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High Cost of Free Parking
Cities like Vancouver are rethinking parking minimums as they try to meet climate goals, reduce traffic, and reallocate street space to other modes.
Sightline
With car ownership rates soaring, the fight for the city's free street parking spots is intensifying.
The New York Times
Auto-dependence starts with land use, and zoning codes ensure everyone pays for the privilege only available to some.
Vice
Free street parking in much of New York City means lost revenue, but it also affects the urban landscape and the quality of people’s lives. So how much is all that street space really worth?
Bloomberg Opinion
Road pricing has its faults as a revenue measure, but it needs to be compared to ten elements of the current system of paying for transportation, including hidden subsidies, says Joe Cortright, an urban economist with Portland-based City Observatory.
City Observatory
The state of Minnesota is disinclined, so far, to pay for the project, but St. Paul officials are looking to invest big money to replace a large parking garage in the downtown entertainment district.
Streets MN
Swaths of the city of Philadelphia could see increased parking minimums if a new version of a bill that failed in 2016 makes its way through City Council.
PlanPhilly
The city of Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia, has approved a controversial measure to begin charging for on-street parking in the city's downtown.
C-Ville Weekly
A new study presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting builds a strong case that parking causes driving.
CityLab
San Francisco's voters are continuing their trend of deciding complex and difficult planning issues at the ballot box. Last time it was height restrictions—this time it's parking.
SF Streetsblog
In yet another illustration of the high cost of free parking, Eric Jaffe reports on a study by two Virginia Tech transportation scholars that analyze all types of commuter transportation benefits and how they influence choice of commute mode.
CityLab
The Cleveland City Council this week approved a new ordinance that gives away city-owned parking for free for the Cleveland Browns to use—and charge for—during games. High cost of free parking indeed.
19 Action News
A bill in California that would reduce parking minimums in transit-oriented areas has drawn opposition from an unlikely group: the American Planning Association.
California Planning & Development Report
For those who missed it, Friday brought the end to the influential infrastructure focused blog -- The Infrastructurist
The Infrastructurist
Parking guru Donald Shoup writes for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, explaining why free markets and free parking go together.
Cato Institute
Blog post
Everybody knows that most, if not all, of downtown businesses' customers arrive by car. So it's intuitive to try to come up with a way to encourage drivers - who normally wouldn't venture downtown - to hop into their rides and cruise on down to Main Street to shop for wares. If we could do this, just think of all the new business we'd be stimulating! In continuing with this logic, it's also a given that it's impossible for would-be customers to actually get to downtown without the essential attaché to driving, gasoline. So, isn't it therefore intuitive to suggest that if cities were to give away a little bit of gas to each customer – you know, to kind-of thank them for their generosity - then customers would find an overwhelming incentiv
