Residential Street Parking and Car Ownership

Zhan Guo

Journal of the American Planning Association, 2013, vol. 79, issue 1, 32-48

Abstract: Problem, research strategy, and findings: Local governments' minimum street-width standards may force developers to oversupply, and residents to pay excessively for, on-street parking in residential neighborhoods. Such oversupply is often presumed to both encourage car ownership and reduce housing affordability, although little useful evidence exists either way. This article examines the impact of street-parking supply on the car ownership of households with off-street parking in the New York City area. The off- and on-street parking supply for each household was measured through Google Street View and Bing Maps. The impact of on-street parking on car ownership levels was then estimated in an innovative multivariate model. The unique set-up of the case study ensures 1) the weak endogeneity between parking supply and car ownership and 2) the low correlation between off-street and on-street parking supply, two major methodological challenges of the study. Results show that free residential street parking increases private car ownership by nearly 9%; that is, the availability of free street parking explains 1 out of 11 cars owned by households with off-street parking. Takeaway for practice: These results offer support for community street standards that make on-street parking supply optional. They also suggest the merits of leaving the decisions of whether, and how many, on-street parking spaces to provide in new residential developments to private markets rather than regulations. Research support: This project was supported by grants from the University Transportation Research Center (Region 2) and the Wagner School Faculty Research Fund.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01944363.2013.790100 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rjpaxx:v:79:y:2013:i:1:p:32-48

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjpa20

DOI: 10.1080/01944363.2013.790100

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the American Planning Association is currently edited by Sandi Rosenbloom

More articles in Journal of the American Planning Association from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().