End Parking Mandates

We're glad we caught your attention. Thanks for taking the time to better inform yourself, and to give us the opportunity to share insight on an often misunderstood topic.

 What are the signs about? 

• The City of Madison aims to kick off a "curbside management" evaluation in Fall 2025. Per the Institue of Transportation Engineers, Curbside Management seeks to: inventory, optimize, allocate, and manage the curb space to maximize mobility, safety, and access for the wide variety of curb demands."

• In layspeak, it's all about how the city decides to use everything between the painted white line of a vehicle travel line, and the adjacent border of private property. Examples include but are not limited to: street parking, bike or walking infrastructure, greenspace/terraces, space for local businesses (think sidewalk seating), etc. Modifying how curbspace is managed changes how different street users interact with and experience the space. 

• The signs encourage a mindset shift towards alternative uses and away from the defacto use: private vehicle storage. The city hasn't officially started this project just yet, but we'll update this page once that happens. We hope to kickstart the conversation with a push towards progress.

 What does Strong Towns Madison suggest? 

• Simply, the elimination of restrictive parking mandates. Parking mandates (sometimes called parking minimums or parking requirements) are laws, set usually by municipalities, which determine how many parking spaces are required per x unit (e.g. square foot, max number of occupants, number of bedrooms, etc.). These regulations restrict the flexibility of businesses, residents, and propterty owners in determining how they want to best utilize the space on a lot. Parking stalls aren't free, both in direct costs and in the value of land that could've been used for another purpose, so requiring a certain number of them has a very real hand in how the city takes shape and what is allowed to succeed. 

• You might think that guaranteed parking sounds nice and now wonder why we want to get rid of your parking! We don’t, we promise; we want to get rid of excess, unused, wasteful parking that cities require for no reason. The preeminent scholar on parking mandates was the late Donald Shoup, who wrote The High Cost of Free Parking. In this textbook, Professor Shoup laid out the case that cities were burdened with nonsense parking rules. It was preventing businesses from thriving, housing from being built, and expanding a dependence on cars. The studies used to determine minimum parking requirements weren’t based on fact or research and instead were more-or-less guesses based on a suburban environment.

• In Madison, we still require parking mandates outside the downtown and certain zoning districts. Here are some examples (full list):

  • • Multi-family Dwellings: 1 per dwelling unit

    • Assisted Living Facility: 1 space per 10 dwelling units or lodging rooms; 1 per 5 beds 

    • Day Care Center: 1 per 15 clients plus 1 per 2 employees

    • Place of Worship: 1 per 10 seats or 15 lineal feet of seating area in the main worship space. If no fixed seats, 1 per 70 sq. ft. of floor area in main worship space

    • Telecommunications Center: 1 per 2 employees

    • Animal Daycare: 1 per 15 clients 

    • Dry Cleaning: 1 per 2 employees

    • Garden Center: 1 per 1,000 sq. ft. floor area + 1 per 1,000 sq. ft. of outdoor sales, display

    • Coffee Shop: 15% of capacity of persons

    • Auto Convenience Store: 1 per 1,000 sq. ft. of floor area

    • Recycling Center: 1 per 2 employees

• There are more, but hopefully you get the idea. Why do laundry facilities need 1 spot per 2 employees? Or doggy day care needs 1 per 15 clients? We don’t know! Someone in the 1970’s made a guess, it was probably way off, and it just stuck around.

 Why should I care about parking? 

• You likely already do care about parking, in that you hope to have a guaranteed spot, as many of us are accustomed to. We’ll counter that: parking is really expensive and unless you enjoy paying for a guaranteed spot, we shouldn’t mandate required excess parking!

  • • How expensive? For surface level lots it’s over $10,000 a spot in capital costs. For garages, it’s over $30,000 a spot and for underground garages it’s over $50,000 a spot. A standard 100-stall strip mall probably cost over $1 million to construct!

• Consider this hypothetical: a coffee shop becomes a hit for their incredible breakfast burritos and they purchase the vacant storefront next door to expand their operation. If they gain another 30 spots of capacity but don’t have the physical space on hand to build 5 more parking spots, they can’t expand. The city would not allow it, it would be illegal (less burritos for all of us)!

• This is why it's a bad idea for governments to mandate parking. Parking is already costly enough to deter most businesses and developers from seeking more parking than needed. They understand the balance; if they build too little, patrons are frustrated. If they build too much, that’s a hit on their bottom line. It’s in their best interest to build the right amount of parking spots. They're still human, and often overvalue off-street parking while undervaluing pedestrian/bike traffic, but that’s a different conversation.

  • • Excess parking stall costs are passed onto you, the consumer, through goods and services. For parking garages in downtown apartments, spots easily cost $150/month. For every spot the management company doesn’t sell, that’s money they have to get in other ways (likely increased rent the following year).

• It also means some buildings don’t get built, or they aren’t centered around the experience people outside of a car. Buffalo and Seattle removed parking mandates in 2017 and estimated that 60-70% of new housing would have been illegal under the previous rules. Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World- a great, fun intro book into the role of parking- has the following illustration of parking requirements by Alfred Twu: