From Emily Badger at Wonkblog: Does the availability of parking cause more driving?

If planning and things like Complete Streets is an interest of yours then Wonkblog needs to be on your list of blogs to check out at least once a week. The issue is parking in this article and how much does the availability of parking influence driving behavior and, not mentioned specifically but understood, should policies like minimum parking requirements be reexamined? Here are two excerpts:

     It is a firm principle in my household that we will not, under almost any circumstance, get in the car after sundown on Friday or Saturday night. We won't pick you up at the airport, or drive to dinner at your house. We won't just run out to the grocery store, or partake of social events unreachable by foot or bike, or a short Uber.
     We live off H Street in Washington with its bars and restaurants and performing arts, and if we drive away in the evening, when we get back there will simply be nowhere to park. We would behave, no doubt, a lot differently if parking were not an issue. We would probably take more trips.

[and. . .] 

     Past studies have found that parking availability at home is strongly associated with car ownership and use. And more parking at the office is correlated with more employees driving to work alone. Commuters who work in Manhattan, for instance, are also more likely to drive in when they have parking to return to at night.
     It's a provocative argument, though, that parking causes driving, and if this were true, a lot of city policies would look sort of backwards.

On any issue dealing with parking the work of Donald Shoup is rarely left out on this blog. He's been cited many times and also by our good friends at Walkable West Palm. The interesting thing about Donald Shoup is he researched what cars were doing 95% of the time, parked, while everyone else was researching what cars were doing the other 5% of the time: driving on the roads. Here is a link to his now-famous book, The High Cost of Free Parking.