Parking Requirements in Some Major
Asian Cities
Paul A. Barter
Parking requirements are a hotly debated element of parking policy.
Yet such requirements are common worldwide. Little effort had been
made, however, to make international comparisons that could place
local policies into wider perspective. This study focused on parking
requirement policies in 14 cities in South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast
Asia. Cities in these regions have tended to be high in urban density, rel-
atively low in car ownership, and, in some cases, strongly transit-oriented
in their urban transport systems. In the West, localities with these char-
acteristics often reject the suburban-style parking policy that requires
minimum parking, and adopt alternatives. Nevertheless, all Asian cities
in the study did enforce such parking requirements on building devel-
opments. This surprising enforcement result raised questions. Are these
Asian parking requirement policies really similar to those in the West?
Are criticisms of Western policies relevant in Asia? Are there lessons
to be drawn from parking requirement practices in this region? Such
questions were addressed through comparisons of parking requirement
policies in the 14 Asian cities (and with reference to Western practice,
especially in North America and Australia). The study drew on infor-
mation collected for a wider study of parking policy in Asia commis-
sioned by the Asian Development Bank. The results revealed diversity,
including some distinctive approaches. The findings should provide
insights that are useful in debates on parking policy reform, inside and
outside the region.
Most municipalities worldwide require building developers to pro-
vide a certain amount of car parking space, usually within the same
premises. Excessive minimum parking requirements have been
criticized for encouraging so-called free parking, which shifts park-
ing costs away from car users, and for being a key barrier to more
transit-oriented, less car-dependent forms of development (1, 2).
The potential importance of parking policy is increasingly recog-
nized, as is the fact that contrasting parking policy choices are avail-
able (3–6). A lack of international comparative literature on the
subject, however, makes it difficult to obtain a sense of perspective to
inform local parking policy debates. This absence of a comparative
perspective is especially acute outside the West.
This study addressed this gap and focused on parking requirement
policies in 14 Asian cities. The South Asian cities in the study were
Ahmedabad, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. The East Asian cities
included three in China: Beijing in the north, and Guangzhou and
the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in the south. The
Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, 469C Bukit
Timah Road, Singapore 259772. paulbarter@nus.edu.sg.
Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board,
No. 2245, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington,
D.C., 2011, pp. 79–86.
DOI: 10.3141/2245-10
79
other East Asian cities were Seoul, South Korea; Taipei, Taiwan; and
Tokyo. The Southeast Asian cities were Bangkok, Thailand; Hanoi,
Vietnam; Jakarta, Indonesia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Manila,
Philippines; and the city–state of Singapore.
What approach to parking supply policy should it be expected to
find in Asian cities? Given Western parking policy literature, the
expectation would be parking policies for newer, more automobile-
oriented suburban areas, in contrast to policies set in older and
denser parts of the urban fabric. Suburban-style zoning for parking
is increasingly seen as ill-suited to areas in Western cities built up
before the rise of automobile-oriented planning norms. Such areas
therefore often use alternative approaches (1). Because Asian cities
tend to be high in urban density across much of their metropolitan
areas and relatively low in car ownership, it might therefore be expected
that Asian jurisdictions generally would reject parking policies suited
to automobile-oriented suburban locations. Nevertheless, the study
found that all of the Asian cities examined did impose minimum
parking space requirements.
This surprising observation prompted the focus of this study, which
was to investigate whether or not Asian parking space requirements
were similar to those that have been most criticized in the West. Some
Asian cities did indeed impose parking space requirements akin to
those in Western, automobile-oriented areas, and these requirements
might become increasingly problematic. Other cities in the study
have taken an approach to parking space requirements akin to an
approach often used in the inner cities of American or Australian
cities. In some of the East Asian cities examined, however, the
approach to parking space requirements was strikingly distinctive
and might be especially worthy of further investigation.
PARKING REQUIREMENTS
AND THEIR DISCONTENTS
Conventional suburban parking policy requires every building site
to provide on-site parking space sufficient to meet its own demand.
Derived from the technical advice of the traffic engineering profession,
these parking requirements have been formulated through studies of
peak parking demand for various building types. The requirements
are justified for their prevention of off-site parking, which is seen as
an externality imposed by the development on the vicinity and labeled
as spillover. With this framing of the situation, it seems reasonable
to fear that, unless required to, developers will provide too little
on-site parking.
This rationale has long come under attack on various grounds.
The negative impacts of parking requirements allegedly include
economic distortions that arise from the ways in which parking
requirements distort travel choices, promote low-density development,
80
prompt parking costs to be bundled with other services, increase the
cost of housing, harm low-income households, and blight the built
landscape (7–11). Most parking demand studies that are used to
guide parking requirements in suburban North America and Austral-
asia have inbuilt, automobile-oriented assumptions. They seek data
on isolated buildings, invariably in low-density locations where there
is no pricing of parking. Theses studies thus were biased to reveal
unconstrained demand at car-dependent destinations. Unsurprisingly,
they resulted in requirements that produced levels of parking supply
that rarely have been saturated even at zero price (7).
Despite such criticism, parking requirements remain almost uni-
versal in suburban jurisdictions as popular ways to prevent parking
conflict and to ease enforcement, among other reasons (12). These
requirements work in tandem with zoning to cap the density of new
development, and placate suburban fears of greater traffic genera-
tion and changes in neighborhood character. Even smart growth and
form-based planning codes have failed to reform parking require-
ments significantly (13). The bundling of parking costs with other
services, or with real estate, so that parking is free-of-charge to the
user can be seen as rational in cases in which prices are too low to
be efficiently levied (14).
Dissatisfaction with conventional parking requirement policy is
more pointed in denser inner-urban localities, even in the United
States. As mentioned above, such cases may be relevant in Asian
cities, which are diverse, yet mostly densely urban, with mixed-use
across large areas. These characteristics are akin to those of inner
city and city center areas in North America and Australia. In such
locations in the West, often it is considered problematic to apply
parking standards that are inflexible.
High minimum parking requirements can block adaptive reuse of
old buildings and hinder cost-effective development on small plots
when applied rigidly to older, densely developed landscapes, and thus
worsen inner-urban blight (2). Old areas that keep intact most of their
historic, urban fabric obtain little new parking space through require-
ments that are triggered by building activity. In many American city
centers, such requirements do create parking but often in destructive
ways. They prompt demolition to make way for required parking
adjacent to, or near, redeveloped or reused buildings. Urban blight
itself prompts demolition, which creates vacant lots often used for
parking. Parking requirements thus contribute both directly and
indirectly to the creation of blighted, inner-urban landscapes.
In practice, dense, inner areas often scrap or reform their parking
requirements to avoid their blighting effects. In fact, inner cities and
traditional downtowns usually are the only places in American or
Australian metropolitan areas that adopt alternatives to conventional
requirements for minimum parking. Only in such areas have park-
ing management alternatives long been applied. Here parking has
been used as a tool to shape wider transport behavior with a toolbox
that includes parking maximums; caps, levies, or both; diverse pric-
ing practices; and encouragement of shared parking, among many
other tools (1). Similarly, Shoup’s reform proposals, which include
the abolishment of parking requirements, have thus far garnered
interest mainly in inner city locations (15). A more modest reform
effort has focused on demand assessments that are more realistic,
with less extremely automobile-oriented assumptions, so that the
resulting parking requirements better suit each site within its actual
context and take into account any pricing and the quality of access
for alternatives to the car. Even this moderate reform effort has been
confined to inner-urban contexts in North America for the most part,
although proponents would like to see it extended (1, 16).
Transportation Research Record 2245
OBJECTIVES AND METHODS
Parking requirements can be problematic in high-density parts of
Western cities, and they now face reform efforts. Different approaches
might therefore be expected in Asia, home to some of the world’s dens-
est cities. Yet every one of the 14 Asian cities in the three subregions
considered in this study did use parking requirements as a primary
parking policy tool.
With this finding in mind, the study examined the details of these
parking requirement policies to see how they varied across Asian
cities and how they compared with Western parking requirements.
Were the Asian policies problematic and prone to the same criti-
cisms that conventional parking policies received in the West? Were
there policy lessons to be drawn from parking requirement practices
in the Asian cities, both for the cities themselves and for others? The
study addressed these questions by drawing on information col-
lected for a wider study of parking policy in Asia. It also made some
simple comparisons with parking requirements in Western cities,
especially American and Australian ones. For this purpose, Sydney,
Australia, was used as an example whenever possible.
