Every American city has a zoning code. Every zoning code has a parking section. The parking section specifies how many parking spaces must be provided for each type of land use: so many spaces per thousand square feet of retail, so many per residential unit, so many per hospital bed. These numbers were mostly set in the 1950s and 1960s, based on traffic engineering studies of dubious quality, and they have barely changed since.
The consequences have been enormous. Minimum parking requirements have shaped the American built environment more profoundly than almost any other single policy. They have made cities less walkable, more car-dependent, and more expensive. They have consumed land that could have been used for housing, parks, or productive economic activity. They have made it impossible to build the kind of dense, mixed-use neighborhoods that Americans claim to want.
The Florida Case
Florida is an extreme case. The state's rapid postwar growth happened entirely in the era of minimum parking requirements, which means that virtually the entire built environment was designed around the car. Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville — these are cities where it is genuinely difficult to exist without a car, not because of geography but because of policy choices made decades ago.
Parking requirements did not just accommodate the car. They made the car mandatory.
The reform movement is real. Several Florida cities have eliminated or reduced minimum parking requirements in their urban cores. The results have been predictable to anyone who has studied the research: more housing gets built, at lower cost, in more walkable locations. The sky has not fallen.
The deeper lesson is about the relationship between policy and urban form. The American city did not become car-dependent because Americans preferred cars. It became car-dependent because the rules required it. Change the rules, and the city can change. This is, in the end, an optimistic conclusion.