While deliberating on master’s thesis topics for my degree in Environmental Governance, I stumbled upon Climate Town’s video on parking requirements and PRN’s parking mandate map (shown below) and became fascinated by the absurd world of parking requirements. A very informative conversation with PRN President Tony Jordan last December opened the door to help me answer the research question of my thesis: How do the factors observed in individual municipalities support and/or explain observed patterns of widespread reform adoption?

To keep the data set at a manageable size, I chose to focus on the most “pioneering” of parking reforms, i.e. the citywide elimination of parking requirements for all land uses (the “red dots” on the parking mandate map).  I implemented Policy Diffusion Theory to attempt to understand why and how parking reform spread across the country, likening it to a contagious agent. What commonalities did “afflicted” communities share? Were they isolated cases, or could the spread of reform be traced from one community to the next? What were the means of transmission?

Quantitative analysis of PRN mandate map CSV data was combined with qualitative data collection via interviews with more than a dozen city officials and parking reform advocates from across the country. While the results of my study may not be particularly groundbreaking for veteran parking reform advocates, my hope was to systematically study and summarize the state of parking reform at present, in order to provide evidence for advocates and policymakers to utilize when undertaking reforms. To that end, below I will present an (extremely) abbreviated report of my findings and their potential implications for the future of parking reform in the US.

(A quick note: collection of quantitative data on pioneer cities was concluded on December 30, 2023. Many cities have been added to PRN’s mandate database in the meantime, including a good few cities that have eliminated all requirements, i.e. are pioneer cities. So while the findings based on the 58 pioneer cities present at the end of 2023 are “out of date” in the sense that many new cities have been added in the past six months, the general implications of the research are likely to hold.)

Who is reforming anyhow?

What kinds of cities are adopting the most progressive parking reforms? What is their “profile?” What do they look like, in terms of population, wealth, geographical distribution time of adoption, and partisan lean?

Long story short, everyone’s doing it. The 58 pioneer cities present at the end of 2023 are an incredibly diverse set of communities. Cities of nearly a million (Austin, Texas) and towns of less than a thousand (River Rouge, Michigan). Some are in hard-leaning Democratic counties, some in hard-leaning Republican counties. Plenty are in counties whose party differs from their state’s. A wide range of median household incomes and poverty rates are found in the pioneer city set, with many communities at the national poverty rate, and some at more than triple. For some cities, parking reform was an isolated policy change, whereas for others the reform was integrated in a broader municipal policy plan.

At the end of 2023, 46 percent of states had at least one city that had repealed parking requirements. Five states had four or more cities with no MPRs; Oregon led the pack with 12 MPR-free communities, in large part due to the statewide Climate-Friendly and Equitable Community Guidelines that are pushing communities in eight metropolitan areas to undertake parking reform.

Diffusion has only just begun

A promising result of this research was found in the graph of cumulative MPR elimination reforms, as seen below:

This rapid increase in reform adoption suggests that parking reform is currently in an exponential phase of “contagion,” which, according to Political Diffusion Theory, continues until the reform has saturated eligible legislatures, resulting in an “S-shaped curve” on a graph of cumulative adoptions over time. The S-shaped curve is often associated with incremental learning processes, and it is posited that cautious legislatures observe a few innovating legislatures as they adopt policy innovations and once proved successful, adoptions follow in a rush until only a few lagging or hesitant legislatures are left. If this holds true, we can expect this number to continue to rise rapidly over the next few years, given how many municipal and state legislatures are candidates for such reforms.

Reform Factors

Results of the interview portion of my research suggest four major factor groupings that explain cities’ experiences with parking reform:

Resource factors show that the resource intensity of reform (in terms of time, financial resources and staff) is widely varying between communities, with a repeated sentiment being that the reform process was unnecessarily resource-intensive at times.

Motivation factors revealed concerns regarding housing supply and cost of housing to be the most common motivation for parking reform, and arguments for and against reforms were repeated in most communities interviewed. However, arguments can change depending on the relative wealth and priorities of a community, and it was found that parking reform can attract proponents from a wide variety of interest groups (housing advocates, business owners, de-regulation proponents, etc.) and result in “unlikely bedfellows.”

Governance factors show that partisan dynamics do not play a major role in municipal reform, although there is potential for parking reform to gain bipartisan support given that it is an issue that crosscuts generations and political views. Additionally, interviewees reported several barriers that related to the municipal government structure; examples include a supermajority to approve zoning changes, the need for co-sponsors, and three of five councilmembers needing agree to hear an item for it to be put on agenda. A passive city government was also reported as an obstacle to reform. Catalyst mechanisms also proved influential in reform experiences (see below).

Diffusion factors suggest that the support of elected officials is especially critical for success. When interviewees were asked why the reform happened when it did, the most common response was that the political will was present on the city council, reflecting, in the case of parking reform, the importance the support of local elected officials. In at least half of the cities represented in interviews, the changing of city councilmembers and emerging political will were cited as reasons for the timing of the reform. Several interviewees indicated with fairly high certainty that the end result of the parking reform would either have been quite different or not occurred at all had it not been for either a single person or particular coincidence of supportive council members and timing.

