The End of Parking Misery

Parking is one of the most vexed commodities in modern American life. A nation of about 300 million citizens with 255 million registered cars has as many as 800 million parking spaces, but not enough at the right place at the right time. A family needs a place to park their car when they’re home, but that space goes empty whenever they’re at work. Workers need a place to park their car when they’re at the office, but nobody is at the office most of the time. For all this parking bounty, it often seems that there’s never anywhere to park—at least not where you want to go. The mix of massive excess capacity and chronic shortage is one of the biggest, most persistent, and least examined failures of the American economy. Fixing it is going to require better policies, but it also needs a healthy boost from the private sector. Into the breach steps Parking Panda, launched earlier thi...