To build a bowling alley in the city of Brighton north of Denver, developers have to provide four parking spots for every lane — enough to accommodate an alley full of bowlers if none of them carpooled with a friend or family member.
Studio apartments in Brighton require two spots each — even though close to 20% of all renters live alone, according to U.S. census data. That’s the same number that Lone Tree requires for a three-bedroom apartment or single-family home.
Farther down Interstate 25, Greenwood Village requires three spots per bowling lane. But their single-family homes need more parking than Lone Tree’s do — a minimum of three spaces, no matter how many bedrooms the home has.
For decades, cities across the U.S. have required developers to build huge amounts of parking that experts say bears no statistical relationship to how much space residents and consumers actually need for their cars.
“It’s really voodoo and witchcraft, and cities copy-pasting numbers and jacking them up to be extra careful,” said Ben LeRoy, an urban planner who teaches at the University of Illinois. “This is not our profession’s finest moment in terms of rigor and accuracy.”
While convenient for drivers, all that free parking isn’t cheap. Studies show developers spend anywhere from $9,000 to $50,000 per spot in surface lots and garages. That drives up the cost of housing and retail — sometimes preventing apartments and businesses from being built. Parking also takes up scarce land that could have been used to build even more units.
A sea of asphalt is bad for the environment, to boot. So after nearly a century of transportation planners and city land use professionals pushing for more and more parking, experts in the field now say we’ve been building our cities all wrong.
“The tendency has been to just put in way more parking than what is necessary,” said Andy Goetz, a geography professor at the University of Denver who specializes in transportation and urban planning. “In many places, there are requirements for having two, three, four parking spots for every unit of housing — and that’s just way too much.”
In late May, Longmont became the first Colorado city to eliminate minimum parking requirements entirely, giving developers more freedom to decide how many spots their property truly needs. Weeks earlier, Gov. Jared Polis also signed into law House Bill 1304, a measure that will prevent affected cities from requiring minimum levels of parking at multifamily residences built near public transit.
But despite the emerging consensus among planning and transportation experts, reducing or eliminating parking requirements remains a dicey political proposition in a country where driving remains the primary mode of transportation.
The new law was adopted over the opposition of Republicans and many Democrats, who said cities — not the state — should have control over how their communities develop. And in most places, accommodating drivers isn’t optional. Most Colorado neighborhoods and business corridors — including many in Denver — aren’t particularly walkable. Most homes and businesses don’t have convenient access to transit.
Notably, places like Seattle and Buffalo, N.Y., that critics of parking minimums point to as national models, enacted their parking policies at the local level, with support from city council members, local planners and residents.
“(Eliminating parking minimums is) something that might work well in Denver, but harms us in an exurban environment,” Peter Padilla, the mayor pro tem on the Brighton City Council, told state lawmakers in a committee hearing earlier this year.
“The results won’t be fewer cars, just fewer safe places to put them.”
The hidden costs of unused parking
Among urban researchers, the growing body of evidence is clear: U.S. cities have more parking spots than people use.
In 2020, the Regional Transportation District studied parking lot usage in 86 apartment complexes near transit stations across the metro area. At market-rate apartments, 40% of parking spaces were empty at their peak demand. In publicly subsidized housing for low-income residents, half of them went unused.
A similar pattern plays out in cities across the country, in residential lots and commercial ones alike.
All those extra spots make it convenient for drivers to find a space. But while the urban sprawl resulting from the rise of American highways has been well documented, the cost of parking is less widely understood.
A 2021 study of 19 affordable housing projects found that Denver-area developers spent $9.3 million on unused parking over a six-year period — enough to build an additional 40-unit apartment complex.
Parking lots are bad for the environment, contributing to heat islands and generating stormwater runoff. Moreover, environmentalists argue, sprawl is a self-perpetuating cycle. When places are easier to drive and harder to walk, it encourages people to hop in their cars and burn air-polluting fossil fuels that contribute to climate change. In response to rising car traffic and resident demand, cities build more parking spots and wider roads to accommodate more cars.
“We need people to be able to live, work and play in the same area where they actually want to be,” said Rep. Stephanie Vigil, a Colorado Springs Democrat, who sponsored the state parking bill. “And instead we’re requiring that new housing is farther and farther away from all other necessities.
“A lot of this is about disrupting that cycle,” she said. “It’s going to be a little uncomfy. People are nervous about having a parking space. I get that.”
