Off‐Street Parking Policy without Parking Requirements: A Need for Market Fostering and Regulation

This paper addresses and extends upon the recent upsurge of interest in market‐oriented reform of parking policy, which has been reinvigorated by the work of Donald Shoup. His market‐oriented approach to parking policy is shown to be the more ambitious of two distinct challenges to the conventional supply‐focused approach. The other is ‘parking management’. However, off‐street parking markets and their post‐reform dynamics have been neglected so far in proposals to deregulate the quantity of off‐street parking. The paper highlights additional barriers to the emergence of off‐street parking markets and several likely problems within them. Rather than suggesting the rejection of market‐oriented parking policy, these findings are taken to imply a need for a more vigorous policy effort than has so far been called for. Achieving well‐functioning off‐street parking markets would require efforts both to actively foster such markets and to regulate to ensure their health. Deregulation would not be enough.