The Asian Development Bank commissioned a wider study, for
which the final report was completed in late 2010 (17). The study,
which had a much broader focus than the one reported here, sought
insight on a wide range of parking policies and practices. The
wider study engaged local field assistants and collaborators in each
city. Sources of insight and data used here included more than
65 interviews (mainly with public officials), parking policy doc-
uments, academic studies, planning regulations, local area parking
studies, and news media reports. Online searches supplemented these
sources. Published sources are cited here. A full list of interviews and
unpublished sources is presented in the main report (17).
The cities studied were diverse (Table 1). Car ownership and
income levels within them varied widely, and a number of them were
motorizing rapidly from low bases and growing rapidly in popula-
tion. Urban densities in the metropolitan areas of this Asian region
tended to be high compared with North American and even European
densities (20). In light of these characteristics, it was not surprising
to find that parking was a challenging issue in many Asian cities.
The study had some limitations. Comparisons of parking require-
ment regulations are complex and prone to inaccuracies and over-
simplifications. For the quantitative comparisons, the study used
hypothetical buildings of several kinds and calculated the prima
facie requirements for these in each city according to the written reg-
ulations (supplemented by insights from interviews). This approach
was taken to avoid confusion, which would arise from incompatible
methods to express parking requirements. Some nuances in the reg-
ulations were not conveyed, however. For the most part, these com-
parisons were made with respect to the policies specified on paper
and did not account for possible waivers or variations in their actual
application.
Comparison of the qualitative elements of parking policies also
raises challenges. Terminology can be misleading. Failure to find
evidence of a specific practice in a city is not proof of its absence,
and more confidence can be placed in positive findings that a policy
or practice does exist than in claims that it does not. Generalizations
should be made with caution about parking policy in the countries
studied. The cities examined in this case study might have differed
in a number of ways from those that were not surveyed. Finally, this
study did not make a quantitative assessment of the success of park-
ing policy in each city examined, nor the extent to which each city
faced parking problems, such as on-street parking saturation.
Barter 81

TABLE 1 Key Data on Cities in Study and in Sydney, Australia TABLE 2 Car Parking Required with Sample Office and Retail
(17–19) Buildings (17)

Economy GDP/ CBD Office Noncentral Shopping Center

Population (18) Car Ownership (17) Capita (19) Urban Area Building Office Building (noncentral)
Urban Area (millions) (per 1,000 persons) (PPP$ 2008)
Tokyo 0.3 0.3 0.4
Singapore 4.6 112 (2008) 50,456 Beijing 0.5 0.5 0.3
Hong Kong 7.1 55 (2008) 43,954 Singapore 0.2 0.5 0.5
Tokyo 35.2 335 (2008) 34,173 Dhaka 0.5 0.5 0.5
Taipei 6.3 253 (2008) 30,942 Hong Kong 0.4 0.6 0.6
Seoula 19.9 227 (2005) 27,620 Guangzhou 0.6 0.6 0.6
Kuala Lumpurb 5.8 314 (estimate) 13,816 Ahmedabad 0.7 0.7 0.7
Bangkokb 8.3 330 (estimate) 8,216 Taipei 0.7 0.7 0.7
Beijing 14.0 103 (2008) 5,958 Seoul 0.1 1.0 1.0
Guangzhou 13.2 84 (2008) 5,958 Hanoi 1.0 1.0 1.0
Jakarta 22.0 203 (2006) 3,975 Manila 1.3 1.4 1.0
Manila 20.8 82 (2007) 3,507 Jakarta 1.0 1.0 1.7
Ahmedabad 5.4 55 (2007) 2,923 Bangkok 1.7 1.7 2.6
Hanoi 2.4 18 (estimate) 2,788 Kuala Lumpur 1.5 2.6 2.7
Dhaka 10.1 27 (2009) 1,501 Sydney 0 3.3 4.0
Sydney 3.7 516 (1995) 36,417
NOTE: Standard buildings used for comparisons were a CBD office building
NOTE: GDP = gross domestic product; PPP$ = purchasing power parity; GDP of 25,000 m2 gross floor area (GFA); a noncentral office building
per capita figures are for whole economies, not just urban areas. of 25,000 m2 GFA; and a medium-sized, noncentral shopping center with
a
Seoul population is for whole metropolitan area, but car ownership data are for 25,000 m2 GFA.