There’s a conservative argument for eliminating parking minimums, too — though it didn’t resonate with suburban and rural Republicans at the statehouse. At its core, it’s a free market solution that allows developers to determine how much parking their commercial or residential property truly needs — or at least what they’re willing to pay for.
Because of that, planners say that fears of builders getting rid of parking entirely to save money are overblown. Risk-averse developers still tend to err on the side of ample parking; in some cases, lenders and big-box store tenants require it.
“We need parking — we all know that we need parking,” said Shaida Libhart, a planner with TEI Engineering and Design in Denver. “It’s just, let’s put our resources and our money into serving everyone instead of (parking spaces) that are sitting vacant for a significant portion of time.”
After Seattle eliminated parking minimums in most transit-oriented neighborhoods in 2012, most developers still built parking — just 40% less of it.
To supporters, that example shows the benefits of a free market approach. Under the policy, developers built 18,000 fewer spaces and saved an estimated $537 million on parking between 2012 and 2017, a peer-reviewed academic study found.
To critics in Colorado, the fact that it worked in Seattle — considered one of the 10 most walkable cities in the U.S. by Walk Score, which factors in transit and bicycle infrastructure — doesn’t mean it makes sense for the Denver suburbs.
“Unfortunately, public transit in Colorado is nowhere near where we need it to be if we expect people to get rid of their cars,” Beverly Stables, a lobbyist for the Colorado Municipal League, testified in opposition to the bill.
City policies lag as guidance evolves
The high financial cost of parking has long been understood.
In a 1959 ruling that was later reversed, the Colorado Supreme Court found that municipal parking requirements were an unconstitutional taking of property, meaning cities should compensate property owners for the cost.
Today, a number of Colorado cities have ordinances on the books allowing parking waivers for affordable housing projects — an acknowledgement that the cost of parking is at odds with affordability.
So why do cities continue to require more parking than their residents and visitors need?
For much of the country’s history, the city planning profession preached the exact opposite of what it advocates today.
Minimum parking rules first emerged in the 1920s, when new motorcars began to crowd American streets. For decades, the Institute of Transportation Engineers published manuals guiding cities on how much was needed. It wasn’t until 2005, with the release of the book “The High Cost of Free Parking,” that planners say the idea of eliminating parking minimums started to take hold.
Today, the ITE president opposes parking minimums, saying their costs outweigh their benefits. So does the American Planning Association.
But the emerging expert consensus hasn’t translated into widespread policy changes.
LeRoy says outdated guidance from the transportation engineers still serves as the basis for many municipal codes. And cities didn’t even apply that consistently. A golf course in Brighton for instance, requires double the parking as one built in Lone Tree. A spokesperson for the city of Brighton did not respond this week to an email seeking comment about their parking policies.
A bigger barrier to change is political. Most residents own cars. And no one enjoys circling the block repeatedly for parking.
“The best thing you can say about minimum parking requirements is that they are a politically popular policy tool,” said LeRoy, a former city planner for Champaign, Illinois. “I don’t discount that that is what politicians and voters often want. The challenge to us as planning professionals is to continue to do a better job of explaining why minimum parking requirements might actually work against the electorate’s preferences.”
But in advocating for statewide pre-emption, some planners — including the Colorado branch of the APA — have taken a different approach.
“I think a statewide movement was kind of needed because we were having a lot of difficulty in local jurisdictions making some of those big steps forward,” Libhart said.
The state law blocks parking requirements for multifamily housing and mixed-use residential projects. But it only applies in cities within a metropolitan planning organization near qualifying transit stops.
Longmont will be a testing ground for more sweeping change. It eliminates minimums citywide, for all new development. And it institutes new residential parking maximums, allowing no more than 2 spaces per home.
“While city staff recognize that people own cars and need places to store them, not everyone chooses to own a car or can afford one,” Ben Ortiz, a Longmont city transportation planner, said in a statement. “For these individuals, eliminating minimum parking requirements will be particularly beneficial, as the cost of parking increases the costs of goods, services, and housing for everyone, including those who do not drive.”
The council vote was unanimous — but not without backlash.
“I would like to speak on behalf of the vast, vast majority that use cars to get around,” Longmont resident Gary Hodges told the City Council before its vote to eliminate parking minimums. “We are a car-centric society — that’s just a fundamental truth, and we’re not getting away from that.”
But even in Longmont, experts say don’t expect developers to suddenly stop building parking.
“Developers don’t want to build something that people don’t want to buy,” said Libhart, who co-chairs the legislative committee for the Colorado APA chapter.