Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Matt Yglesias on requirements that businesses provide parking for their customers:

For the millionth time this isn’t something that needs regulating. Land is a valuable commodity. And ability to park one’s car is also valuable. Property owners in any given area are perfectly capable of evaluating what portion of land should be dedicated to parking based on the market demand for parking relative to the demand for other uses of land.

Requirements in cities and suburbs vary, but here in the burbs the general idea behind parking regulations is to make businesses pay for their own externalities instead of fobbing them off on other people. If I provide parking for my customers, and someone opens up next door and decides not to bother, then his customers will take up all my spots. If neither one of us provides enough parking because there’s a neighborhood nearby, then our customers will take up street parking that owners of existing houses have paid for and are accustomed to using. In both cases, there are people who would like to regulate parking in order to make life more convenient and prevent free riding.

Now, if your goal is simply to reduce the amount of parking so that it’s a pain in the ass and people will drive less, that’s fine. It’s a pretty roundabout way of doing it, but whatever. But if your goal is to match parking spaces to cars, then it’s simply not true that property owners are the best judges of how much parking is needed. Like profit maximizers anywhere, they’ll do their best to provide as little parking as possible and instead try to free ride on the parking that other people have already created and paid for.

If there were an efficient way to allow customers to park only in spaces specifically paid for by each business, then property owners could be left alone to determine their own parking requirements. But that’s rarely the case. Thus, regulations.

WE'LL BE BLUNT:

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't find elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate