Policy Drivers for Sustainable Mobility Solutions

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Parking reform offers a major opportunity to New York’s municipalities to help tackle climate change, improve accessibility, and deliver a host of wider economic and quality of life benefits. For decades, car-centric planning and policy has over-supplied and subsidized parking, incentivizing ever greater car use over alternatives and occupying vast swaths of valuable land. By reversing this process, municipalities can encourage the use of more sustainable alternatives, reduce congestion, lower the cost of housing, and even generate municipal revenues. Although parking reform can be a contentious subject, a growing recognition of the urgency of addressing climate change, changes in working patters created by the COVID-19 pandemic, and new transport related technologies all open new opportunities to act.

The Columbia SIPA Capstone team provided a practical guide for leaders and citizens who are ready to pursue local parking reform. It draws on existing research and interviews with officials from across the State and includes:

• Evidence on the benefits of parking reform.
• A menu of policy solutions to manage the supply and demand for parking.
• Illustrative examples of parking reform in action.
• An implementation roadmap.
  
   

Every municipality will have its own challenges and opportunities when it comes to parking reform and this guide aims to provide the full range of the interventions available to meet them. These both reduce the supply of parking and encourage alternatives to driving. This guide also provided inspiration on how solutions might be combined and a flexible framework to help municipality leaders design and implement reform.