Seoul City alone (and are higher than figure for wider area).
b
The Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur car ownership figures are estimates extrapo-
lated from earlier household survey data. Their official registration data appear to requirements for commercial buildings, relative to their levels of
have problems (official data suggest higher car ownership rates for these cities). motorization.
The estimates here imply more than one car per household on average at current The cities of Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok stood out among
household sizes in these two cities. the Asian cities for their high commercial parking standards, which
were not far below Sydney’s requirements for other than central
business districts (CBDs). These Southeast Asian office parking
FINDINGS
requirements were a little below the average observed for 1951 in
This section presents the results with respect to parking require- 203 American cities of 3.0 spaces per 100 m2 (2.77 per 1,000 ft2) and
ments in the 14 Asian cities included in the study sponsored by the far below the 1990 average (from 138 cities) of 4.3 spaces per 100 m2
(4.0 per 1,000 ft2) (12). Although their parking requirements seemed
Asian Development Bank. A combination of quantitative compar-
high relative to car ownership, the same might have been said of
isons and qualitative and narrative assessments is presented. The
America in 1951. Parking requirements in the United States have risen
aim was to answer the specific questions posed above and to place
more slowly than motorization, which rose from 248 vehicles per
the practices revealed into international, comparative perspective.
1,000 persons in 1946 to 738 in 1991 (12). Nevertheless, it is clear that
All of the Asian cities studied had minimum parking requirements,
other Asian cities, particularly the richer ones, have so far refrained
but they varied in their style and levels. from enactment of high parking requirements in anticipation of high
future car ownership.
Parking standards for commercial buildings in Manila and Hanoi
Commercial Parking Requirement Comparisons appeared to be running slightly ahead of motorization. The South
Asian cities were not yet extreme in this respect, but clues from their
For office and retail buildings, it was striking that richer cities
local debates on parking policy, and those of other South Asian cities
(Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul) had lower parking such as Delhi (21), suggested that they were likely to raise their park-
requirements than most of the middle-income cities (Kuala Lumpur, ing standards further. They thus seemed likely to follow the examples
Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila) (Table 2). The exceptions among of middle-income Southeast Asian cities, rather than the East Asian
middle-income cities were those studied in mainland China, which cities, which tended not to set high parking standards. Conversely,
had low to moderate parking requirements. Middle-income Beijing Singapore and Hong Kong lowered their parking requirements within
had lower parking requirements than the much poorer cities of the last decade, after it was concluded that the requirements had
Ahmedabad and Hanoi. Minimum parking requirements in many of been set too high.
the Asian cities were as high, or almost as high, in the city center as
in more suburban locations.
A comparison of the averages of these commercial park- Residential Parking Requirement Comparisons
ing requirements with car ownership estimates provided further
insight (Figure 1). It might be expected that parking requirements Parking standards that applied to apartment buildings are compared
would have some correlation with car ownership levels. As the in Table 3. In these cities, multifamily housing was extremely com-
figure shows, however, Taipei, Seoul, and especially Tokyo set low mon and often was the dominant housing form. Apartments catered
82 Transportation Research Record 2245

FIGURE 1 Parking requirements at commercial buildings versus approximate car ownership (17).

TABLE 3 Parking Required with Apartment Buildings (17)

Small Apartment Medium Apartment Small Apartment Medium Apartment

Urban Area (slots per unit) (slots per unit) (slots per 100 m2) (slots per 100 m2)

Jakarta 0.1 N/A 0.2 N/A

Hong Konga 0.03, 0.1 0.03, 0.7 0.05, 0.2 0.03, 0.6
Hanoi 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.2
Tokyo 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.2
Ahmedabad 0.1 0.4 0.2 0.3
Beijing 0.4 0.4 0.7 0.4
Dhaka 0.1 0.5 0.2 0.5
Taipei 0.4 0.7 0.7 0.7
Guangzhou 0.5 0.7 0.8 0.6
Bangkok 0.2 1.0 0.3 0.9
Manila 0.3 1.0 0.4 0.9
Singapore 1.0 1.0 1.7 0.9
Kuala Lumpur 1.0 1.1 1.7 1.0
Seoul 0.8 1.7 1.3 1.5
Sydneyb 0.9 1.3 1.6 1.2

NOTE: The specific hypothetical buildings used to derive these requirements were small apartments (middle-suburb,
slots for a 100-unit block of apartments each of 59 m2) and medium apartments (middle-suburb, slots for a 100-unit
block each of 110 m2). N/A = not available.
a
For Hong Kong, two figures are given in each column: the left ones are for subsidized housing and the right figures are
for private housing. The average used in Figure 2 is a weighted one and assumes subsidized housing accounts for about
48% of the population.
b
Sydney’s residential parking requirement figures in the table reflect the average of an inner suburb (Leichardt) and a
middle suburban one (Ryde).
