occupies more urban land than any single use except housing and roads.
Most of it is required by a regulation that almost nobody has examined.
oblige a developer to build a fixed number of spaces per flat or per square metre of shop.
The numbers in those rules were copied between cities for fifty years and rest on very little measurement.
The cost is invisible because it is into the price of everything above it.
A flat with a parking space costs more, and the household without a car pays for it anyway.
Removing the minimum does not remove parking; it moves the decision to whoever is paying.
Cities that abolished the requirement saw small buildings appear on that had been unbuildable.
A narrow plot cannot accommodate a , so a rule about cars had quietly banned a building type.
On-street parking is the other half and is almost always priced below its value.
Free space in a busy district guarantees that drivers circle, which produces a measurable share of local traffic.
Charging enough to keep one space free in ten removes the circling and raises money that a district can see.
Returning that revenue to the street that generated it is what makes the policy survive an election.
Where the money went to a central budget, the charge was reversed within two years in several documented cases.
reform is unusual in urban policy because it costs nothing and returns space immediately.