Putting parking in its place

AT THE END OF June 2024, there were 41.7 million licensed vehicles in the UK, an increase of 1% compared with the end of June 2023. The total number of licensed vehicles has increased in all but two years (1991 & 2020) since the end of the Second World War, according to vehicle licensing statistics.

Not surprisingly, cars make up the majority at 33.93 million (81.3%), with 4.8 million LGVs (11.5%), and 0.54 million HGVs (1.3%).

For anyone involved in transport, this volume of vehicles on the move is an obvious key ingredient in policy and planning. But for most of the time they pose a rather different problem - where they are to be parked when not moving around?

In fact, according to analysis by the RAC Foundation, the average car or van in England is driven just 4% of the time, a figure that has barely changed in a quarter of a century.

For the rest of the time the car or van is either parked at home (73%) or parked elsewhere (23%), for example at work.

As the era of mass car ownership developed in the first half of the 20th century, many of the challenging implications were slow to be recognised. Initial fears were for the effects on human wellbeing from travelling at what appeared to be rapid speed, and also whether these noisy mechanical vehicles might frighten the horses or collide with people on foot or on bicycles, causing injury.

Little attention was given to a number of the major issues of which we are now well aware, including the emissions from the petrol engines, or the fact that carbon was being burned and put into the atmosphere. Nor was there great concern at the need to provide an ever-growing amount of highway capacity, and the problems that ultimately arose of congestion and dislocation in both towns and cities and across the countryside.

Not much thought at all was given either to the land requirement and physical accommodation for all these vehicles – not only when they were moving on the road, but when stationary and parked, often on valuable real estate.

In England in 2022, the latest National Travel Survey published by the Department for Transport revealed that only 10% of household vehicles were parked in a garage overnight; with 62% kept on private property (but not garaged), 25% left on the street, and 3% in other places.

The NTS also reveals that in the 20 years since 2002 the proportion of respondents parking vehicles in garages has actually decreased, from 22% to the current 10%, and the proportion parking elsewhere on private property has increased by about the same amount (from 50% to 62%). Many garages are now not used for cars, but seen as a valuable extra room for the home, so the car must go elsewhere.

These figures are not only significant for transport policy, but also for housing and land use policy too.

As the report Standing Still, published by the RAC Foundation in 2021, put it, “For all the debate that goes on about how, for environmental reasons, we ought to curtail the amount of driving we do, it is still quite remarkable just how little of their lives our cars spend actually being driven.”

The penny dropped slowly for the public policy implications of all these vehicles needing to be provided with parking space. Domestic provision for cars to be kept ‘at home’ grew up gradually in new housing design, providing for driveways and garages. Where existing housing stock was not suitable to accommodate this - eg. in terraces - vehicles gradually filled up the kerbside at or near people’s homes – a problem as yet to be really resolved despite the arrival of residential parking controls and systems like CPZs and permits.

At the other end of the journey, so to speak, cars have increasingly needed to be parked at or near workplaces, town centres, shopping facilities and other visit destinations. Here the solution has not generally been specific space allocation to an individual user, but a collective challenge in managing parking provision for both private and public authorities.

This kind of parking provision and control saw the introduction of meters and other organised bays from the 1950s, stimulating both private commercial development of car parks at surface level (many on bomb sites in the post was years) and then multi-storeys to pack in more capacity in confined areas.

The authorities only slowly learned how to handle this marketplace for parking, even to determine whether it should be a free service or something for which a charge could reasonably be made.

As often, the situation in the most car-oriented society in the world – the USA – was moving forward ahead of that in Britain, not, unfortunately, predominantly with any careful approach to matching supply and demand, thus ensuring the shape of cities took priority over vehicles.

Regulations regarding building design were, meanwhile, drawn up in a quest to satisfy the voracious demand for parking space and make sure that both residential and commercial buildings had to make provision for minimum levels of capacity.

Eventually, some thought began to be given to more rational and durable solutions – and one man became a leader in this field. He was Donald Shoup, who died last week, and is recognised as an inspirational figure in transport planning for his groundbreaking work on parking policy and its impact on urban planning, traffic management, sustainability, and economic development.

Shoup argued that traditional parking requirements – like mandatory minimum parking spaces for new developments – led to urban sprawl, traffic congestion and higher housing costs. He also contended that use of space for parking required an appropriate price for the scarce resource involved.

Shoup was one of the few Americans promoting a more progressive and alternative approach to car-dominant planning in a way that appreciated the cultural difficulties that raised. His work was a wake-up call to show how cities were wasting valuable land and resources by prioritising car storage over more efficient land uses.

He advocated for three key reforms:

• Eliminate Parking Minimums – Instead of requiring excessive off-street parking, he suggested letting the market determine parking supply.

• Price Parking Correctly – He proposed demand-based pricing, where parking costs adjust in real time to ensure some spaces are always available.

• Use Parking Revenue for Local Improvements – He suggested reinvesting parking fees into street improvements, making the policy more palatable for communities.