Reform Experience Contrasts

One illuminating result of this research was the stark contrast between reform experiences present in some cases. A good example can be found between two communities only a few miles apart in Massachusetts: Cambridge and Brookline. (Brookline is not a pioneer city, but rather implemented incremental residential parking reform. Several cities that adopted incremental reforms were included to qualitatively compare their experiences with those of pioneer cities.) While Brookline’s population is roughly half that of Cambridge, in other respects they are similar; values for political lean, median household income and poverty rate are all comparable. While it could have been expected that Brookline’s reform would be more straightforward, given its smaller size and subsequent potential to be more nimble and adaptive, this was not found to be the case. According to interviews with individuals integral to and familiar with the respective reforms, it was Cambridge that experienced an uncomplicated, uncontroversial reform, while Brookline’s reform was a contested, time-consuming and laborious effort. Given that the two communities have significant economic, political and geographic similarities, a further factor must be responsible for the substantial difference in reform experience.

One potential explanation may be found with the type of municipal government of each community. Brookline’s local government, called a town meeting, is a regionally specific form of government for smaller communities, one which a Brookline town meeting member described as “democracy on steroids” given the size of the decision-making body and extensive procedures that must be undertaken before an item is voted on. In this system of government, power is relatively diffuse in comparison to Cambridge’s more common form of government, the mayor-council system. As stated by one interviewee, “Cambridge is a city rather than a town, and so…power is more concentrated in the form of a city manager [or mayor].” With direct resident participation playing a less prominent role in the mayor-council system, it could be that the concentrated power enables quicker reform processes. This result suggests that municipal government structure and the accompanying power concentration could play an influential role in the process and outcome of parking reform at the municipal scale.

Catalysts

Several government programs and policies elaborated on during the interviews were determined to be catalyst mechanisms that contributed to reform success. Here, a catalyst is understood as a means that reduces the barriers to parking reform: political, economic or otherwise. Catalysts included state-level initiatives, such as Massachusetts’ “An Act Enabling Partnerships for Growth,” which lowered the required vote for zoning changes at the micro-level in Massachusetts towns and cities from a supermajority to a simple majority. Brookline’s most recent parking reform would not have passed if the supermajority had been required. Another state-level catalyst was Michigan’s Redevelopment Ready Communities (RCC) Program that funded the zoning changes that included the elimination of MPRs in the pioneer city of River Rouge. This state program provides technical and financial support to communities seeking economic development. The support is contingent on the adoption of a variety of business-friendly micro-governance practices. Only a selection of the practices, at the discretion of the individual municipal government to decide, must be adopted. Parking reform is only one of these practices.

Other catalysts include a regional planning governance system that requires a comprehensive plan to be developed once a decade, as well as federal funding schemes such as recent infrastructure funds being distributed to states and municipalities. While this funding does not immediately concern parking policy, such funding enables transit infrastructure expansion, which inarguably plays into the feasibility and viability of parking reform. The variety of these catalysts demonstrates that parking reform can be enabled through many channels and the opportunities for support of reform processes are multitudinous.

Future Research: what next?

Given that this was an explorative study, there are many avenues for future research and further dimensions of analysis:

• A more robust statistical analysis of the quantitative data collected would be required to make verifiable statements regarding the significance of observed trends.
• The economic analysis performed in this study yields further research recommendations that could contribute to a broader understanding of the economic attributes, drivers and impacts of parking reform. One example is an investigation into the property values of cities that adopt parking reform and how the property values may vary and change over time. Such an investigation would provide a more nuanced understanding of the wealth present in reforming communities.
• Case studies would provide further valuable contributions to parking reform adoption literature. One example would be an investigation into the coercive power and impact of Michigan’s RRC program, which incentivizes but does not require parking reform for applicable communities. Understanding the efficacy of such a program could serve to encourage the expansion of such a system to other states, or even to the federal level with a federal funding scheme with contingencies similar to the RRC program.
• Given the efficiency of state-level reform, a study focused on the factors contributing to the success (and failure) of state-level parking reform initiatives could prove valuable for future efforts—for example, a case study of Minnesota’s People over Parking Bill.

Implications: what does this mean for you?

This research suggests that there is likely a vast untapped political viability for parking reform across the US. Where this viability exists but is not yet realized, a catalyst could prove determinative in the initiation and success of reform. Do you know of any undiscovered catalysts that could initiate, expedite or support reform efforts? Is your community in need of a catalyst? What municipal power structures are present in your community, and how might they influence the parking reform process? How can you help your cautious council learn from other cities? Is there a local election happening in your community soon, and is there a candidate who supports parking reform?

The arguments for adopting parking reform are now well-developed and accessible to interested parties. The future of parking reform research and practical application must now focus on the tangible and empirical impacts of these reforms on the urban environments where they are implemented. Through a combination of empirical proof of reform benefits and a demonstration of the universality of reform applicability, as found in this study, supporters of reform are well-positioned to successfully advocate for change no matter the community they are fighting for.

Hopefully, this work can contribute to accelerating the changes that are essential for a just and sustainable future by building on research that shows that because MPRs no longer fit urban environments, parking reform is a fit everywhere. So that hopefully the era of cities parking themselves into oblivion, banning their most desirable neighborhoods and depriving themselves of the housing and development they so desperately need will soon be a thing of the past, an outdated, nearly unthinkable trend no city would dare to follow.

This research would not have been possible without the help of Tony Jordan and several PRN members. I thank you all, deeply and humbly, for your dedication and time taken to speak with me for this study.

If you found this research interesting and have further questions, please reach out to Sarah Stuetz on LinkedIn. The full thesis is available to be shared and includes sources, deeper analysis of political and economic conditions of pioneer cities, more elaborated implications of this research and further factors that contribute to reform (including a hesitancy to compare, epistemic communities and policy integration).