Finding a city parking spot can be painfully slow — Los Angeles drivers spend more than 80 hours a year looking for a space, and major metros from London to Frankfurt face similar headaches. Yet parking does more than frustrate drivers: it quietly shapes urban form. Many U.S. cities devote at least a quarter of their developable land to parking, and vast swathes of asphalt intensify summer heat and block stormwater, increasing flood risk.
Some city governments are reassessing the priority given to curbside car storage and imagining different uses for that pavement. Vienna has taken an especially deliberate approach: rather than expand parking, the city is removing on-street spaces and turning them into greenery and public amenities. More than 350 projects are converting asphalt into parks, plantings and plazas.
In central Neuer Markt, former curbside bays beside tourist routes have been pedestrianised and repopulated with trees and seating. One major street lost 140 parking spaces to create about 1.3 kilometres of cycling lanes and roadside planting, modeled in part on Dutch cycle-street ideas. Smaller “neighbourhood oasis” initiatives let residents petition district offices to transform single parking slots into community gardens, outdoor dining or play areas.
Vienna also ended free street parking citywide in 2022: all on-street spaces are now paid, and non-residents face a two-hour limit. That policy brings in roughly €180 million a year, which the city channels back into cycling and other sustainable mobility projects.
Crucial to Vienna’s strategy has been offering realistic alternatives for drivers. The city expanded park-and-ride garages with inexpensive all-day parking connected to an affordable, frequent transit network. Making it easy to switch modes helped public acceptance — residents now drive about 37% less than in the 1990s, and surveys show over two-thirds back reductions in parking in favor of more green space. Still, officials acknowledge the politics are hard: taking space from cars feels like an attack on people’s livelihoods or mobility to many motorists.
Those political dynamics are especially strong in the United States, where roughly 92% of households own at least one car. Yet U.S. cities are beginning to experiment with similar tactics. Dallas transformed a massive downtown parking lot into a 3.7-acre park; New York and San Francisco have made pandemic-era curbside dining and widened sidewalks into permanent public space; and raising curb prices has been used to curb parking demand while funding other projects.
Some municipalities, including San Jose and Austin, have removed minimum parking requirements for new developments, freeing up land for housing or amenities and loosening the assumption that every building needs a row of parking. Transportation experts note that streets are among a city’s most valuable assets, and rethinking how they’re used can unlock funding and create better public life.
Planners emphasize that reducing parking succeeds only when good alternatives are available. As Ina Homeier of Vienna’s planning department put it, decisions work best when residents are asked how they want their neighbourhoods to feel — full of cars or full of trees — and when affordable, convenient transit and cycling options are provided. Vienna’s experience suggests that, with choices and reinvestment, reclaiming curb space can cool cities, reduce car dependence and create more inviting public places.