Barter
to a wide range of socioeconomic groups and were not especially
associated with transit-oriented locations or low car ownership in
these cities. Furthermore, these were parking standards for apart-
ments that were not necessarily located near mass transit.
Most jurisdictions specified residential parking requirements per
dwelling. This was the case in Bangkok, Beijing, Dhaka, Guangzhou,
Hanoi, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and Singapore. Ahmed-
abad, however, specified residential parking as a percentage of the
allowed built floor area. In Taipei and Tokyo, residential parking
requirements were set based on slots per unit of floor space.
Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Seoul, and Singapore had rel-
atively high residential parking standards (comparable to Sydney’s).
However, the Singapore figure was an exaggeration, because it was
the standard for private sector housing only. This was a small segment
of the housing market, which served mainly high-income residents
with higher-than-average car ownership. About 80% of Singapore’s
resident population lived in public housing provided by the Housing
and Development Board, which did not make its parking supply
guidelines public, unfortunately.
Tokyo’s residential minimum parking requirements were again
strikingly low, especially when compared with car ownership
(Figure 2). The residential parking requirements in the cities of
greater China were moderate but not as surprisingly low as the
commercial standards discussed above. Unlike the commercial park-
ing standards, the residential parking requirements of Hanoi and the
South Asian cities did not appear to run ahead of car ownership.
Residential parking requirements in Seoul, Kuala Lumpur,
Bangkok, and Manila were comparable to those in some Western
FIGURE 2 Home parking requirements versus approximate car ownership (17).
83
cities despite much lower levels of car ownership (Figure 2). Still,
the requirements were lower than the 1.5 slots per dwelling typical in
American outer suburban areas (12). Seoul was overcompensating
perhaps for serious parking conflicts, which had been occurring since
the early 1990s in its traditional, low-rise residential areas and in older
high-rise areas (22). For some of the developing cities, such as Manila
and Guangzhou, surprisingly high parking requirements for apart-
ments relative to car ownership might have reflected a presump-
tion that modern high-rise apartments were for high-income people.
Dhaka’s car ownership rate was only about 30 per 1,000 persons, but
every new, formal-sector residential building was expected to have
car parking spaces.
Evidence suggests that minimum parking requirements in resi-
dential areas harm the affordability of housing in the United States
(10). Insufficient access to affordable housing is a problem in many
Asian cities, but little or no Asian-focused literature exists on the
relevance of parking policy to that problem. High residential park-
ing requirements tend to promote the bundling of parking costs into
the price of the unit. Households cannot reduce housing-related
costs through ownership of fewer or no cars. Smaller apartments
might be expected to have lower parking requirements in the inter-
ests of affordability because smaller apartments are likely to house
lower-income people and because such households are more likely
to be small. Several cities (Dhaka, Manila, and Hong Kong) did
have substantially lower requirements for small apartments. Some,
such as Taipei, specified a fixed requirement per unit of floor area,
which resulted in fewer parking spaces per unit for small units.
Cities that specify parking spaces on a per unit basis, however, may
84
actually impose a higher parking standard per square meter of resi-
dential space on small apartments, which seems perverse. This com-
ment applies especially to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Beijing, and
Guangzhou.
Approaches to Determination
of Parking Requirements
The approaches taken to establish parking requirements can provide
useful insights into the goals of parking policies and the assumptions
involved. This study used interviews and examinations of parking
policy documents to understand the philosophy behind parking
standards in each city.
In a number of the cities, it was clear that the parking standards
were set to ensure that all of the potential parking demand was met,
even at the risk of an overestimation of demand. Like parking poli-
cies in American suburban jurisdictions, parking policies in Kuala
Lumpur, Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila apparently reflected a fear
of spillover more than a fear of overbuilt parking. Hanoi and the
South Asian cities also appeared to share this fear. In most of these
cities, rather high minimum parking requirements applied even in
inner and central areas.
