Roughly Right or Precisely Wrong?

Over the last 10 years there has been a lot of very interesting work and research on how much parking is needed in different types of places. One of the leading authorities on parking is Professor Donald Shoup. Prof. Shoup wrote a well researched book called The High Price of Free Parking. 700 some pages on parking. A great resource if the PDF linked below gets you thinking about how parking is managed.

Below is a link to PDF paper publish before the book that digs into how shoddy the work that established parking minimums really was. Where those apparently precise off street parking requirement numbers come from?

This is more than some idle curiosity. When a municipality sets the minimum number of off-street parking spaces too high, the amount of land used by parking is increased and because the effective property tax rate on surface parking is so low, the local tax base is reduced. Essentially, if we spread civilization too thinly we have a hard time paying for it. One of the consequences of _false precision_ turns out to be reduced property tax revenue.

The median price to build a parking space in a parking garage is over $21,000. At that number you really don't want to build more spaces than you need , just because an engineer used some decimal places in the standards published by the Institute for Transportation Engineering (ITE).

Roughly right is always better than precisely wrong.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235360495_Roughly_Right_or_Precisely_Wrong