Reading Time: 4 minutes
This week I read a column about parking by Netherland’s architect Harvey Otten. You can imagine that in a country that easily fits between Toronto and Ottawa with 18 million residents (and 3rd in the 2026 Olympic Games Medal count, dare I say), space is at a premium and yet, even there, many people expect parking to be available nearby, everywhere and free. Harvey Otten compares parking a car with lugging a lawn chair around and leaving it somewhere. I asked Mr. Otten and Architectenweb.nl, if I could translate and publish his column and -Dutch among each other- that wasn’t a problem. So here it is:
Parking is not a birth right
Suppose I were to walk through the city with a lawn chair tomorrow; it’s always handy when I want to take a rest. But eventually, I’d get tired of lugging it around, so I’d just put it somewhere on the side of the street. If I left that lawn chair for a day, it would probably be gone. If not by municipal enforcement officers, then by irritated neighbors, or by a random passerby who saw it left unattended and took it. If I were to leave a car in that same spot, we’d consider it perfectly normal, which is quite strange. Why do we assume that cars should be able to be parked anywhere, and yet we consider it a big deal that in some places we have to pay a tiny bit for it?
Leaving your car unattended used to be illegal
You might think it’s never been different, but that’s not the case. In the past, leaving your vehicle, and that included your car, unattended in cities was illegal. A hundred years ago, Amsterdam’s municipal bylaw stipulated that cars could only be parked under supervision. In practice, this probably meant that the driver stayed with the car, just as in previous centuries the coachman stayed with the horse-drawn cart, when it was forbidden to leave horses outside the stable.
Free parking everywhere
Only after the war did we suddenly start creating parking spaces everywhere, because we wanted to grant everyone the freedom to drive. As a result, we now have almost 10 million cars on the road in the Netherlands, and we’ve reserved 20 million or more parking spaces for them. That’s enormous and unsustainable in the long run. Just look at the space requirements. For each regular parking space, we need about 25 square meters (270 square feet) to park a car and to drive in and out. Only a few percent of those parking spaces are in parking garages. More than half of the parking spaces are on the street, and the vast majority of public parking spaces are free.
Tipping point
We’re at a tipping point where the 8 million homes we have in the Netherlands will take up less land than all the parking spaces we think we need. Architects who design inner-city housing therefore know that the number of homes you can build somewhere often depends on the number of parking spaces you’re required to create.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t yet reached everyone. For example, six months ago, the VVD parliamentary party (a Dutch right wing party) introduced a motion to establish a minimum parking standard of 1.7 parking spaces per home as a nationwide standard. Fortunately, this motion was rejected, as it would have made many housing development plans impossible or at least significantly delayed them.
Parking isn’t a fundamental right
Designing alternative solutions for cars isn’t very complicated. Contemporary urban development plans increasingly feature parking hubs in strategic locations, car-sharing schemes are operating throughout the Netherlands, and in some municipalities, parking standards are being drastically lowered. Everyone benefits. It’s healthy to walk a short distance to your car, you see your neighbors again, and there’s more space in the street for greenery and children to play.
Yet, more is needed than just design. A parking garage in the Netherlands easily costs €30,000 (CAD 48,000) per space, and that’s just for construction, not including additional costs, maintenance, and the like. If we want to incorporate parking alternatives into plans, we’ll have to acknowledge that parking isn’t a fundamental right. Such a parking garage isn’t profitable as long as you can park your car for free a few streets away.
Minimum parking standards for homes to zero
Ideally, we’d cycle more, use public transport more often, and share our cars whenever possible, but I’m not naive. A great many people still want to park somewhere near their homes. For some because it’s necessary, for many others because they can’t live without their car. That’s fine, as long as we don’t shift the costs and problems onto the growing group of people who can manage without a parking space. So let’s think truly liberally and stop making parking a social problem. If we charge a fair price for parking in public spaces, we can reduce the minimum parking standards for homes to zero.
The idea that the car and the house belong together is even stranger than the idea that you can just leave your stuff on the street.
Harvey Otten is a Dutch independent architect and developer. His architectural firm, Harvey Otten Architectuur, is part of the XOOMlab (website being updated per March 2026) cooperative. As a developing architect, he is a partner at Ruimtemaken (which translates as ‘Making space’).
This column by Harvey Otten appeared earlier on Architectenweb.nl as “Parkeren is geen grondrecht“. Architectenweb is a cool website with around 14,000 Dutch projects you can search and filter through, from composite facades to biobased homes to skyscrapers. It is in Dutch, but fortunately that is not an issue for you, as your browser has built in translation options.
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