Chrissy Mancini Nichols

From ride sharing and expanding public transit systems to the promise of autonomous vehicles, cities will likely need less parking in the future. The question: when and how do cities start to reduce parking requirements? Some cities have already started to reduce parking requirements, especially cities with alternative transportation options. We talked with Chrissy Mancini Nichols and Steffen Turoff of Walker Consultants about the pathway to reducing parking requirements.

“Some cities, especially those with ample transit and walkable neighborhoods, have implemented policies that either eliminate or reduce parking minimums or cap parking at a max,” Nichols tells GlobeSt.com. “For example, San Francisco has reduced parking requirements to meet transit and housing goals. Chicago has reduced parking requirements within a half-mile of a CTA rail station. Even in smaller markets, Fargo, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and other cities have eliminated parking minimums in downtown districts. Buffalo is the first city to completely eliminate parking minimums citywide. It did so to advance overall city goals.  We're waiting to see if others follow on a city-wide scale.”

Steffen Turoff

The trend toward reduced parking requirements has already begun, but there is no trend in geographic patterns. “Working across the country we have not seen a pattern emerge as cities reevaluate their parking policies because there is no one size fits all approach to parking requirements,” explains Nichols. “What works in San Francisco looks different in Champagne, IL. Right sizing parking must take a context sensitive approach. The good news is there are reliable and modern tools to make sure we build just the right amount of parking and more efficiently manage the existing parking supply—a cost saving solution to providing more parking.”

There are several ways that cities can accommodate a reduction in parking requirements. The first step is to regulate street parking for residents facing reduced in-building parking. “It is critical that any policy of reducing or eliminating parking minimums be combined with targeted on-street parking policies to eliminate street spillover,” adds Nichols. “Regulations such as parking pricing and time restrictions improve the overall operation of the parking system and ensures that valuable on-street parking spaces are available for visitors and other customers.”

Next, cities can also use a shared parking model to accommodate reduced parking requirements. This will reduce the need to build more parking by activating unused office or apartment parking at times of the day when the spaces typically sit empty. “Shared parking is a mechanism that leverages complementary land uses peak parking by allowing them to share those spaces, instead of building individual spaces for each use,” says Nichols. “This opens an opportunity to provide parking without building more parking spaces for customers, workers, residents, even delivery drivers. Allow shared parking and you get a cost-effective approach to address parking shortfalls, while increasing the capacity of each parking space in the system.  This opens more land for uses other than parking and reduces overall development costs, which can have the parallel effect of lowering rents.”

Using the cash flow from paid parking is another way to fund more transit projects, which in the long-term will accommodate reduced parking. “Implementing paid parking can also be leveraged to fund mobility options based on a city's transportation, economic, and sustainability goals,” says Nichols. “Parking meter revenue can fund bicycle, pedestrian, and transit related improvement and operations that decrease the need for car ownership, which ties back into reducing minimum parking requirements.”

While new technologies have created less of a reliance on cars, car ownership is still increasing, and while it is good for developers to look ahead, it may be too early to opt out of parking altogether. “Nationwide vehicle ownership by household has increased since 2006, likely the result of a stable economy and low unemployment rate. Further, given the suburbanization of poverty and jobs/housing/transit mismatch many workers, who don't have a transit option, rely on their car to get to work,” says Nichols.