The parking garage at Belmont and Sheffield costs $6/hr. or $9 for two hours. The parking meters in front of the garage only cost 25 cents/hr. Why do we practically give away the most convenient parking and how do these policies affect our city?

Parking policies can have a significant impact on our urban environment, deciding whether your neighborhood looks like Little Paris or Little Schaumburg. The city decides the minimum number of off-street parking spaces required for different kinds of development, from condos to bars, and sets the cost of on-street parking meters. These seemingly innocuous policies also influence developers’ decisions about what to build in your neighborhood, indirectly shaping your blocks.

As concerns about parking shortages have grown, neighborhoods have been complaining that new development is straining the limited parking supply. In response, some neighborhoods are downzoning in an effort to limit the number of new residents (and cars), or requiring that new developments include more than the city minimum requirement of one parking space per unit in exchange for zoning changes.

But we don’t really have parking shortages in the city – the same neighborhoods complaining about parking shortages often have parking garages that sit half-empty. We only have shortages of free parking, which is not something we should be in the business of providing anyway.

Often parking becomes an end in and of itself rather than a means to improve access to homes and businesses. Parking should be part of a larger strategy for access rather than treated as the only means of access.

Parking concerns also must be weighed with simultaneously increasing concerns about traffic congestion. If a neighborhood creates more parking, and all of those parking spaces stay relatively full, it goes without saying that there will be more cars in the neighborhood, and more traffic.

If our ultimate goal is to reduce automobile dependency in the region while increasing accessibility, then we need to stop encouraging people to drive by subsidizing parking through hard-handed zoning requirements and underpriced street parking. Instead, we need to focus our energy on improving our regional transit system and making our neighborhoods more welcoming places to walk.

Minimum parking requirements promote a car-dependent city. The garages created by the requirements often create dead spaces that make pedestrians feel unwelcome. But worse is the impact the requirements have on development. Developers are forced to build the parking regardless of the market demand, and the cost of the parking inflates the cost of housing in new buildings constructed under the requirements. The cost of parking also ends up included in the cost of goods and services. If you shop at a store that provides free parking, you may unknowingly be subsidizing other shoppers’ bad driving habits.

The cost of building one parking space per unit discourages developers from building smaller (and hence affordable) housing. If a developer owns a small lot and has the choice of building a 3-story building with 3 large three-bedroom luxury condos, or a 3-story building with 6 entry-level one-bedroom condos, you can bet they’d rather only have to pay for three parking spaces instead of six. The cost of accommodating six spaces on a small lot is exponentially greater than three, as the developer would most likely be forced to use an underground solution. This may explain why all the low-rise small-unit apartment and condo buildings are old – it’s no longer financially feasible to build this form of housing because of current zoning laws.

We need to let the market determine the parking prices and stock. Many home owners may demand parking, but also many will not. Letting the market decide would uncover the true costs of driving. It would reduce automobile use, relieve traffic so the roads are accessible to those who truly need them, and return our neighborhoods to places that serve people instead of machines.

How do we let the market take over though? Simply removing minimum parking requirements could be a mistake. The cost of street parking is currently so cheap that it would undermine the market for private off-street parking. This is where residents complain most. If street parking is severely below market, then developers will not build enough parking. The streets would become more clogged with people looking for their free space. This is why street parking must be in balance with the market. Developers can follow demand, but if residents can park for free somewhere within two blocks, they’re not going to demand a private space. This lack of a fair market is precisely why the city has to require developers to supply parking.

Chicago is currently considering a proposal to test market-based meter pricing in several neighborhoods. The way the program works is that the meters are priced with a target of keeping 15% of the spaces open so that people can readily find open parking spaces, without having to circle the neighborhood multiple times, contributing to traffic. The increased price also encourages visitors to consider other modes of transportation, encourages drivers to move on so other drivers can park and do their shopping, and is more effective than two-hour time limits. The increased revenue is split between the city and the local neighborhood, where it can be used to improve the pedestrian and transit environment.

Other cities and towns around the country are catching on to these solutions, which were popularized by Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking. It's time for Chicago to learn from their successes.

Learn more from the Metropolitan Planning Council or the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference.