By Chris McCahill
Under a new law in North Carolina, most cities and towns will not be allowed to set minimum parking requirements for new developments or changes in building use. This change comes amid a growing recognition that burdensome parking mandates worsen traffic, drive up development costs, and sometimes stifle development altogether. This shift opens the door for transportation agencies to harness parking management as a valuable tool for taming traffic and improving transportation options.
Many U.S. cities have already eliminated their parking requirements, and some states have limited local mandates or required them to be more flexible, as the Parking Reform Network has documented. North Carolina’s law covers all building types statewide, except in coastal counties.
Proponents of the law point to the high cost of parking construction as a barrier to housing and economic development. But our long history of excessive parking mandates has shaped the nation’s landscape and mobility options—forcing many people into costly, car-dependent lives.
Minimum parking requirements rose to prominence in local zoning codes throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Planners, reacting to a surge in car ownership, treated parking shortages as the main problem to solve, not knowing how that would reshape cities and towns. Parking requirements became so ubiquitous that developers almost anywhere in the U.S. had to provide enough parking to cover whatever policymakers believed would be needed on the busiest day of the year. This spread shops and offices apart, each surrounded by a sea of asphalt and accessible only by car. It also made it harder to redevelop or repurpose older buildings in walkable, transit-oriented downtowns.
Even in the most transit-friendly places, parking remains one of the biggest factors influencing how people choose to get around. A new policy brief from UCLA’s Center for Parking Policy—featuring my earlier research—outlines how cheap and plentiful parking fuel people’s decisions to drive.
State and local transportation agencies should take notice. In states like California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington, where there are concerted efforts to lower vehicle miles traveled (VMT), local parking policies can make or break those efforts. More broadly, parking management is a critical tool for fighting congestion and mitigating traffic impacts. Our guide, Modernizing Mitigation, goes a step further than North Carolina’s new law—which still lets developers build as much parking as they want—by encouraging developers to use parking management to limit traffic impacts and support a range of travel options.
Photo credit: Ceir Junior via Pexels. License.