Boston City Council Hosts Hearing Tuesday On City’s Dated Parking Rules

The Boston City Council’s Committee on Planning, Development, and Transportation will hold a public hearing on Tuesday afternoon “to explore amending the Boston Zoning Code to remove parking minimum requirements for new development.”

Boston’s minimum off-street parking rules are an outdated 20th-century zoning concept that requires developers to build a certain ratio of off-street parking spaces for every new building that goes up in the city – a rule that implicitly assumes that access for car owners is a requirement for new buildings in the city, but access for transit users is not.

Parking mandates increase development costs, reduce housing availability, and reduce transit ridership by subsidizing car-owning households and businesses in urban neighborhoods.

Boston’s city planners regularly approve the construction of thousands of additional parking spaces every year in new development projects. Frequently, the number of new parking spaces exceeds the number of new apartments and homes that developers build within the city limits – an imbalance of investment and real estate that exacerbates the city’s housing shortage and congestion problems.

In 2023 alone, Boston’s planning agency approved 69 large development proposals that would build enough parking to store up to 8,053 more cars into the city – enough to fill all eight lanes of the Southeast Expressway (I-93) with bumper-to-bumper traffic from the Neponset River to downtown Boston.

Several other cities in the region have repealed similar rules from their zoning codes, including Cambridge (in 2022) and Somerville (in 2024).

Since the beginning of 2022, the number of registered passenger motor vehicles in Boston has increased by nearly 14,000 cars, according to Registry for Motor Vehicles data. In the same period, the number of registered passenger cars in the City of Cambridge declined by 759.

Committee Chair and District 8 City Councilor Sharon Durkan and at-large City Councilor Henry Santana are sponsoring Tuesday’s hearing.

The hearing will be held at 2 p.m. in the Iannella Chamber, on the 5th Floor of Boston City Hall. View the public notice here.

Members of the public are invited to testify in person or virtually, or submit written comments that will be included in the hearing’s record.

For information on how to join the meeting virtually, or submit written comments, contact Meagan Corugedo at Meagan.corugedo@boston.gov or 617-635-1711.