Siegman & Associates founder Patrick Siegman spoke with Catie Gould of the Sightline Institute for her in-depth article on why cities and towns across the US are removing minimum parking mandates, what has happened in the places that have, and how they still manage to keep curb parking readily available.

“'When city staff manage on-street parking properly, they can prevent that on-street parking from getting overcrowded with a 99 percent success rate,' said Siegman, who has spent much of his career studying spillover parking concerns. The problem, he said, is that almost no one has training in how to manage street parking in a way that is both effective and politically popular. On-street parking management is not part of the core curriculum for planners or transportation engineers.

'What you’re essentially doing with on-street parking spaces is taking a valuable resource that belongs to the public and setting up rights to determine who gets to use it,' said Siegman. Any hotel manager knows that once the keys are gone, there is no vacancy. Yet cities often hand out multiple residential permits for every street space, and wait until the problem is so bad that neighbors have to petition for curbside management. When a neighborhood has more drivers seeking permits than there are on-street spaces, there are a number of ways to ensure balance.”

Continue reading at Land Lines, the Journal of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.