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

by Jeff Speck

But businesses should be allowed to provide parking to lure customers, you might protest. Fair enough. But in America, such parking is not just allowed; it’s required. Some cities, like Monterey Park, California, not only require on-site parking, but insist that it be provided to visitors free of charge.11 These requirements are powerfully disruptive to the way cities function. A true master of the long-form analogy, Shoup describes the situation this way: If cities required restaurants to offer a free dessert with each dinner, the price of every dinner would soon increase to include the cost of dessert. To ensure that restaurants didn’t skimp on the size of the required desserts, cities would have to set precise “minimum calorie requirements.”