It was a long haul for Shoup to make headway with this thinking, and, indeed, it is still far from accepted conventional wisdom in all places, while parking remains an often-overlooked topic in transport policy. His book The High Cost of Free Parking (2005) nonetheless became influential among planners, urbanists, and policymakers in north America — and beyond.

By fixing parking policies, Shoup argued that cities could reduce car dependency, encourage public transport use, and make streets more pedestrian-friendly – all of which contribute to sustainability and liveability.

Cities worldwide, from San Francisco to London, have adopted policies inspired by ‘Shoupian’ thinking, leading to more efficient land use and better urban design.

Despite the advice from the likes of Shoup, not all city authorities have played their hand well in dealing with the management of urban parking and its economic value. The now notorious Chicago parking concession of 2008 provided a 75-year lease to a private investment company against a sizeable upfront payment of $1.15bn (£912m). It seemed a lot, but in terms of the long term value it was not. The concessionaire has the right for years to operate over 36,000 on-street metered parking spaces in the city, and collect and retain the revenues; though the city retained responsibility for parking enforcement. This was a classic short-term fix presented as a way to patch up a massive budget hole at the city following the financial crash. But looking back, critics now argue it’s been a disaster for the city in the management of it prime resource of the road space, and the overall management of the urban realm.

A key message of this issue regarding parking provision, is that the most obvious short term policy considerations in transport are not always the ones that may ultimately matter most. If those responsible for the regulation and supervision of the growth in motorised travel back in the first part of the 20th century had seen this coming, they would arguably have shaped a different framework for this element of the equation. Even by 2008, the short-term fix clouded the long term view.

Parking remains a badly neglected element of transport policy.

Interestingly, the Department for Transport has got a couple of mentions of parking into the script for developing its promised new 10-year-long Integrated National Transport Strategy for England, which the DfT now describes as aimed at “improving connectivity and economic growth across the country”.

The project seems to have been narrowed to focus on integrating local transport service provision rather than setting strategic transport planning and policy considerations.

As far as motoring is concerned, the DfT says: “Recognising that driving is often a necessary choice, the department will be listening to ideas on how to help drivers, which could include systems that help manage traffic flows or help drivers easily find and pay for parking spaces.”

More a consumerist approach, it seems, than a transport policy one, and branded under the government’s all-encompassing wider Plan for Change. “The new ‘people-centred’ Integrated National Transport Strategy (INTS) will join up transport networks, empower local leaders and drive economic growth,” is the DfT’s line.

It, therefore, now seems unlikely that this new strategy will want to grapple with the difficult issue of transport’s wider impacts, like charging to reflect the costs and externalities it brings, either for parking or with the idea of some new general form of road user charging.

If Local Transport Minister Simon Lightwood, who has just launched a road show programme to collect input, really wants to set an agenda to “empower local leaders to build a system that’s right for their needs, connecting cars and buses, trams and trains, and cycling and walking, into one joined-up system”, he might care to ensure parking is part of the equation, and look at the trade-offs between the different modes, and in particular, the opportunities offered by appropriate pricing systems.

The DfT says the roadshow will examine things like how technology can manage traffic, co-ordinated bus and train timetables, and parking options, all made accessible via an app. The INTS aims to create what the Department calls a “national vision of transport, but delivered by local people, where the power belongs”.

At the same time, but not obviously much connected to the activities of Lightwood and his colleagues at the DfT, the Government department responsible for planning, The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has been pushing forward its plans for a big new wave of housing development to secure the provision of 1.5 million new homes during this Government’s first term. This will include the creation of a set of New Towns, and other new housing developments on both ‘Grey Belt’ land within the Green Belt, and brownfield areas of already developed predominantly urban land.

Two published reports related to this mission, likely to be very interesting to transport planners, have just been published, as we report in this issue. One explores the idea of ‘Brownfield passports’ to facilitate and expedite the use of any available land for housing in already built up areas, and the other is the first report of the New Towns Taskforce established by the Government, setting out its guiding principles for how these major new communities should be planned and designed. Both reports stress the benefits of an increased density of housing development to both secure the provision of new homes, and improve the economic model for the provision of services - including transport and community facilities for those who will live in the new housing stock.

The issue of appropriate provision for parking is surely going to be a major issue here – in terms of both the style of housing built, the land take, and the expectations of residents of how they can accommodate their cars when they are not being used - ie the parking issue and what space for cars is allowed.

These are significant and sensitive issues for the Government, and local authorities, in terms of parking provision management – and how it is paid for. Both for the residents, and at the other locations which need to accommodate cars –from businesses to retailers and other service and leisure providers.

Will the Government be grasping this nettle, and acknowledging the logic of Donald Shoup’s work? Might the strategy be willing to embrace the options of mechanisms like the use of parking income to pump-prime better local bus services as part of policies to achieve modal shift, or even fund new high-quality rapid transit provision, as did Nottingham from its Workplace Parking Levy?

These approaches would mean addressing rather tough decisions about the priorities and best overall outcomes of integrated multi-modal policy packages for both the transport users, non-users, and the community as a whole. From the language now being used it is not looking as though that difficult equation will be something that the Government wants to be responsible for, as short term again eclipses the more difficult longer view.

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT909, 19 February 2025.