How Many Parking Spaces Does a City Need? Just How Big Is the Gap in Our Parking Lots?

City landscapes are changing with each passing day—new urban areas spring up, and old neighborhoods undergo renovation and upgrading. Has the rapid development of urbanization increased your sense of well-being? If you’re striving and chasing dreams in the city, what inconveniences do you still face in daily life? The Government Work Report emphasizes “improving the quality of new-type urbanization” and “people being the core of new-type urbanization.”

Parking is so difficult—just how many parking spaces do we actually have?

“Who’d want to ‘park 游击战 (yóujīzhàn)—dash around searching for a spot’ every day if they had their own parking space?” In the second half of last year, Wu Feifei, a Beijing resident, obtained a license plate through the lottery system and bought a new car. But her joy turned to worry within days: although she lives in a high-end residential community, all the parking spaces allocated to the community had long been sold out, and there were barely any rental spaces available. On-street monthly parking costs 400 yuan, yet it doesn’t guarantee a fixed spot. “Sometimes when I get home late, I drive around for ages without finding a space, so I have to park randomly, risking a ticket, and hurry to move the car early the next morning.”

Parking difficulties aren’t unique to major cities like Beijing. As people’s living standards improve, the “automobile society” is taking shape faster. In many medium and small cities, “where to park tonight” has also become a headache for car owners.

Behind the parking crunch, the most direct cause is insufficient parking space supply. To improve parking lots and solve parking difficulties, we must first clarify the current supply-demand situation and estimate the size of the gap.

Generally speaking, a city’s parking demand is directly related to the total number of motor vehicles. Each car requires two types of spaces: basic parking spaces (relatively fixed spots for long-term parking needs) and trip-related parking spaces (spots for temporary parking during travel). The sum of these two types equals the total parking demand.

In September 2015, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) released the Guidelines for Urban Parking Facility Planning, which states that for cities with a planned population of over 500,000, the total number of parking spaces should be controlled at 1.1 to 1.3 times the number of motor vehicles. “The 1.1–1.3 range is actually an empirical value, and it largely depends on the city’s available space,” said Guo Jifu, Director of the Beijing Transport Institute. He gave an example: in the United States, the ratio of parking spaces to vehicles is as high as 2.5:1—a figure that is clearly unattainable in China, where land is scarce relative to population. Currently, Beijing has approximately 5.7 million motor vehicles; based on this, the ideal number of parking spaces should be between 6.2 million and 7.4 million.

In the past, the industry generally believed that the ratio of vehicles to parking spaces in Chinese cities was roughly 1:0.5. Data released by some cities is even more striking: Guangzhou has about 660,000 registered standard parking spaces, giving a vehicle-to-space ratio of approximately 1:0.3; Suzhou has over 2.75 million motor vehicles, but only 424,000 parking spaces in its urban area.

However, it’s important to note that the data released by many cities only includes registered parking spaces and does not cover a large number of non-commercial spaces (such as parking lots within institutions). A parking survey conducted in Beijing yielded a less grim result: the total number of verified parking spaces in urban areas of the city is 3.82 million. Based on actual parking conditions after 10:00 PM, the total number of parked vehicles is 3.84 million—meaning supply and demand are roughly balanced in terms of total quantity.

If that’s the case, why do residents still feel parking is difficult? The problem lies in the structural imbalance of parking space supply: many spaces are idle in outer urban areas, newly built districts, government institutions, and enclosed compounds, while old residential areas and city centers are overcrowded, with “one space hard to find.” Take Beijing as an example: the ratio of residential parking demand to residential parking spaces should be 1:1, but in reality, it’s only 1:0.63—creating a gap of 1.29 million spaces and leading to acute supply-demand conflicts at night.

We must both expand supply through construction and regulate order through management, truly achieving “park in designated spots, pay for parking, and be penalized for illegal parking.”

The Government Work Report proposes improving the quality of new-type urbanization and “upgrading public service facilities for daily needs, such as vegetable markets and parking lots.” Experts point out that reasonable parking demand should be met as much as possible, and the supply of parking lots should be expanded in an orderly manner; however, from the perspective of urban development and traffic management, construction cannot be “uncontrolled.”

“A single above-ground parking space takes up 25 square meters. If built underground, including access roads, ramps, and enclosures, it requires 40 square meters,” Guo Jifu said. This is comparable to the per capita living space of urban residents across China today—“larger than the living rooms of many families!”

Only by recognizing this fact will more people seriously consider: in a city where every inch of land is precious, how much space should we really allocate to parking?

