The most important construction law in America: Make sure the building comes with 1) a roof and 2) parking. Whether they’re building apartment buildings or a Chuck E. Cheese, developers are typically required by US city governments to create a minimum number of car spots.

But now, over 50 major cities nationwide have ditched parking mandates, per NPR, allowing developers to decide how much parking is enough. And in 2022, California became the first state to ax parking minimums for buildings near public transit.

Why make parking optional?

Officials are listening to critics who say parking minimums hinder new housing construction and encourage folks to drive rather than take public transit. Critics argue that:

• Requiring parking to be built alongside housing uses up land that could be occupied by extra dwelling units.
• A single parking spot can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $150,000 to construct, with developers footing the bill and often passing it on to renters.
• Parking lots and garages fill up precious urban real estate with soulless concrete eyesores, making cities more sprawling and less convenient.

Parking skeptics also claim that the number of spots required is often arbitrary. One Minneapolis suburb mandates bowling alleys to build two spots per lane, while another one requires seven, Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, who wants to ban minimums statewide, told the Star Tribune.

Many drivers are not on board…they claim parking minimums allow them to avoid circling every destination in a desperate search for a spot. Anti-minimum advocates say that any rescinding of mandates needs to be coupled with policies promoting public transit that’ll make it easier to ditch cars.—SK

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95%: The amount of time your car spends parked in its lifetime, according to Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking.

20,000: Spots available at West Edmonton Mall in Canada, the largest parking structure in the world.

1,825: Total vehicle miles cars travel per curb space every year just looking for parking, according to Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking.

$1 billion: How much New York City is currently owed in unpaid parking and speeding tickets, according to the Independent Budget Office.

12: City blocks that would be required for parking spaces if the Empire State Building was built with today’s requirements, according to urban policy journalist Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise.

76%: Percentage of US college students who say they have to pay to park on campuses, according to a 2022 Inside Higher Ed survey.

20: The number of roller coasters the solar panel installation being put up over the parking lot at Six Flags Magic Mountain in Los Angeles will reportedly be able to power.

57%: The percentage of UK drivers whose heart rate surged while attempting to parallel park, according to Auto Trader UK.

92%: The percentage of the nearly 1.2 million parking and traffic tickets issued every year to San Francisco motorists for things that do not affect public safety, like overstaying their meters or parking in the way of street cleaning trucks.—MM

In his book, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, Henry Grabar explains America’s addiction to building more parking at the expense of other public infrastructure, among many other parking-related topics. Despite our frequent frustration with not being able to find free, close, and available parking, Grabar argues a lot of cities’ problems can be solved not by building more parking, but by managing it better.

Morning Brew spoke with Grabar about parking’s outsized role in city planning, its waste of valuable space, how cities can tackle congestion, and much more. Read it here.—CC

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Businesses are plugging into a new market for revenue: EV owners looking to park and charge up.

After a record 1.2 million EV sales last year, there are now 4.5 million EVs on the road in the US. Those EVs need time to charge throughout the day—time that companies believe can be spent shopping.

• Walmart plans to install thousands of chargers at its stores, including Sam’s Club locations, by 2030. Ikea embarked on a similar venture in 2022.
• Kohl’s has more than 375 charging stations at 170 stores, while select Macy’s stores have been EV-friendly since 2014.
• Gas stations are investing in chargers that can get drivers back on the road in 20 to 30 minutes—just enough time to buy some beef jerky and Doritos from the attached convenience store.

Chargers equal revenue. A recent survey showed that 80% of EVgo charger users spend ~$1 shopping for every minute spent charging.

A bit of a weight problem. EVs can be thousands of pounds heavier than the average gas-powered vehicle. Experts warn the extra weight from EVs could cause older parking garages to collapse unless steps are taken to buttress the structures.—DL

These parking facilities, gadgets, and drivers make finding a place to leave a vehicle less vein-popping, more exciting, and—dare we say—beautiful.

Some sweet spots:

• An orange birdlike car shelter that’s made of 570 solar panels generates power outside the headquarters of the Thai energy company B.Grimm.
• Two pristine underwater garages at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station hold 11,000 bicycles (and no cars!).
• China’s completely automated Future Car Park stacks automobiles inside circular columns and has a rooftop garden.

Automation is hot, so valets are going bionic:

• A major airport in France valets cars using autonomous forklift robots that look like if food delivery bots had mothers.
• Another smart device, Parkie, can slide cars into the narrowest of spots (and does it so well that it won a CES 2024 award).
• Volkswagen’s software company is testing out a smart parking garage system that uses robots to guide cars to free spots and automatically charge EVs.

But there’s just something about the way humans can park a car:

• The Red Bull Car Park Drift is a competition for wheel-finessers who can slide around pavement like Dom Toretto.
• An amateur parallel parking championship takes place annually on the streets of Pittsburgh.
• The best valet drivers in America competed in parking, lot maneuvering, key matching, and trunk packing in the National Valet Olympics for eight glorious years.—ML

Parking spots and garages are not just places to put your cars in timeout while you go off and have fun without them. They are also, we maintain, the bedrock of cinema—the sites of some of the funniest and creepiest moments in film and television history.

TV Tropes, a website that compiles every Hollywood plot convention you can think of (and many you can’t), features oodles of fascinating ways parking has been depicted in the movies. We’ve highlighted a few of the best parking clichés to give you a sense of how the institution of parking has been a gift to entertainment.

The Ominous Parking Garage. If you’ve ever felt compelled to look over your shoulder as you try to remember if you parked on level three or four, it might be because movies have trained you to do so. Parking garages have been the location of countless iconic scenes:

• Bob Woodward meets Deep Throat in All the President’s Men
• The climax of six seasons of The Americans
• Batman’s entrance in The Dark Knight

Parking Problems. Struggling to find a parking spot in real life is a modern torment that which is previously unknown to man, but in entertainment, it’s usually a source of chuckles:

• Rooney’s car gets towed in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
• George fights for a spot in Seinfeld

Rock Star Parking. At the other end of the spectrum is when characters unrealistically catch all the parking breaks:

• In MacGyver and Starsky & Hutch, there’s always a perfect parking spot exactly where our heroes need one.
• In Ghostbusters, the team parks the ECTO-1 right in front of the entrance of a busy hotel in New York City.

Other tropes include Improbable Parking Skills, Stealing the Handicapped Spot, and Parking Payback.—AE