ABSTRACT
Urban planners have diagnosed the parking problem in a way that makes it extremely expensive to solve. Believing that the problem is a parking shortage, planners require enough off-street spaces to satisfy the peak demand for free parking. If planners do copy other cities' parking requirements in an unscientific process we might term "unnatural selection," the requirements of different cities should converge over time. Urban planners receive almost no academic or professional guidance on how to set parking requirements. Planners' other common source of information about parking is the Parking Generation report published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Aside from the problem that many parking generation rates are statistically insignificant, they can seriously overestimate even the peak demand for free parking. The upward biases in parking and trip generation data differ from the strategic misrepresentation in forecasts that overestimate the benefits of proposed transportation projects.