American-style parking regulations have been criticized for their
specification of parking requirements for a ridiculous number of
building types (2). The categories of land use, each with its own
parking requirements, range in number from about 50 to as many
as 174 (12). In this study, however, the Asian cities tended to use
relatively short lists of land use categories. The longest lists were
in Singapore, with about 50 land uses, in Manila with about 29,
Kuala Lumpur with about 24, and Dhaka with 18. Most of the rest
applied fewer than 10 categories to land use in their parking stan-
dards. Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Taipei had the simplest lists of
building categories in their parking standards. The shorter lists
tended to go together with lower requirements, although there was
no close correlation.
Increasingly in North America and Australia, parking require-
ments are being fine-tuned to accommodate local circumstances
(16). This trend is prominent in inner-urban areas and represents a
reform of the automobile-dependent assumptions of conventional
suburban parking policy through the search for a more realistic esti-
mate of parking demand. Inner-urban municipalities in the Sydney
metropolitan area, in which public transport service and use are
high, have considerably lower parking minimums than those in the
outer suburbs, for example (15). This was also the case throughout
Singapore and Hong Kong (although Hong Kong’s conception of
parking demand was more restrictive than Singapore’s). The rele-
vant documents in both cities were explicit: the aim was to meet
parking demand on-site. Estimated demand was relatively realistic,
because prevailing prices were taken as a given in the parking demand
reviews. Both cities had lower minimum parking requirements in
their city centers and in locations close to mass transit. Both had
lowered their requirements substantially within the last decade to
better match observed demand. In most parts of Seoul, nonresidential
minimum parking requirements also appeared aimed to meet realistic
demand, given public transport service levels.
Seoul did have parking limitation zones in its CBDs, however,
which imposed low parking minimums and also maximums. Such
an approach moves beyond realism about demand and represents
active constraint of parking supply to an amount below demand.
It is an approach that is used also in some Western CBDs, such as
Transportation Research Record 2245
in Sydney’s, which are well served by mass transit. Surprisingly,
Seoul was the only Asian city in this study to take this approach
unambiguously.
Tokyo, Hong Kong, and, to an extent, Taipei, appeared to have
introduced an unusual twist into their approaches to parking mini-
mums. Japanese parking standards, especially, appeared to cater to a
restricted conception of demand. Apparently, the assumption was that
most parking, beyond some notion of minimal needs, would take place
in public parking places outside the premises. The parking require-
ments in Japanese cities also varied little from place to place across
the metropolitan area. Hong Kong’s parking standards for nonresi-
dential use catered to manifest operational requirements. Relatively
low minimum parking requirements in these cities were not a sign
of parking limitation efforts. Rather, they reflected the assumption
that, in general, buildings would not cater to all of their own park-
ing demand (at least not as the concept of full demand is understood
in the West). Apparently, it was assumed that nearby public parking
could accommodate demand not met within the destination premises.
These parking requirements apparently aimed to meet demand that
could not be met easily outside the premises. They were similar to
practices used in some British town centers (before minimums were
replaced by maximums in that country) (23).
Given their moderate parking requirements relative to motoriza-
tion and different standards for inner and outer areas, the mainland
Chinese cities might have sought realistic assessments of demand.
Like Tokyo, they also might have placed considerable faith in public
parking.
Exemptions for Small Buildings
One way to reduce the negative impact of parking requirements in
dense, mixed-use areas is to exempt small buildings from the require-
ments. This approach seems to be rarely taken in the West. Several
Asian cities in this study, however, had a threshold for the floor area,
below which a building was not required to include parking.
Japan was striking for its high thresholds at 1,500 and 2,000 m2
of floor space. Above the thresholds, parking requirements were
phased in gradually in Japanese cities, and reached their full effect
only for buildings with more than 6,000 m2 of floor space. In fact,
buildings with more than 10,000 m2 were assigned parking require-
ments at slightly lower than the full rate. As already seen, the park-
ing requirements themselves also were rather low. This situation
was found not just in Tokyo but seemed to occur throughout Japan.
Surprisingly, Japanese parking literature seemed not to highlight
these features of parking policy prominently.
