TOOL 26
Remove Parking Minimums and Implement Shared Parking Procedures

Long Description.

Theme: Integration of Land Use and Transportation; Role: Planners, Elected Officials; Complexity: Level 2; Scale: Local.

Overview

This tool focuses on removing parking minimums and promoting shared parking procedures and curbside management strategies to reduce vehicle trips and associated exposure, provide for flexible right-of-way reallocation, and make on-street parking tradeoff decisions easier. These actions support the Safe System Approach (SSA) by reducing population-scale exposure to high-speed, high-mass vehicles; enabling more space-efficient and multimodal street design; and reinforcing more compact, sustainable land use patterns.

Why Is This Important?

This tool is important for institutionalizing the SSA in planning and programming because it targets exposure: addressing systemic, population-level conditions that impact how many vehicle trips occur and how much kinetic energy enters the overall transportation network.

Parking policy directly influences land use, development patterns, and travel behavior. Minimum parking requirements can limit density, increase housing costs, and lead to large areas of land dedicated to parking. These outcomes tend to encourage driving over walking, bicycling, or riding transit, ultimately increasing traffic volumes and risk exposure. Removing minimums and enabling shared or unbundled parking allows for more flexible, compact development; lowers the cost and feasibility of infill housing; and supports mode shift. These changes also help jurisdictions shift toward 15-minute communities, where daily needs are accessible by foot, bicycle, or transit, reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and therefore risk exposure.

Description

This tool focuses on three interrelated strategies: removing parking minimums, enabling shared parking, and advancing curbside management practices. Together, these strategies can reshape how land is allocated, streets are designed, and demand is managed, ultimately reducing systemic risk across the transportation network and making right-of-way tradeoff decisions easier.

Key Components of this Tool

Eliminate Parking Minimums

• Removing minimum parking requirements gives developers more flexibility and encourages denser, mixed-use, transit-oriented development. It reduces construction costs (especially for structured parking) and supports more affordable housing near key destinations, thereby reducing VMT and trip generation.
• When parking is unbundled from rent or sale prices, it better reflects the true cost of parking and incentivizes households to own fewer vehicles.

Require Parking Maximums

• Providing a parking maximum in local policy or zoning regulations sets a maximum amount of parking a developer can provide based on the number of units, square footage, or similar development measures. This is typically applied in downtown areas and transit-oriented development zones.
• When a parking maximum is applied, residents, visitors, and employees are incentivized to choose non-auto travel modes, less land needs to be devoted to parking and can be available for more efficient and sustainable uses, induced demand is avoided, and development is typically more compact, walkable, and a mix of uses.

Implement Shared Parking Procedures

• Shared parking strategies improve parking utilization by enabling different land uses (e.g., office, retail, residential) to use the same spaces at different times of the day or week.
• This reduces the total parking supply needed in a community, freeing up land for housing, green space, or active transportation infrastructure.
• Shared parking also allows curb space to be repurposed for bicycle lanes, wider sidewalks, or transit-priority lanes without a net loss in parking access.

Advance Curbside Management

• Curbside management treats the curb as a dynamic zone with competing demands: loading, drop-offs, transit lanes and stops, bicycle lanes, parklets, and parking.
• Supported by emerging technologies, jurisdictions can use pricing, time restrictions, and dynamic use flexibility to ensure the curb is allocated to its highest and best use, depending on the surrounding context.
• Coordinated on- and off-street parking strategies allow cities to reallocate curb space without diminishing access, especially when supported by shared-use agreements or parking technology.

Recommended in Combination with Other Tools

21. Update Transportation Impact Assessment Guidelines

28. Provide Affordable Housing and Balance Jobs and Housing

29. Implement Mixed-Use and TOD Strategies

30. Enable Priced Parking and Congestion Pricing

Case Study

Metropolitan Transportation Commission Transit-Oriented Communities Policy

The San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) adopted the Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) Policy to advance the goals of Plan Bay Area 2050 by aligning local land use and transportation decisions. The policy requires jurisdictions seeking

regional transportation funding to adopt policies across four key areas: land use density, affordable housing, parking management, and complete streets/multimodal access.

A central element of the policy is parking management reform, which includes eliminating minimum parking requirements for new residential and commercial development in most Transit Tiers and setting parking maximums based on the areaʼs Transit Tier classification. MTC defines the Transit Tiers as:

• Tier 1: Rail stations serving regional centers (i.e., Downtown San Francisco, Downtown Oakland, and Downtown San José).
• Tier 2: Stop/station served by two or more Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) lines or BART and Caltrain.
• Tier 3: Stop/station served by one BART line, Caltrain, light rail transit, or bus rapid transit.
• Tier 4: Commuter rail (SMART, ACE, Capitol Corridor, Valley Link) stations, Caltrain stations south of Tamien, or ferry terminals.

Requiring jurisdictions to eliminate parking minimums and adopt shared parking and curbside management practices helps reduce traffic volumes, shift trip modes, and free up curb space for safety enhancements, such as pedestrian infrastructure or protected bicycle lanes. More information is available through the MTC TOC Policy.

Additional Resources

• A New Transportation Safety Paradigm: Written by Todd Litman for the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, this report reframes traditional traffic safety thinking by emphasizing the role of transportation demand management (TDM) strategies, such as parking pricing and land use reform, in reducing systemic risk. The report argues that lowering VMT through tools like parking policy change is among the most effective and underutilized ways to reduce crashes and improve population-scale safety.
• CAPCOA—Handbook for Quantifying TDM: Produced by the California Air Pollution Control Officers Association (CAPCOA), this guide provides standardized methods for estimating the effectiveness of various land use and TDM strategies in reducing VMT. Parking-related measures, such as eliminating minimums, unbundling costs, and implementing shared parking, are shown to have some of the highest VMT reduction potential.

References

California Air Pollution Control Officers Association. Handbook for Analyzing Greenhouse Gas Emission Reductions, Assessing Climate Vulnerabilities, and Advancing Health and Equity. October 2024. https://www.caleemod.com/documents/handbook/full_handbook.pdf

Litman, Todd. A New Transportation Safety Paradigm. Victoria Transport Policy Institute. Accessed June 2025. https://www.vtpi.org/ntsp.pdf

Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) Policy. Accessed July 3, 2025. https://mtc.ca.gov/planning/land-use/transit-oriented-communities-toc-policy