The United Kingdom has been both a bold parking reformer and a parking reform disappointment. But which is the more important story? The nationwide abolition of parking mandates in 2001 and the shift to parking maximums was amazing and of great interest to parking reformers elsewhere. Yet, parking management has often failed to rise to the challenge, leading to problems and then to some backsliding on parking standards. For more insight and lessons from UK parking, I turned to Andrew Potter, who is Director of Parking Perspectives, a parking focused consulting firm based in Chelmsford in the ..read more

On November 2, 2023, the Austin City Council voted to end parking mandates, making Austin Texas the largest municipality in the USA to do so. So far.  I had a discussion with three of the key people from the Austin Parking Reform Coalition who worked to make it happen. They were Leah Bojo, Jay Crossley and Adam Greenfield.  It was a Master Class for aspiring parking reform advocates! Scroll down for a transcript. Listen with the player below. Or subscribe to the audio podcast. This is the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network.  "The day that Austin City Council voted t ..read more

January's episode of Reinventing Parking introduced six surprising parking reform ideas.  This post explains the fourth idea, "Alternative to maximums: make parking count as floor area". This is a lightly edited transcript of that part of the episode, which starts at the 14:05 point. Listen with the player below. Or subscribe to the audio podcast. This is the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network. Alternatives to parking maximums The idea in this section is about actively deterring excessive parking supply but doing so in a less rigid way than parking maximums.  Let me expl ..read more

January's episode of Reinventing Parking introduced six surprising parking reform ideas.  This post explains the third idea, "Project to create many city maps of areas with paid parking"  [12:00] This is a lightly edited transcript of that part of the episode, which starts at the 12:00 point. Listen with the player below. Or subscribe to the audio podcast. This is the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network. Many city maps of parking pricing The success of Parking Reform Network’s mapping projects got me thinking.  So here is another mapping possibility.  Would it b ..read more

January's episode of Reinventing Parking introduced six surprising parking reform ideas.  This post explains the second idea, "Should we turn every decent-sized building and its parking into a mini Parking Benefit District?"  This is a lightly edited transcript of that part of the episode, which starts at the 8:35 point. Listen with the player below. Or subscribe to the audio podcast. This is the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network. Every building a mini Parking Benefit District This idea is a bit more audacious than most others in the episode. Towards parking fee positiv ..read more

January's episode of Reinventing Parking introduced six surprising parking reform ideas.  This post explains the first idea, "What if we require private off-street parking to report regularly on usage levels?" This is a lightly edited transcript of that part of the episode, which starts at [4:02]. Listen with the player below. Or subscribe to the audio podcast. This is the official podcast of the Parking Reform Network. Parking occupancy reporting for private off-street parking The Motivation This idea came up in the December 2023 episode of Reinventing Parking in my conversation with Ev ..read more

This month I want to share some parking reform ideas that will probably be new to you. There are six ideas, so I only describe each one briefly. What if we require private off-street parking to report regularly on usage levels? [4:02] Should we turn every decent-sized building and its parking into a mini Parking Benefit District? [8:35] Project to create many city maps of areas with paid parking [12:00] Alternative to maximums: make parking count as floor area [14:05] Parking moratorium (or maybe even parking draw-down) [18:39] Please abolish parking mandates, but it you must have them, make ..read more

  My guest this month is an active Parking Reform Network member with unique insights at the interface between the parking owned by buildings and the world of parking reform.  Most buildings fail abysmally to manage their parking efficiently. It hurts building owners. It hurts tenants. It hurts residents. It hurts the whole community. Yet most building managers have little clue that there are now tools to help them easily do much better. Evan Goldin is co-founder and CEO of Parkade, a company which provides an amazing app and system that makes it simple for buildings to better util ..read more

I spoke with Dana Yanocha about an encouraging, readable and helpful new report from ITDP that focuses on off-street parking reform.  "Breaking the Code, Off Street Parking Reform Lessons Learned" is aimed at parking reformers and potential parking reformers all over the world. Dana, who is research manager for ITDP Global, led the team that prepared the report and was co-author of the report along with Mackenzie Allen. Listen with the player below. Or scroll down for a lightly edited transcript. Or subscribe to the audio podcast. This is the official podcast of the Parking Reform Networ ..read more

People keep claiming that parking reform and the Parking Reform Network are "anti car". So I thought I should make an episode to try to answer the question, is parking reform anti-car?  But, since that’s a loaded question not usually asked in good faith, I decided to instead look at a similar but more constructive question: Can parking reform help cities avoid or escape having cars dominate their transport systems? And the short answer is that parking reform can help do this as much or as little as you want it to. Listen with the player below. Or scroll down for a lightly edited transcrip ..read more