Review of the Effects of Developments with Low Parking Requirements

Abstract

Parking management and planning can be used to address several issues related to sustainable urban development. For example, parking availability affects both car ownership and usage, and parking planning can affect both land use and building costs. A tool used in several countries is minimum parking requirements (MPR) and lowering these could be a pathway to more sustainable mobility. However, the actual effects of lower MPR have not systematically been studied. In this paper we present the results of a review of sixteen developments with low MPR in Sweden, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Existing research and reports have been analyzed to compare these and draw conclusions on the effect of MPR on mobility patterns and mobility services. In addition, interviews were conducted with representatives from municipalities and developers. Our results indicate that the mobility patterns of individuals in the studied projects are more sustainable than in nearby projects. However, the causality of MPR and mobility is hard to establish due to the risk of self-selection and that all of the studied projects have good prerequisites for sustainable mobility practices. Many of the studied evaluations are also of poor quality with, for example, lack of appropriate control group.

Finding space for nature in cities: the considerable potential of redundant car parking

“…This translates to huge areas of public land. At the same time, due to common planning rules requiring generous parking provision in new builds, many cities (both in developing and developed nations 53,[81][82][83] ) have created extensive areas of garage space as they developed 49,55,89 . This effectively duplicates street parking.…”

Cross‐sectoral collaboration in business model innovation for sustainable development: Tensions and compromises

“…It should also be noted that authorities may also behave conservative in relation to a particular sustainability topic and that institutional logics per se does not determine partners' interests concerning a BMIfS-topic. One must consider the particular socio-material contingencies of the topic as such; for instance, City is a place with a history of poor air quality and policy efforts to reduce cars but strong demand for cars among residents and voters, where parking is cheap to build, unlike in the larger Swedish cities where public transport works better, parking is expensive to build and developers have found reduced parking to make good business sense (Sprei et al, 2020).…”

“…Traditionally, residents' mobility needs are met via convenient parking, but the environmental, social, and economic costs of cars and parking, for instance, CO 2 ‐emissions, city congestion, nitrogen pollution, displacement of children and pedestrians, and cost of land, have motivated cities all over Sweden to reduce residential parking. Instead, mobility hubs are promoted; multi‐functional facilities that combine parking with alternative services to both reduce residential travel overall and promote sustainable alternatives (car and bike pools, mobility‐as‐service) (Sprei et al, 2020).…”

Urban planning for car-free housing and ideas of future desired states

“…Part of this movement, although still in the margins, is a new form of development that is emerging in some cities in Western Europe: car-free housing. Carfree housing are new developments with no allocated car-parking spaces, and which often include a facilitation of more sustainable forms of mobility such as cycling or walking -often through the promotion of new forms of digital mobility services (e.g., Mobility as a Service (MaaS), which emphasises a shift away from personally-owned modes of transportation and towards mobility provided as a service) (Sprei et al, 2020). Central to car-free housing is the attempt to challenge the dominant 20th century urban planning norm of "minimum parking requirements" for new urban developments.…”

“…This norm seeks to cater for "the expected future car ownership" and is intended to reduce the number of street-parked cars in urban areas (Johansson et al, 2019). These car-free developments tend to be realised as municipal pilot projects with a parking norm of zero and include an exclusive acceptance to deviate from the municipal parking norm (Gunnarsson-Östling, 2021, Sprei et al, 2020. As such, the housing is part of broader processes of testbed planning in which pilot projects and urban experiments constitute an integral part of urban planning and development (Berglund-Snodgrass & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2020;Berglund-Snodgrass, 2021;cf.…”