Parking Reform Atlas

This paper addresses and extends upon the recent upsurge of interest in market-oriented reform of parking policy, which has been reinvigorated by the work of Donald Shoup. His market-oriented approach to parking policy is shown to be the more ambitious of two distinct challenges to the conventional supply-focused approach. The other is ‘parking management’. However, off-street parking markets and their post-reform dynamics have been neglected so far in proposals to deregulate the quantity of off-street parking. The paper highlights additional barriers to the emergence of off-street parking markets and several likely problems within them. Rather than suggesting the rejection of market-oriented parking policy, these findings are taken to imply a need for a more vigorous policy effort than has so far been called for. Achieving well-functioning off-street parking markets would require efforts both to actively foster such markets and to regulate to ensure their health. Deregulation would not be enough.