Several other Asian cases had thresholds, but they were much lower
than the Japanese ones. Taipei had thresholds at 300 to 500 m2 and
Guangzhou’s was 500 m2. Commercial buildings in Bangkok below
500 m2 were exempt from parking requirements. Hanoi exempted low-
rise residential buildings, while Ahmedabad exempted only tiny resi-
dential buildings of 60 m2 or less. Singapore exempted buildings for
their heritage value, which applied most commonly to traditional shop
houses. In Hong Kong, small street-side retail buildings that served
local residents were exempt in general.
Flexibility and Variances
Many cities around the world are open to requests for variances on
parking requirements as part of the development control process. It
Barter
is not clear how commonly the Asian cities examined in this study
were willing to loosen parking requirements, but the evidence sug-
gested that such allowances might be made in Manila, Bangkok,
Tokyo, and Hong Kong. In Hanoi and the Ginza area of Tokyo, flex-
ibility was shown in some circumstances to allow required parking
to be built off-site, albeit nearby.
Variances on parking often involve a payment to the local gov-
ernment in lieu of parking, which is common in inner-urban loca-
tions in North America and Australia (2). Asian provisions for such
a deficiency charge were found in Ahmedabad, Hong Kong, Kuala
Lumpur, and Singapore, yet all seemed to be quite restrictive in their
stipulation of the conditions that would allow the charge to be paid
in lieu of parking spaces to be created. Such charges are not always
about flexibility. In Dhaka, for example, the 2009 parking policy
included a proposal to impose deficiency payments on existing
buildings that lacked the newly required parking supply (24).
Effects of Parking Requirements
The intention of minimum parking requirements is to ensure that
more parking is provided than otherwise would be the case. Usually,
these regulations exert a strong influence on the provision of park-
ing, but evidence also shows that they do not completely determine
the parking that is supplied with buildings.
It was beyond the scope of this study to do a detailed evaluation
of the effects of parking requirements in the sample of Asian cities.
Anecdotal information provides clues, nonetheless, that may sug-
gest issues ripe for further research. Web searches and data obtained
by local team members allowed a comparison of apparent parking
requirements and data on parking spaces and floor areas for 58 real
buildings (20 in Guangzhou, nine in Tokyo, six in Manila, five each
in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, four in Singapore, and three each in
Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Taipei).
If developers voluntarily provide parking in excess of the mini-
mum requirements, the implication is that some parking minimums
might in fact be unnecessary. Examples may also suggest that other
incentives to provide parking are at play, beyond the minimum park-
ing requirements. Such examples were found in buildings in Jakarta
(five), Kuala Lumpur (four), Guangzhou (four), Tokyo (two), and
Taipei and Manila (one each).
Conversely, to have found examples of parking space provision that
was below the current minimums was not necessarily surprising and
did not immediately yield a policy implication. Lower standards might
have applied at the time of construction, or some flexibility might have
been exercised in the application of the parking standards. Clear-cut
examples of parking provided below the apparent minimums were
found in buildings in Manila (four with slightly less), Tokyo (two),
Hong Kong (two), Bangkok (two), and Taipei (one).
Evasion of the standards appeared to occur in some Asian cities,
however. Supporters of minimum parking requirements might take
these examples as evidence of the need for such regulations and for
more effective enforcement. Isolated examples of required parking
put to other uses were reported in Bangkok, Beijing, and Hanoi (17).
In South Asian cities, building managers were found to put the
required parking spaces to other uses often (21). The practice was
rational in places where the willingness to pay for off-street parking
was low. It was rational in places where a lack of on-site parking
did little harm to access by customers, employees, and clients, and
where the alternative uses of the required space were much more
lucrative than they would be for parking. This phenomenon was
85
allegedly a source of corruption in the local government of Dhaka (25).
In Ahmedabad and Dhaka, enforcement action was taken in 2009
against numerous buildings that were in violation of parking stan-
dards. These actions included the demolition of basement shops,
which occupied space that had been planned and designated for
parking.
Is Parking Excluded from Calculations
of Allowable Floor Area?
If parking counts toward the allowed gross floor area (GFA) of a
development under zoning controls, developers face a high oppor-
tunity cost for parking in their buildings, which can only be provided
at the expense of a reduction in leasable floor space. This under-
researched issue interacts with parking requirements but is little dis-
cussed in the parking literature (6). Jurisdictions vary in the extent
to which parking space is counted toward the built space allowed.
