London's 2004 parking reform: what happened when minimums were scrapped

Benchmark note · Parking policy

The reform

England's national planning guidance (PPG13) said in 2001 that parking standards should be maximums rather than minimums. In February 2004 the London Plan required London's boroughs to make that switch, and all of them did so in 2004 or soon after.

What researchers found

Zhan Guo and colleagues compared what developers actually built with what the old minimum standards would have required:

• Parking supply in new development fell by about 40%.
• Between 2004 and 2010 that meant 143,893 fewer spaces.
• Only 2.2% of the reduction came from the new maximums. The rest came simply from removing the minimums: developers chose to build less parking once they were no longer forced to.

The lesson

The striking point is that the cap did very little. Most of the change came from no longer forcing developers to build parking they did not think buyers wanted. That suggests minimums in London had been well above real demand.

Relevance to Indian cities

Indian development control regulations typically set minimums by number of flats or floor area. Nobody systematically checks how many of those spaces are used. A simple first step for any Indian city would be the same kind of study: compare spaces required with spaces actually occupied in a sample of recent buildings. If occupancy is low, the case for lower minimums near transit becomes evidence-based rather than ideological.

Sources

• Parking Reform Atlas: London parking maximums (and minimums abolition)
• Greater London Authority: London Plan parking policy

About this note: desk research by the WA Foundation research desk, using the published sources listed above. Figures are reported as given by those sources. This is not original fieldwork and has not been externally peer reviewed. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with credit to WA Foundation.