You may or may not know what the term “parking minimums” refers to. (Though if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you do.) It’s a shorthand for regulations—maybe not in the zoning code per se, but part of the overall land-use regime—that mandate a certain number of parking spaces for a home, or, for commercial or retail space, a certain number relative to the overall square footage. For example, using a made-up number, a minimum-parking ordinance might demand one parking space for every 100 square feet of retail space.

These minimum requirements are often well above day-to-day use, and in many cases developers would actually prefer to build less parking. Parking (especially garage spaces) is actually quite expensive, and as critics of parking minimums say, asphalt doesn’t pay taxes.

A bit of a tangent here: it’s interesting how when it comes to parking, we’re very risk averse—building for a handful of peak days, generally Christmas shopping, rather than saving the expense of overbuilding and dealing very occasionally with more inconvenience. When it comes to other things, however, like inventory management or industrial capacity, we tend to see spare capacity or slack in the system as liabilities—latent efficiencies to capture by cutting everything to the bare minimum. That contrast is really interesting, and I’m curious how it arose.

Strong Towns does a Black Friday Parking online event every year, asking folks to go photograph substantially empty parking lots on the year’s peak shopping day. It isn’t hard to do.

So no matter how the property has evolved, how many customers actually drive, or how much a parking lot generally sits unused, the code likely requires it. But parking is even more overbuilt than that. Why? For a reason that I rarely see mentioned explicitly, but that everybody knows: shopping malls and strip plazas are almost never fully occupied.

Even very healthy shopping centers often have at least one or two vacancies at any given time. But if you’re 80 or 90 percent full at any given time, that means your parking lot is 10 or 20 percent overbuilt, on top of how overbuilt the actual square-footage-to-parking-spaces ratio is.

In an extreme case—and while it’s extreme, it’s not uncommon—you have shopping centers that are substantially empty for years, but which, in my understanding, are required to maintain all of their parking as long as the physical retail spaces are still standing. (If you know a lot about this, and know of any exceptions or complications for cases like this, leave a comment!) Take a look, for example, at this parking lot in Woodbridge, Virginia, on an average weekday (This tweet is like an early first draft of this post.)

Addison Del Mastro @ad_mastro

You know, one funny thing about parking minimums is they assume the retail space will be occupied. See this plaza in Woodbridge, VA, along a somewhat depressed strip of Route 1. At least 1/3 empty since *2011.* And how much does all that asphalt inhibit lively, organic commerce?

February 27th 2019

2 Retweets12 Likes

The small-format supermarket chain Trader Joe’s is sort of famous in urbanist circles for its notoriously crowded, seemingly underbuilt parking lots. I wrote about it myself once, but I’m far from the only or the first person to notice this. As a customer, it can be an inconvenience—you will likely have to circle the lot a few times if you go at a peak time, and the spaces are tight. If you have a massive SUV with poor visibility, you might have a hard time navigating it.

But I’ve come to appreciate how efficient it is. The stores’ properties use up a fraction of the land of a conventional supermarket. They pay fewer taxes and less in property upkeep. The prices, not unrelatedly, are extremely competitive. And you know what? That feeling of unbearable frustration when you don’t immediately find an empty parking space? I’ve learned not to feel it, and even to see it as a sort of artificial reaction to an artificial expectation of frictionless consumerism. It’s kind of like unlearning the frustration at driving slowly or getting stuck in a bit of traffic. The spaces turn over frequently enough. You’re not going to be circling the parking lot forever.

It reminds me of Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia, a large strip plaza mostly consisting of Vietnamese shops and restaurants. It’s a cultural and commercial center for the Vietnamese community in the area and beyond, and it’s also something of a tourist destination. The parking lot is crammed full on weekends and frequently even on weekdays. It took me and my wife 10 minutes to find a space one Saturday at lunch time.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t enough parking, because again, the spots turn over quickly enough. It means that the parking lot is being fully utilized. It means that the place has changed the consumer psychology from “I won’t go there if I can’t park instantly” to “let me get rid of this damn car so I can go enjoy the shops and restaurants.”

That’s a good thing. A full parking lot means a healthy business. Between parking minimums and elevated vacancies in the age of ecommerce, we’ve massively overbuilt parking. That little bit of convenience forecloses an untold amount of potential enterprise: raising the cost of building things, locking up land in an unproductive use, and making our communities more fragile.

I’d rather circle the lot once or twice.

Related Reading:

Taking Off the Car Blinders, Opening Your World

Where Do They Shop?

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