We’re used to thinking of “free parking” as that cozy little corner on the Monopoly board or as an amenity that makes it easy to visit a destination. In the era of Urban Renewal, planners zealously bulldozed urban neighborhoods and replaced them with high rise buildings, highways, and lots of parking lots. There’s still a zeal to put in lots of parking spaces every time a building goes up, and in many cases parking for new business establishments is mandated by zoning laws. However, parking lots have in many cases turned the city centers into virtual wastelands, hindered urban revitalization, and discouraged the use of mass transit.
http://www.governing.com/columns/assessments/gov-parking-urban-planning.html
This article highlights that allegedly “free” parking is not actually free. In fact, it costs cities and their residents a lot of money, while increasing traffic congestion and ugly downtowns. The author provides another scholar’s, Shoup, call to action/solution: “That cities systematically limit the number of parking spaces in the central city and charge higher prices for the ones that remain, all as a way of inducing people to do less driving.” However, we must question how this could play out practically, especially in a mixed-use zone. Furthermore, could the practice of limiting parking really uproot the entire individual-car-ownership phenomena (which I believe goes further into social conceptions of individualism/patriotism in the U.S)?