There are roughly one billion parking spaces in the United States. That is more than three parking spots for every registered vehicle in the country. Laid end to end, America's surface parking lots would cover an area larger than Connecticut. And yet every Saturday afternoon, you will still hear someone in a suburban Target complain that there's nowhere to park.
This is not an accident. It is the logical result of seventy years of policy choices that prioritized the storage of automobiles over the needs of human beings. And it has cost us far more than we realize.
The Origin Story Nobody Asked For
The modern parking minimum was born in the 1950s, when traffic engineers began inserting requirements into municipal zoning codes that mandated a specific number of parking spaces for every new building. A restaurant needed one spot per four seats. A church needed one per three seats. A bowling alley needed five spaces per lane. The numbers were not derived from rigorous study. They were copied from one city to the next like a chain letter nobody questioned.
Donald Shoup, the UCLA economist who has spent his career dismantling the logic of parking policy, calls this "a fertility drug for cars." When you mandate free parking everywhere, you get more driving, more sprawl, and more demand for parking. The cycle feeds itself.
By the 1970s, most American cities had baked these requirements so deeply into their zoning codes that no one could build a corner store, a dental office, or a four-unit apartment building without also constructing a sea of asphalt around it. The result is the landscape we inherited: strip malls marooned in parking deserts, downtown blocks where the lots outnumber the buildings, and neighborhoods where walking anywhere feels like an act of civil disobedience.
The True Cost of "Free" Parking
Parking is never free. Someone always pays for it. The question is who, and how much.
A single structured parking space costs between $25,000 and $50,000 to build. Surface lots are cheaper per space—around $5,000 to $10,000—but they consume vastly more land. In Houston, surface parking covers roughly 30% of the downtown core. In Des Moines, it is closer to 40%. In some smaller cities, the percentage is grotesque.
These costs get bundled into everything. Your rent is higher because your landlord had to build parking you may not use. Your groceries cost more because the supermarket allocated half its property to an asphalt plain. Healthcare costs absorb the construction of hospital parking garages. According to Shoup's estimates, the subsidy for "free" parking in the United States exceeds $500 billion per year—more than the defense budget at the time he calculated it.
And that is just the financial cost. The environmental arithmetic is equally damning. Impervious asphalt prevents rainwater absorption, intensifying urban flooding. Dark surfaces create heat islands that push summer temperatures 5-8 degrees Fahrenheit above surrounding areas. Stormwater runoff carries oil, heavy metals, and tire particulate directly into waterways. Every acre of parking lot is an acre that could have been housing, a park, a business, or simply permeable ground.
The Cities That Got It Wrong
Los Angeles is the canonical example, but it is too easy a target. Consider instead Jacksonville, Florida, where surface lots dominate the downtown to such a degree that the city feels abandoned even during business hours. Or Oklahoma City, which in the 1970s demolished entire blocks of historic buildings to create parking for commuters who then fled to the suburbs anyway. The lots remain. The buildings do not.
Hartford, Connecticut tells a particularly bitter story. Once a prosperous insurance capital, Hartford razed its downtown in the mid-twentieth century to accommodate highways and parking. Today, nearly 50% of the downtown land area is devoted to parking or highway infrastructure. The tax base collapsed. The city has never recovered.
Even cities that should know better continue making the same mistakes. Nashville has experienced a building boom in the last decade, yet new developments still allocate enormous footprints to parking structures—structures that will be functionally obsolete within twenty years as ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles reduce private car ownership.
What the Rest of the World Figured Out
Tokyo has more cars per capita than most American cities. It also has almost no free parking. The difference is that Japan requires proof of a parking space before you can register a vehicle—a policy that puts the cost of storage on the driver rather than on society. The result is a dense, walkable city with extraordinary public transit and virtually no surface lots blighting the urban fabric.
Amsterdam famously removed 10,000 on-street parking spaces over the past two decades, replacing them with bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and public plazas. Property values adjacent to the converted spaces went up, not down. Retail activity increased. The apocalypse that parking defenders predicted never materialized.
Seoul demolished an elevated highway and its associated parking infrastructure to daylight the Cheonggyecheon stream in 2005. The restored waterway became the centerpiece of urban renewal that increased surrounding property values by 30% and reduced the urban heat island effect measurably.
Mexico City eliminated parking minimums citywide in 2017. Since then, developers have built more housing units per project, commercial ground floors have expanded, and transit ridership in affected corridors has grown.
These are not utopian fantasies. They are policy choices made by cities that decided car storage was not more important than human habitation.
The Parking Reform Movement in America
Something is finally shifting. Since 2020, more than fifty American cities have reduced or eliminated parking minimums, including:
- Minneapolis eliminated minimums citywide in 2021
- San Jose followed in 2022, becoming the largest city in the U.S. to do so at the time
- Austin dropped minimums near transit corridors
- Anchorage, Alaska, of all places, removed its parking requirements in 2023
- New York State passed legislation allowing cities to opt out of minimums
The Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit that tracks these changes, reports that reform is accelerating. In many cities, the push comes not from urbanist ideologues but from developers and affordable housing advocates who have done the math: eliminating two parking spaces from a small apartment building can reduce construction costs by $50,000 to $100,000, savings that translate directly into lower rents or additional units.
But reform faces fierce opposition. Neighborhood groups, accustomed to abundant free parking, treat any reduction as an existential threat. City council members fear the political backlash of "taking away" parking. The rhetoric is always the same: "Where will people park?" As if the answer were not self-evident in every city that has managed to function without mandating three spaces per apartment.
What a Post-Parking America Could Look Like
Imagine downtown Hartford with its parking lots converted to mixed-use buildings—ground-floor retail with apartments above. Imagine Jacksonville's waterfront freed from asphalt, with parks and promenades connecting neighborhoods that have been severed by surface lots for decades. Imagine the tax revenue, the foot traffic, the life that would return to these places.
This is not speculation. It is what happens every time a city converts parking to productive use. The results are so consistent they have become boring to urbanists: more tax revenue per acre, more economic activity, lower infrastructure costs, better environmental outcomes, and—counterintuitively—less traffic congestion, because walkable places generate fewer car trips.
The parking lot is America's most honest monument. It tells the truth about what we chose to value: the convenience of the automobile over the vitality of our communities. Every surface lot is a confession that we preferred easy storage to good design, and that we were willing to destroy extraordinary places to achieve it.
The question is no longer whether parking minimums should be eliminated. The evidence is overwhelming. The question is how quickly we can undo the damage—and whether we have the political courage to tell drivers that the era of subsidized car storage is ending.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth: every parking space we mandate is a home we do not build, a business we do not open, a tree we do not plant, and a neighborhood we do not create. For seventy years, we chose the parking space. It is time to make a different choice.