Unneeded parking requires expensive maintenance. It raises the cost of serving spread-out homes and business with infrastructure. It creates runoff and flooding problems. It makes cities less walkable by requiring walkers to traverse a wasteland of parking to get anywhere. It constitutes a colossal subsidy to those who drive cars, at the expense of anyone who doesn’t.

Our parking glut is perhaps never more obvious than in a big-box shopping plaza on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Why is that? Because for decades, we’ve been told, “We need to make sure stores are providing enough parking for the busiest shopping day of the year.”

Let’s even overlook for a second the dubious nature of this standard, which we don’t apply to any other privately-produced good or service. Even if we ignore that question of whether building for peak demand makes economic sense, it turns out that we build for greater than peak demand. Most local governments require stores to provide far more parking spaces than will actually fill up on Black Friday, let alone any other day.

Don’t believe us? Go count for yourself this Friday—oh, and take your camera along, and share your findings on social media with the hashtag #BlackFridayParking.

The Movement to End Parking Minimums is Growing

A growing number of cities and towns are coming to the realization that they don’t need these counterproductive laws on their books, and are repealing them. We’ve profiled successful such efforts before in cities including Hartford, Buffalo, Portland, and even small towns like Sandpoint, Idaho. We’ve also described exactly how parking minimums are so prohibitive for small-scale businesses and other buildings that they make great walkable neighborhoods effectively illegal to build or replicate today, in places from Pocatello, ID to Marietta, GA.

There are very few policies we’re willing to go out on a limb and suggest are universal. But this is one. No city or town, of any size, should have parking minimums on its books.

Notice that we didn’t say no city or town should have parking. There is nothing wrong with a business opting to provide parking for its customers, or a residential building providing it for its residents. But those businesses are perfectly capable of assessing their own need for parking, and weighing it against the other, potentially more valuable things they might do with the same land. Only when parking is not mandated can we do that weighing, decide what it’s actually worth to us, and price it accordingly.

A skeptical city council person or staffer, faced with a policy proposal like “Let’s get rid of our parking minimums,” almost always has at least this one question before hopping on board: Where else has this worked?

That question is the reason that we maintain a crowd-sourced map of cities that have made significant progress toward eliminating their parking requirements, or have scrapped them entirely. We’re sure it’s woefully incomplete, so please don’t hesitate to submit updates or corrections here.

Nonetheless, we think our map shows that this is a significant, growing movement. Here’s the map: