The costs and effects of excessive parking supply

Scroll down in this article to see a really useful table with formulas that communities can build into their zoning ordinance to decrease parking requirements based on factors like location, density, transportation, demographics and land use.“Excessive, inflexible parking requirements contradict virtually every principle of good planning,” the article says. It presents well-researched parking statistics from around the country.

• There are more than a billion off-street parking spaces in the United States.
• Roads and parking facilities cover about 35% of the surface area of most urban residential areas and 50–70% in non-residential areas.
• Each motor vehicle requires $4,500 worth of parking annually, which is slightly more than the $4,415 that consumers spend annually per vehicle. Since there are approximately 260 million vehicles in the United States, this suggests that off-street, government-mandated parking costs exceed $1.0 trillion annually.
• The U.S. has 20 million priced parking spaces, representing about three percent of all spaces and generating about $25 billion in revenue.