Parking, and especially the amount of parking that should be required with new housing, is a hotly-debated issue in Metro Boston. Some neighbors worry about competition for on-street spaces. Others want to discourage people with more cars from moving into the neighborhood. Developers are understandably focused on marketability and the bottom line. However, there’s little guidance on how much parking is actually needed for a given development – and how much is too much.

Over the past three years, MAPC has set out to measure the actual supply of and demand for residential parking in the Inner Core subregion, which includes Boston and 20 surrounding cities and towns. The survey included apartments and condos, large and small projects, and projects close to and far from transit. Counts took place during peak utilization hours: in the middle of the night on weeknights, and not during the summer or near major holidays. Over two phases of research,we obtained data from 189 sites across the study area. The sites included 19,600 housing units, most of which have been built since 2000, and all of which provide off-street parking.