Less technical than Shoup Dogg and more full of intriguing examples and stories.
>It would be one thing if requirements were rational. But, as Shoup ably demonstrates, parking standards are, at best, exaggerations of actual needs and, at worst, totally arbitrary. For instance, Grabar tells us that--for no apparent reason--high schools in Mesa, Arizona, require five times as much parking as those in Kansas City do. Omaha requires twice as much office parking per square foot as Denver does. In many cases, parking requirements...end up being bargaining chips for opponents of development rather than anything resembling tools of rational transportation planning.>Paved Paradise also covers the vicious policy cycles that led to the parking regulations (i.e. minimums) that prevail across the United States. After World War II, civic leaders in almost every city in the country decided that downtowns needed ample parking to appeal to a newly mobile population (at least among wealthy, white Americans). And so, they built so much parking -- and demolished so many attractive, functional buildings -- that downtowns lost their appeal entirely.>Across the country, mid-size developments (commercial and residential alike) fall into the Valley of High Parking Requirements: "Anything between sprawl and high density development was impossible to build because it was impossible to park – surface parking will take up too much room; structured parking will cost too much to build." "Mostly, America just stopped building small buildings," Grabar writes. "Parking requirements help trigger an extinction-level event for bite-sized, infill apartment buildings like rowhouses, brownstones, and triple-deckers; the production of buildings with two to four units fell more than 90% between 1971 and 2021."https://www.cp-dr.com/articles/the-best-parking-book-since-donald-shoup 