–present)
- Oregon Just Ended Excessive Parking Mandates on Most Urban Lots (Sightline Institute, 12/14/20)
- I’ve Seen a Future Without Cars, and It’s Amazing: Why do American cities waste so much space on cars? (Farhad Majoo, New York Times, 7/9/20)
- People Over Parking: Planners are reevaluating parking requirements for affordable housing (Jeffrey Spivak, APA Planning Magazine, Oct. 2018)
- How parking requirements hurt the poor (Donald Shoup in Washington Post, 3/3/16)
- Ending Parking Minimums (Strong Towns)
- Reinventing Parking
- Parking Today
- Topic: Parking Minimums (Planetizen)