Parking Management: Innovative Solutions to Vehicle Parking Problems

The author of this article argues that planners’ conventional approaches to parking problems no longer work, and efforts to provide free and abundant parking contradict other planning objectives. The author provides a brief history of how parking standards were created in the past from demand studies performed in automobile-dependent locations. Close to two dozen strategies are identified that encourage more efficient use of parking resources, such as shared parking, more accurate standards, parking maximums, remote parking, and improved pricing methods. The author contends that huge savings can be achieved by reducing parking requirements, and cites Old Pasadena’s downtown area in southern California, Portland, Oregon’s Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District, and the Austin Parking Benefit District as examples.