Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

Look at any city, suburban, or rural zoning code, and you will see page after page of rules about parking. Of the six hundred or so land uses that we planners have managed to identify, each has its own minimum parking requirement.13 Shoup documents how these requirements have often been generated from a bare minimum of data and can bear little resemblance to reality.14 A gas station requires 1.5 spaces per nozzle. A bowling alley requires 1 space per employee, plus 5 spaces per lane. A swimming pool requires 1 space per twenty-five hundred gallons of water.● These requirements are then passed from city to city and town to town,15 almost always resulting in the same outcome: too much parking. How much? In 2010, the first nationwide count determined that there are half a billion empty parking spaces in America at any given time.16 More to our purposes, a 2002 survey of Seattle’s Central Business District found that, during times of peak demand, almost four out of ten parking spaces were empty.17 This condition of oversupply occurs most often in central cities, and is typically the result of downtowns importing zoning standards from the suburbs, where no alternatives to driving exist.