Research during the 1980’s and 1990’s, led primarily by Professor Donald Shoup at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed that parking policies were undermining the economies of urban areas, hurting retail sales, and increasing traffic congestion. It was also shown that many suburban building codes required more spaces than needed unnecessarily increasing the costs of goods and services and creating pedestrian-unfriendly “dead space” around buildings.
Shoup and his colleagues noted that “bundling” the cost of parking with building leases required anyone who used or did business in a particular building to participate in subsidizing anyone who used the attached parking. “Unbundling” the cost of parking from building rents has emerged as a necessary first step in reforming the allocation and use of parking.
In New York City, there is growing concern that free parking in new residential buildings will cause a steep rise in car ownership and traffic congestion. In August 2008, the organization Transportation Alternatives issued an urgent report [3] calling for significant reform to city parking policy. Their recommendations include: eliminating or reducing minimum parking requirements in areas close to transit, prohibiting curb cuts for parking facilities on pedestrian-oriented streets, and reduced housing prices for car-free households.
The effect of New York's residential parking minimums is to concentrate parking in the most dense and transit-rich areas of the city, packing cars into neighborhoods that would otherwise be walkable [4]. "Everyone's trying to remake themselves into New York while New York is trying to make itself a more suburban environment," explains urban planning professor Rachel Weinberger
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