Free workplace parking is a large incentive to drive to work.

This DC law is a first-of-its-kind municipal-level parking cash-out law. It is a potential model for other cities and will be carefully watched for its impacts.

Parking cash-out has been estimated, based on experience in California, to have strong potential for mode shift (of 10 to 12% reduction in drive-alone commuter trips).

The idea of making excessive parking space count towards the allowed floor area in zoning calculations is a promising approach that other cities should study. It increases the opportunity cost of parking in a context-sensitive way. This fascinating and market-friendly approach to discouraging excessive parking provision close to public transport deserves more attention.

São Paulo is among the largest cities to have completely abolished its costly parking mandates. It is impossible to ignore the precedent set by this enormous city with relatively high car ownership and 12 million people at the heart of a 23 million population metro area.

It is significant that this reform was part of an ambitious strategic master plan that focuses on people-oriented development and improved public and non-motorized transport.

Under this reform, the city refrains from promoting excessive parking supply. Another case in the Atlas will highlight another reform taken at the same time to more actively discourage excessive parking provision in buildings close to transit corridors.

Cities around the world, even in Europe, struggle to set the prices for residential on-street permit parking at anything even remotely approaching a market price or a rent covering price.

However, the City of Stockholm has unusually expensive residential on-street permit parking in which the prices are approaching those of long-term garage parking.

This seems to be the result of a consistent long-term effort to establish and operationalize the view that parking on public streets is a privilege provided to residents, and certainly not an obligation that the city must provide. Parking policy and pricing decisions have consistently put this view into practice.

I hope to update this case with more information on the politics of how this was achieved if I can find out more.

Japan fails to regulate small vacant-lot parking areas tightly enough, which causes various problems.

Nevertheless, the flap lock parking approach to pricing in Japan does demonstrate the feasibility of charging fees for parking even on very small parking areas (some as small as a single parking space).

This or similar systems might enable self-service pricing of small parking areas in many other countries too.

One possible application is for the small parking areas in front of small commercial buildings. This ‘frontage parking’ arrangement is common across Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, India, Colombia and probably many other countries too. This parking is often private (customers-only or tenants-only). Typically, each business controls the spaces directly in front of it. This is extremely inefficient. Flap lock parking might perhaps be part of a better approach to managing such parking spaces. This would probably require local government help with negotiations to enable solutions that benefit all of the businesses involved.

Preventing parking requirements from being adapted to each local context makes them even more harmful than they need to be.

The Philippines is not unique in having the national guidelines on parking requirements. However, the national parking minimums in the Philippines are unusually inflexible in allowing local governments no discretion to set lower or zero parking minimums to suit local contexts, even in locations where high parking minimums would be especially inappropriate.

This case also highlights a wider dilemma over local control versus pre-emption by higher levels of government. Although parking reformers cheer cases in which State or National governments restrain local governments from imposing excessive parking mandates (as in France for example) we are less happy when they impose excessive and inflexible parking mandates on local governments, as in this case.

This is a sophisticated and much-studied example of demand-based parking price setting (which is a key element of Professor Donald Shoup’s set of parking policy suggestions). Its success has been well-documented in San Francisco.

Demand-based parking pricing in San Francisco did not cease at the end of the SFPark pilot. In fact, it has been expanded and made permanent (but without the use of in-street parking sensors).

Success with on-street parking management has also probably played a role in emboldening the city to finally completely abolish minimum parking requirements across the city in early 2019.

Although the SFPark pilot faced some controversy initially, this soon disappeared. Demand-responsive parking price adjustments have generally proceeded without fuss or controversy since then.

This is a rare case of charging high, ‘market-based’ prices for on-street residential parking permits.

However, only NEW permits attract the market-based price. Holders of permits before the reform can continue to renew their permits at the old price (it was ‘grandfathered’). In addition, low-income residents are also eligible for the old price.

These features made the reform politically feasible. Nevertheless, because roughly 20% of legacy permits are NOT renewed each year, the number of permits at the grandfathered price is expected to decline quite quickly.

The key question for parking reformers is how was such an ambitious bicycle network expansion possible despite significant levels of parking removal?

The decision to proceed very quickly with a large network seems to have been important. The approach to public input was also a key. There was still much consultation and it resulted in design changes in various areas. However, the question in consultations was never WHETHER the bike network would go ahead. The question was always HOW exactly bike lanes would be added to the streets. Blocking bike tracks from being built was not an option on the table.

It is also possible that relatively effective parking management in high-demand areas may also have helped defuse parking-related opposition. But this is speculative and I would like to learn more.

This is Australia’s first example of demand-based parking price setting. The ParkInCentre Scheme also involves a relatively evidence-based approach to parking management. This reform has received little publicity. It deserves to be more widely known and to have its effects studied in more detail. It remains to be seen if the City of Gold Coast will extend this approach beyond its currently very limited geographical extent.

Ranchi was a pioneer in India of relatively high hourly on-street parking prices.

The creation of four zones to reflect different levels of parking demand is an excellent feature of this reform. This would have been more robust if it had included routine price reviews based on demand (occupancy for example).

The huge increase in revenue that was achieved suggested that most cities in India could be gaining much more revenue from on-street parking than they had been.

Unfortunately, the paper and cash based fee collection, problems with contracts, a lack of evidence-based price reviews, and a focus on revenue seems to have undermined the early healthy focus on parking management and led to political problems for the reform.

Perhaps, Ranchi could reap BOTH revenue AND street parking management benefits if the primary focus of the effort can return to parking management and if contracting policies, fee-collection methods and price-review practices can be improved.

There is a growing trend for higher levels of government (national or state/province) to restrict the ability of local governments to enact excessive parking requirements. This is a striking example. This bans all but small settlements from enacting any parking minimums at all. Please note that this does not require local governments to impose parking maximums. They can't require parking but they do not have to restrict parking.

Making it politically feasible to set high parking-permit prices is probably the most noteworthy feature of this set of parking permits reforms. Northwest Portland has found a combination of rules, price points, exemptions and incentives that won local support for permit prices that are much higher than in most other North American cases. On-street parking management in the area still has some way to go before problems with high parking occupancy rates are overcome but these reforms have helped.

Momentum to reform parking minimums and to consider parking maximums may be gathering across Latin America. Rio de Janeiro has joined Mexico City and São Paulo in enacting such reforms.

Parking maximums are controversial among parking reformers but if they are appropriate anywhere it is close to mass transit.

Cities, like Nairobi. which currently have a flat fee for all-day on-street parking, should certainly shift to time-based fees.

This mundane-seeming change is very important. A fee-per-hour can improve street parking conditions by discouraging long-duration parking in prime locations.

By contrast, flat-rate fees cannot play any useful parking management role and can only be about revenue (and they perform poorly at that too).

Despite some significant difficulties and problems, this seems to be a relatively successful implementation of on-street parking management, including fee collection, in a low-income country context.

It highlights that establishing such parking management is challenging but also rewarding.

This is another case of applying demand-based parking price setting in a relatively low-fuss and simple way.

The use of very clear data-based trigger points to aid decisions on where and when to step up or change parking management is an excellent model for other cities.

The reported lack of controversy (after initial debate) over this pricing approach in Auckland is also striking. At least anecdotally, based on this case and similar ones such as Seattle, Calgary and San Francisco, demand-based parking price-setting seems to succeed at greatly reducing civic unhappiness over on-street parking price adjustments.

This example of using information rather than regulation is relevant to the 'Shoupista' view that there is no need to regulate the supply of parking with parking minimums and that developers just need the right information and the right set of incentives to make judgements about parking in their projects that will be roughly in line with the wider public interest.

This example is best understood together with the page about London's parking maximums https://www.parkingreformatlas.org/parking-reform-cases-1/london-parking-maximums-(and-minimums-abolition)

Higher levels of government are increasingly interested in setting limits on the ability of local government to set excessive minimum parking requirements. This is an important example.

This policy sometimes gets confused with parking maximums. Limiting the level of parking minimums that municipalities may set is NOT the same as a policy of imposing parking maximums.

Montreal's parking tax is applied to all non-residential parking in the central area. It has apparently played a strong role in spurring the redevelopment of many surface parking lots in the area (although a careful study of the impacts and possible side-effects would be good to see).

This is a rare case of a workplace parking levy applying across a large area (a large proportion of the Nottingham metropolitan area).

The Nottingham WPL is so far reported to be strikingly successful. It was crafted to be part of a strategic transport package for the city.

Note that business sites in Nottingham do not face minimum parking requirements, so reducing parking supply is one option available to them.

This is a reminder that there are many cities where parking meters have never been used for on-street parking payments. Pre-paid parking coupons (or cards) are a parking payment method that has been widely used in Brazil, Malaysia, Ireland, Israel and Singapore. They have some advantages over older parking meters.

Today however, even low-income or middle-income cities should probably consider jumping straight to phone-based parking payments (plus payments via vendors as backup). Singapore is making this transition and Tel Aviv, Sao Paulo and Penang have already phased out coupons and shifted entirely to mobile payments.

This is a case of a parking levy that clearly needs improvements. It raises revenue but it is not clear that it changes motorist or parking-owner behavior in helpful ways. This is a reminder that not all parking levies are the same. Poorly designed parking levies may not achieve their stated objectives.

Hamer et al., 2012 conclude: “What is also clear is that a large proportion of those who park and commute to the Melbourne CBD do not pay for parking. Employers cover this as part of wider salary packaging arrangements. This is a significant barrier to the effective use of parking pricing as a means of reducing car congestion. To address the issue, policy could either deal directly with employers by targeting employment packaging arrangements or deal directly with the driver using taxation such as a road toll.”

Indonesian cities have on-street parking fees but are mostly unable to use them for any kind of effective parking management. Instead they merely collect a small amount of rent from on-street parking. This is done in an extremely leakage-prone way by contracting out very short sections of street to individuals who are given a permission letter to manually collect cash parking fees on that street section. There are numerous problems with this. The app described in this case suggests some effort to improve the situation but only a very small one.

This is a case of a large city where casual on-street parking payments are handled ONLY by mobile payment options, with no parking meter option. It shares this distinction with several other cities, including other cities in Israel and São Paulo and Shenzhen.

This experience should encourage cities that do not currently use parking meters, but which want in adopt or expand paid on-street parking, to consider avoiding parking meters completely and to jump straight to mobile-only payment systems.

This case suggests that it may be feasible for more governments to take steps to encourage employers to implement paid workplace parking.

This case of parking minimums abolition includes a safeguard, that certain development proposals are required to complete a TDM plan, which can result in the provision of off-street parking. This may have helped reassure doubters before the reform. However, it seems that this is probably not a case of retaining parking minimums in disguise.

Hess and Rehler (2021) offer a takeaway for practice from their study: "Our findings suggest mixed-use developers are likely to take advantage of the ability to provide less parking in highly accessible locations. Though many developers quickly pivot to the newfound possibilities of providing fewer parking spaces, others continue to meet earlier requirements. Cities of all types stand to benefit from undoing constraining parking policies of the past and allowing developers to transform parking lots to “higher uses.”

London (and England more widely) is a prominent case of a large city that has been almost completely without parking minimums, and has applied parking maximums, for more than 15 years now. The impacts of the reform on residential parking provision have been closely studies by Zhan Guo and his colleagues.

Without fanfare it appears that Dublin (and perhaps many or all cities in Ireland) has been applying parking maximums, rather than minimums.

However, the policy is interesting in that the goal seems to be not only to avoid excessive parking provision but also to avoid excessively low provision.

So, despite imposing maximums, the spirit of this policy therefore seems less relaxed about the possibility of low-parking buildings than a reform such as Edmonton's, where minimums have been abolished without imposing maximums.

Seattle's demand-based parking price setting is noteworthy for starting in a relatively simple (but good enough) implementation but then making incremental improvements over time.

This is a striking case of wholesale abolition of parking minimums across a whole car-dependent city.

The framing of the reform as "Open Option Parking" is noteworthy and may be worth emulating. Campaigners for a similar reform in Vancouver in Canada are already running with this framing.

It is also unusual in that the City of Edmonton with about 930,000 people accounts for a very large proportion of the metropolitan area of 1.3 million people. This reform therefore applies to most of the metropolitan area, including large areas that are car-dependent suburbia.

