“Less Parking, More City”

Adding parking spaces might seem like the answer to traffic problems, but it ends up making them much worse.

That’s the message in this video produced by the Mexico branch of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, which Paul Barter shared at his blog, Reinventing Parking.

Mexico City has been adding parking at a feverish pace — faster than housing, offices, or retail — thanks in part to poorly conceived minimum parking requirements. The city is expected to add 175,000 parking spaces in the next three years. For half the cost of building all that parking, the city could create busways capable of transporting 1.5 million people to their destinations daily.

Barter reports that ITDP has been working hard to reform parking mandates in Mexico, and that the country and many of its localities are now revising their policies.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Urban Review STL reports that downtown St. Louis is getting one of those new “neighborhood Walmarts” near its subsidized ballpark. Pedestrian Observations ranks metro systems around the world by ridership per kilometer. And City Observatory shares some major findings about delays faced by American commuters.