There is growing recognition of the negative effects of rapid suburbanization, also known as urban sprawl, which has dominated the development of urban areas for the past several decades. Both land use and transportation policies have contributed to this form of development, creating communities devoid of nearby services and with a characterless urban form and dependence on automobiles for travel. To address these issues, urban planners, architects, developers, and policy makers are considering form-based codes to guide and regulate urban development that creates complete and compact neighborhoods. Whereas form-based codes address urban form and land use, this study focuses on how parking requirements inhibit or support efforts to reduce urban sprawl and automobile dependency. Form-based codes are growing in popularity, and this paper investigates specifically parking policies in these types of land use regulations. This study finds that parking policies in the Miami 21 form-based code and Duany Plater–Zyberk's SmartCode do not offer a greatly different approach to parking than conventional zoning ordinances. The findings show that these codes have not fully embraced solutions from parking critics to address the issues of urban sprawl and automobile dependency. Both codes include some marginal improvements to existing parking policies but do not maximize the potential form-based codes offer to include more progressive solutions to reduce automobile dependency by limiting excesses in parking requirements. This paper recommends that future form-based codes integrate more progressive parking policy solutions to reduce automobile dependency and urban sprawl.
Comparison of Parking Requirements in Zoning and Form-Based Codes
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board ; 2187 , 1 ; 138-145
2010-01-01
Article (Journal)
Electronic Resource
English
Comparison of Parking Requirements in Zoning and Form-Based Codes
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