The 1970s residential parking maximums in Hong Kong were very unusual. Perhaps the only case of the deliberate use of parking maximums to constrain the growth of car ownership.

Although the policy was in place for less than 10 years, those years were a period of high economic and population growth. So the parking maximums policy seems to have been a key part of why Hong Kong has very high parking prices and modest parking minimums even now.

This case demonstrates the power of ordinary straightforward on-street parking pricing with enforcement and improved demarcation of spaces to make a huge difference to the parking and street conditions in a commercial/shopping area.

It is striking that it achieved results even though public transport in Jeddah is still extremely limited. This is a city of more than 4 million people that has only 6 bus routes and no urban rail system yet.

Parking change-makers in many cities have much to learn from the successful campaign waged in Mexico City to achieve this reform.

Also noteworthy is the inclusion in the reform of a new fee on developers parking provision between 50% and 100% of the maximum. This seems to combine well with the rather permissive maximums. It has the attraction for the city government of creating a new stream of revenue as part of the reform.

The campaign also very successfully reframed the issue: that off-street parking is not a way to mitigate on-street parking problems but is actually a CAUSE of problems that need to be mitigated.

This is a case of a city that had an extremely daunting set of parking problems but has managed to establish relatively strong parking management in a short period of time. This should encourage other cities that parking management can be rapidly improved.

This is a relatively simple but effective version of demand-based parking price setting, as recommended by Donald Shoup.

It is noteworthy for having time-of-day price variations and not just variations by location.

Price adjustments under this system seem not to have been controversial since the system was implemented in 2014.

Taipei's price setting approach for the city-owned on-street parking is striking for being an early example of Donald Shoup's recommended demand-based parking price setting approach. I am not sure when Taipei adopted this approach or whether they did so under the influence of Shoup's writings!

This is a rare Asian example of the use of parking maximums.

Imposing parking maximums in congestion-prone but transit-oriented business districts is a time-tested and effective policy in many countries and Seoul's case is an ambitious and interesting version of this powerful policy.

I would like to know more about any analysis of its impacts.

Many other places consider emulating this policy, including several states in India. However, there is low awareness that the policy works well mainly by being twinned with the ban on overnight on-street parking. Nevertheless, there may be ways to succeed with such a policy by twinning it with a robust on-street parking permit system.

This seems a useful example of a city with extremely chaotic on-street parking and a sense of parking crisis making large steps towards well-managed parking.

Have the early improvements been maintained and consolidated? It seems likely further improvements to on-street parking management are still needed. I would like to know more.

This is an important example of a city that has never adopted expensive in-street parking payments infrastructure such as parking meters. It previously used pre-paid paper coupons and has now shifted to a mobile-only payments system. It seems to be working well and may therefore be a model for many other cities seeking to avoid the high capital cost of installing parking meters or parking pay stations.

It is not widely known outside Singapore that car owners in public housing in Singapore pay at least S$960 per year (and usually more) for home-based parking.

The unusual institutional arrangements in Makati CBD (where the Ayala corporation plays a prominent role) may make some aspects of MAPA difficult to replicate but it stands as proof that effective on-street parking management can be achieved even in middle-income countries where good governance is difficult to achieve.

Japanese parking minimums are less harmful than most. They are not an obstacle to infill development.

In combination with other policies, they have resulted in most neighbourhoods having much parking that is open to the public and that is provided on a commercial basis at market prices.

You may think that this 'light' approach to parking minimums is possible in Japan only because of excellent public transport and other policies that keep car ownership low. That may be so of the large cities. However, the same kind of parking requirements apply across the country, even in towns and small cities where car ownership rates are high (comparable to or higher than the rates seen across western Europe).

This is one of only a few cases of a whole large city that has been without parking minimums for more than 20 years now. It would be useful to have more detailed information on the results of this.

Note that on-street parking management was improved but it still has weaknesses. Furthermore, strong parking management is restricted to only a few districts and chaotic on-street parking situations are common in many parts of the city. But according to Jos Nino Notz, there is no political push of any significance to try to reinstate minimum parking requirements.