Why Is Parking So Expensive When So Many Spaces Sit Empty?

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of parking. Drivers can spend 20 minutes looking for a place to leave their car while, somewhere nearby, an empty driveway or parking space sits unused. A business may have vacant spaces after closing. An office may have dozens of spaces sitting empty on a work-from-home day. A church parking lot can be nearly empty for six days of the week and completely full on the seventh.

So how can a city have a parking problem when so much parking already exists?

The answer is that parking is not simply a question of how many spaces exist. It is a question of where those spaces are, who can use them, when they are available and whether drivers can actually find them. A parking space that is unavailable to a driver might as well not exist. At the same time, a space that sits empty for most of the day represents capacity that is not being used.

The Parking Space You Can't See

When drivers think about parking, they usually think about the spaces they know are available to them.

Street parking. Municipal lots. Commercial garages. Maybe a workplace parking lot. These are the visible parts of the parking system.

But there is another layer of parking spread throughout every community. Private driveways. Residential parking pads. Small business lots. Office spaces. Church lots. Apartment spaces. Parking areas belonging to organizations and institutions.

Much of this parking is invisible to the average driver.

It may be sitting 100 metres away from someone searching for a parking space, but if there is no way to access it, the driver has no reason to consider it an option.

The Problem Is Often Timing

Location is only half the equation.

Parking demand changes throughout the day. An office parking lot may be full at 9 a.m. and half empty at 6 p.m. A restaurant may need every space on Friday night but have plenty of availability in the morning. A church may have the opposite pattern, with its parking lot heavily used for a few hours on Sunday and relatively quiet during the rest of the week.

The same space can therefore be valuable at one time and irrelevant at another.

This is why simply counting parking spaces does not tell the whole story. A city could theoretically have enough parking capacity while still having a shortage of parking at the exact place and time a driver needs it.

A Space Does Not Need to Be Used All Day

We tend to think about parking spaces as though they have a single permanent purpose.

A driveway belongs to the homeowner. A business lot belongs to the business. An office space belongs to an employee. A church lot belongs to the congregation.

But ownership and utilization are two different things.

A homeowner might need a driveway overnight but not during the day. An office may need a space Monday morning but not Saturday afternoon. A business may need customer parking during operating hours but not after closing.

If the space is available during those unused periods, there is no inherent reason it could not serve someone else.

The challenge is creating a system that makes that possible.

The Sharing Economy Has a Lesson for Parking

One of the most important ideas behind the sharing economy is that ownership does not have to determine utilization.

A person can own a home without using every room every day. A car can sit unused for hours. Equipment can spend most of its life stored rather than operating.

Technology created marketplaces that allowed those underused assets to be shared.

Parking has the same basic characteristics.

A property owner has an asset. The asset is not being used all the time. Another person has a need for that asset. The opportunity is to connect them.

That is what shared parking does.

What If We Used the Parking We Already Have?

When parking becomes difficult, the natural response is to think about creating more.

Build another garage. Expand the lot. Add more spaces to a development. Convert land into parking.

Sometimes additional infrastructure is necessary. But construction is expensive, land is limited and new parking can take years to plan and build.

Before asking how many new spaces a city needs, there is another question worth asking.

How much of the existing parking supply is actually being used?

If a significant amount of parking sits empty during periods of high demand elsewhere, improving access to that existing capacity could provide another part of the solution.

This Is Where Parker Comes In

Parker is built around the idea that parking does not have to come exclusively from traditional parking operators.

People have parking.

Businesses have parking.

Organizations have parking.

And drivers need parking.

Parker creates a marketplace that can connect those two sides.

A homeowner can make a driveway available when it is not being used. A business can share spaces outside its operating hours. An office can make excess capacity available on days when fewer employees are present. A church can share parking when there are no services.

The result is not necessarily more parking spaces.

It is more accessible parking capacity.

Making Better Use of Existing Infrastructure

There is an important distinction between building more infrastructure and using existing infrastructure more efficiently.

A parking space that is occupied for two hours and empty for 22 hours has a different utilization pattern from a space that serves multiple drivers throughout the day.

The physical space has not changed. Its productivity has.

This concept is common in other areas of the economy. A hotel room does not need to have the same guest all year. A rental car does not need to have the same driver. A conference room can serve different groups throughout the day.

Parking can work the same way.

The opportunity is to match availability with demand.

The Homeowner Is Part of the Parking System

This is where the idea becomes particularly interesting.

Parking is usually viewed as something provided by governments, parking companies and property developers. Homeowners rarely think of themselves as parking providers.

But every driveway is part of the parking infrastructure of a neighbourhood.

If a homeowner has an unused parking space, that space is potentially useful to someone else. The homeowner may be five minutes from a transit station, a hospital, an office district or a busy commercial street.

The space does not need to be large. It does not need to belong to a parking company. It simply needs to be available and located somewhere people need to park.

The Same Applies to Businesses

Businesses can play an even larger role because many have multiple spaces.

Consider the thousands of small businesses that have parking during the day but little demand at night. Or office buildings that have fewer employees on site than their parking facilities were designed to accommodate.

Those spaces are already paved, marked and maintained.

The question is whether they should remain empty whenever the primary user does not need them.

Sharing them could potentially create revenue for the owner while giving drivers another option.

It is a relatively simple way of making existing infrastructure work harder.

A Parking Network Hidden in Plain Sight

The most interesting thing about shared parking may be that the infrastructure is already there.

The parking shortage does not necessarily require us to start from scratch.

There are spaces in driveways. Spaces behind businesses. Spaces beside offices. Spaces at churches and community organizations. Spaces on properties that are busy at one time and empty at another.

They are scattered throughout the same neighbourhoods where drivers are looking for parking.

The challenge is visibility and access.

Once those spaces can be discovered and shared, the definition of the parking supply changes.

Parking Powered by People

That is the larger idea behind Parker.

Parking does not have to be something that only governments and parking companies provide. It can be a resource shared by the people and organizations that already have it.

For drivers, that means more potential places to park.

For property owners, it means an opportunity to generate income from unused capacity.

For communities, it means making better use of infrastructure that already exists.

The parking space that solves someone's problem may not need to be built. It may be sitting in a driveway, behind a business or inside a parking lot that happens to be empty at that moment.

The Future of Parking May Already Be Here

The next time someone says a neighbourhood needs more parking, there may be another question worth asking first.

How much parking do we already have, and how much of it is sitting empty?

That question changes the conversation.

Instead of looking only at construction, it looks at utilization. Instead of treating parking as fixed infrastructure, it treats it as a shared resource. And instead of assuming that every parking problem requires more spaces, it asks whether existing spaces can be put to better use.

That is the opportunity Parker is pursuing.

Because sometimes the best new parking space is not a new parking space at all.

It is an existing space that has finally been made available to the person who needs it.