In Sydney, the inner and middle suburban areas studied exempted
required parking but, in the CBD (which had maximums, not mini-
mums), parking did count toward GFA. Some suburban municipal-
ities in the United States exempt all parking from the count toward
the allowed GFA, which may encourage excessive parking supply
over and above the minimum requirements. More research is required
to know how typical this practice may be.
Reliable information on this issue could be obtained for only a
few of the cities in the study. In Manila and Jakarta, a considerable
amount of extra parking (beyond the requirements) was excluded
from consideration as part of a building’s allowable GFA. In the
Kuala Lumpur suburban jurisdiction of Petaling Jaya, neither out-
door parking nor basement parking counted toward the GFA, but in-
building, above-ground parking spaces in excess of required parking
did. Such exemptions presumably give developers in these cities
some incentive to provide extra parking. In Taipei, required parking
(and parking encouraged with a floor area bonus) was exempt but
only up to a limit.
In Hong Kong, public parking was not exempt but, in general, pri-
vate parking was. Environmentalists have complained that residen-
tial developments are encouraged to build excessive parking as a
result of this exemption (which also exempted such parking from
significant land premium fees) (26).
In Singapore, required parking did not count, but parking space
built in excess of requirements did. As a result, developers report-
edly treated the requirements as maximums, and not just as the min-
imums that they were on paper. At the time of this study at least,
parking in Singapore offered lower returns than commercial floor
space (27). In Bangkok, informed sources said that parking was not
exempt and counted toward GFA. This information might help
explain the observation that some Bangkok developers provided less
than the required amount of parking.
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Despite much literature that sees minimum parking requirements
as poorly suited to dense cities, this policy tool is widespread in
Asia. The Asian minimums were not quite as high as American or
Australian suburban requirements. Yet it was still a surprise to find
Asian cities with parking policies so similar to the Western suburban
approach. Western critiques of parking requirements (and reform
suggestions) may be relevant therefore to cities such as Kuala Lumpur,
86
Manila, Jakarta, and Bangkok. Newly motorizing cities in South Asia
(Ahmedabad and Dhaka) appeared inclined to follow a similar path.
The exemption of extra parking from the count toward the allowed
floor area might have contributed to the oversupply of parking in
Manila, Kuala Lumpur, and Jakarta.
American suburban-style parking standards were not necessarily
surprising, if applied to car-oriented, suburban areas of Asian cities.
In these Southeast Asian and South Asian cases, however, relatively
high minimum parking requirements were found to apply even in
dense areas and older inner-urban districts. Western experience
suggests that this application may tend to contribute to inner-urban
blight, although this study was not able to make any systematic
assessments of this possibility in the Asian cities examined here.
The efforts made by Seoul, Singapore, and Hong Kong to match
parking requirements with realistic, context-specific demand were
broadly similar to those made in some inner-urban areas of the West.
It was surprising to find, however, that Seoul was alone among
Asian cities in the study to make explicit use of parking maximums
as a traffic demand management measure.
Several East Asian cities were found to have introduced variations
on parking requirement policies worthy of further investigation. Tokyo
and Taipei, for example, did not impose high requirements despite
relatively high car ownership. These East Asian cities, moreover, had
low parking minimums throughout their metropolitan areas, not just
in their inner cities. Their parking standards were relatively simple
and did not attempt to match demand precisely in each location. The
exemption of small buildings from minimum parking requirements
was a striking feature, especially of Japanese parking policy. In greater
China and in Japan, the minimum parking requirements seemed to
be set in ways that assumed that a substantial amount of parking would
take place outside the premises of destinations. That such an outcome
was not feared was striking. Perhaps parking policy in these cities
was predicated on a strong role for shared private- and public-sector
parking. This approach contrasted with both the conventional sub-
urban one and with a more demand-realistic approach to set mini-
mum parking requirements. Nor did it reflect an effort to constrain
parking supply. This rather relaxed approach to minimum parking
requirements might offer a pathway toward a policy not to apply
such minimums at all.
In summary, this investigation of approaches to parking require-
ments in Asia yielded a number of insights that should be useful to
practitioners and researchers inside and outside the region. Parking
policy debates can be enriched only by a clearer perspective on the
range of possibilities that exist internationally.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Asian Development Bank funded the larger study reported on
here under the direction of Jamie Leather. A long list of people
deserve thanks for their roles in the study. They are listed in the main
report (17).
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The Transportation Demand Management Committee peer-reviewed this paper.