With the City Council’s recent vote, Cambridge, Massachusetts becomes the latest city to reform parking requirements. Cambridge is unique among Massachusetts cities in that it is the first to fully eliminate parking minimums citywide. But it is not unique among U.S. cities more generally, and comes as a wave of other locations, including San Francisco, California; Lexington, Kentucky; and St. Paul, Minnesota; have made sweeping parking reforms.

Parking minimums are a type of urban regulation that require developers to provide a predetermined number of parking spaces for a certain number of residential units or a given developed square footage. These mandates centralize decision making and impose uniformity, rather than leaving parking decisions to developers or property owners who are likely to understand the needs of residents and appreciate how these needs vary across geography and over time.

As such, parking mandates are a great example of an urban regulation that reduces efficiency and unnecessarily increases costs. Parking mandates also compel vehicle‐​centric transit in what is—or would otherwise be—urban areas. Because land is expensive, especially in urban and development constrained areas, the costs of parking mandates can be substantial.