It might seem like a minor victory, but for drivers, the quiet thrill that comes from finding a free car park can prove deeply satisfying.

Particularly if you've been circling the same suburban street or jostling for space in an already-crowded shopping centre for hours.

But free parking isn't necessarily 'free': there's an invisible, underlying cost.

It's priced into our housing, business, and development, and also has an impact on the environment.

And it affects everyone — even if you're not a car owner.

With attempts at improving parking models — both in Australia and overseas — yielding varying levels of success, how can we reconfigure the high cost of free parking?

Dude, where's my free car park?

Experts say the fallacy of 'free' parking is making cities more expensive ( Wikihow )

It isn't just that we want a free car park — we've come to think we're entitled to one, too.

"You're never satisfied with the amount of car parking that's there," Rebecca Clements, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, tells RN's The Money.

Drivers will often complain about parking if it's not "exactly right", she says.

"It has such a psychological effect on people that goes very, very deep," she says.

And it's changing how we approach development and urban planning.

"Everybody wants to park free, including me … that will never change," says Donald Shoup, an expert in urban planning from the University of California.

"But I think that we have elevated free parking as an ideal as to how to build cities.

"We've converted a desire to park free into a planning doctrine where nothing new can be built unless it has ample parking."

This fallacy of 'free' parking is making cities more expensive — even though we might not necessarily know it.

"One of the things about car parking is that it's often very invisible to us despite how incredibly ubiquitous cities in our cities," Ms Clements says.

"We've got a lot of indirect and direct costs. We often just don't know that they're there."

The desire for free parking is ingrained in drivers — and it's affecting urban planning. ( Getty: Simon McGill )

Professor Shoup agrees.

He sees cities where "everybody happily pays for everyone else's free parking" as a "fool's paradise".

"Just because a driver doesn't pay for parking doesn't mean the cost goes away," he says.

"It's still there. Somebody has to pay it. And that somebody is everyone."

When free doesn't mean 'free'

Those costs are bundled into everything from housing and rent to developments, and even general goods and services.

"Land is expensive everywhere and when we don't charge for parking, the cost of parking spaces are not going to evaporate," explains Eren Inci, a professor of economics at Sabanci University in Turkey.

"[The costs] are first going to be embedded in the leasing contracts, in the rents of shops and via that, they will get into the price of everything."

So even if you don't have to pay for parking at the shopping centre, you'll likely pay for it elsewhere: at the cashier.

There's a similar impact when it comes to housing, he says.

Free on-street parking is priced into housing costs, experts say. ( Getty: Ingrid Hendriksen )

"If you don't pay for street parking directly, the parking costs will bundle into the housing prices and you will still pay for that," Professor Inci says.

"Let me put it differently: if parking is cheap, housing will be more expensive.

"If parking is cheap at the shopping mall, goods and services at the mall are going to be more expensive."

Ms Clements says this is driving inequality.

"Generally speaking it's making our cities much more expensive, much less equitable and much less efficient than it needs to be," she says.

At the same time, she says greater reliance on car parking affects the urban environment.

"All of the car parking that we have on our streets, as well as having urban areas that are dependent on car parking, this is keeping people in cars," she says.

But, she adds, it's also "keeping people who can't drive cars or don't want to drive cars from having good quality cycling and walking and public transport infrastructure".

A dependence on parking also leads to greater traffic congestion.

"One of the best studies was done in New York City where they interviewed drivers who were stopped at traffic lights and asked, 'Are you hunting for parking?'" Professor Shoup says.

"And about 40 per cent of them said they were hunting for a kerb parking space.

"So that is driving that people don't want to do. That is unwanted travel."

What can be done?

Professor Shoup says one measure to ease congestion and redistribute costs is to charge for on-street parking — and to set the price higher where there's more demand.

"A number of cities have been doing it: San Francisco and Los Angeles and Washington, DC," he says.

"They simply say that they're going to set prices based on the demand for parking. And they look at the occupancy rate of each block in the past three months, for example, and if the occupancy rate is low, they reduce the price.

"If the spaces were all full, they increase the price. And if one or two spaces are open, they keep the price the same … so it's based on demand, but it only changes once every two or three months."

The next thing to do is get rid of minimum parking requirements: the idea that the size of car parks should be tied to expectations around how many people will use it.

But these calculations are often "pulled out of thin air" or based on false assumptions, Ms Clements says.

"What it means in a lot of cases is that you're forcing every development, whether it needs parking or not to have parking rather than just letting developments and different users choose what they feel is right," she says.

In Melbourne, two local councils are making attempts to introduce new parking models in their areas — with entirely different outcomes.

Moreland Council is proposing to get rid of minimum car park requirements in activity centres, a move that Ms Clements describes as a "bold integrated transport strategy".

"In contrast, we've got Darebin Council, which was recently going through development of a car parking strategy," she says.

"They're a very similar council to Moreland Council in a lot of ways, but before that strategy was even taken to consultation, there was a political outcry and a local counsellor pulled the strategy.

"That's a dismal outcome because that means that all of the problems still remain."

Successfully changing attitudes towards free parking is tricky — but Professor Shoup says showing residents where the money is going is important.

"Key to solving the political problems with parking is to spend the meter revenue in the metered neighbourhoods, so everybody can see that this is what the parking meters are paying for," he says.

"That was pioneered in some cities in California that really were skid rows. There were wonderful buildings in terrible condition, that were popular in the 1920s but had fallen out of favour and didn't have much parking.

"So when they put in parking meters and spent all the revenue to repair the sidewalks and put in historic streetlights and give free wi-fi to everybody and pressure-wash the sidewalks twice a month and have Christmas decorations, the places took off.

"It was that people wanted the parking meters ... all the stakeholders wanted parking meters."

Whether or not this is achievable in every city is another question, but what is clear: getting people to re-examine how they approach 'free' parking is a useful first step.