Zhao Jie, Director of the Transportation Institute at the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, believes that compared with mandatory measures such as traffic restrictions or vehicle purchase quotas, strengthening the management of parking lots (as static traffic facilities) is a more rational and less controversial means of traffic regulation. MOHURD also states in the Guidelines for Urban Parking Facility Construction that the parking supply system should be built following the principle of “appropriately meeting the demand for basic parking spaces and strictly controlling trip-related parking spaces.” For city centers in particular, the scale of parking spaces should be controlled and parking price regulations relaxed to achieve the goal of “using static management to regulate dynamic traffic and ease congestion.”

Regrettably, current parking management is far from satisfactory, and “penalties for illegal parking” are merely a “superficial solution.”

Experts suggest that to truly solve parking difficulties, efforts must be made not only to expand supply through construction but also to regulate order through management—neither can be omitted. To break the vicious cycle, we must increase the cost of illegal parking through strict law enforcement, truly realizing “park in designated spots, pay for parking, and be penalized for illegal parking.”

Zhao Jie recommends that to address chaotic parking, measures such as cracking down on “illegal parking lots” and unauthorized fee collection must be implemented, or electronic technology can be used to standardize parking fees.

“We Go Up and Down”—Using Vertical Space and Time-Sharing to Improve Space and Parking Space Efficiency, and Perfecting a Sound Market Operation Mechanism

To park in designated spots, we must first have spots available. While standardizing order and smoothing mechanisms, we must find ways to quickly fill the supply gap. In recent years, many cities and enterprises have explored effective paths to expand supply, which are worth promoting and replicating.

In the past, there were only 30 above-ground parking spaces in front of the outpatient building of Beijing Air Force General Hospital. Today, two “parking buildings” (around 7 stories high) have been built there. The vertical circulation mechanical parking garage does not occupy additional space but provides 96 more parking spaces. Not long ago, during an inspection in Hangzhou, Zhao Jie discovered that an old residential community had set aside valuable space to build a 5-story underground cylindrical mechanical parking facility: “The driver parks the car at the entrance, and the garage automatically completes the parking process— the entire garage only occupies over 100 square meters.” In the future, intensive parking facilities such as above-ground, underground, and mechanical parking garages are expected to become “powerful tools” for solving parking difficulties in old residential areas.

On one side, spaces are empty; on the other, they’re fully occupied… The “tidal” flow of vehicles leads to obvious “imbalances” in parking spaces between public places and residential areas. At night, only 580,000 cars are parked in Beijing’s 1.47 million public building parking spaces—leaving about 60% of the spaces available.

To address this imbalance, informatization is key. In recent years, over 200 enterprises across China have developed various smart parking apps, such as “Ting Jiandan” (Easy Parking) and “Dingding Parking.” Some platforms have created “electronic parking maps” that integrate information such as parking lot locations and available spaces, allowing drivers to park “with clear targets”; others have installed smart parking locks for residential spaces, enabling residents to rent out their idle spaces to other drivers during free time. Some cities have also taken action—for example, Guangzhou plans to build a unified parking guidance platform.

Guo Jifu noted that currently, in residential areas of Beijing’s six core urban districts and suburban new towns, about 630,000 vehicles are parked randomly on internal open spaces and roads. If 50% of these are standardized, over 300,000 parking spaces could be provided.

However, this does not mean allowing cars to “park on the roadside with impunity.” Instead, it must be supported by pricing measures and strict supervision: “After standardization, fees should be gradually increased to use price leverage to ‘weed out’ price-sensitive users bit by bit. Once fewer cars are parked on the roadside, parking spaces can be gradually removed, ultimately returning a clean road space to residents,” Guo Jifu said.

With clear technical solutions, sufficient institutional impetus is still needed—adhering to a market-oriented direction and improving a sound operation mechanism.

“Cars are a personalized means of transportation; the government does not need to invest a large amount of financial resources in building public parking lots. Instead, it can attract social capital through incentives such as policy support, appropriate subsidies, and liberalized pricing,” Zhao Jie stated.

Liu Baojun, Vice President of the Beijing Parking Industry Association, believes that low parking fees do not match the economic value of land and services, which has dampened the enthusiasm of enterprises and private capital to invest in parking lots. Zhao Jie suggests that local governments should simplify approval procedures for links such as land use for parking lot construction.

"We also need to effectively control demand."

“Fifty years ago, Tokyo was much more congested than Beijing, and cars were parked everywhere in the city. Now, Tokyo’s population has grown to 37.5 million, and the number of motor vehicles has increased from less than 3 million to nearly 15 million—but the roads are not as congested. The key is that high-capacity rail transit has met travel demand in high-density central areas,” Guo Jifu said. Reducing the intensity of car use and ownership in core areas is the general trend of future urban development. To achieve this, we must make up for the shortcomings in public transportation, so that people are more willing and able to drive less. “Only when supply increases and demand decreases will the problem be truly solved.”