President Bush’s answer to soaring gasoline prices and allegedly dwindling energy supplies is to drill for oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the Gulf of Mexico. But he’d find a much larger source of untapped energy, and a solution to rising transportation woes and expanding sprawl, by looking somewhere else: in the zoning and tax codes that make America the land of the free parking place. Free parking, it turns out, is a major cause of the nation’s unquenchable thirst for gasoline and automobile use. And this thirst drives an array of national concerns: not just rising fuel prices but also global climate change, dependence on foreign oil, tightening traffic snarls, relentless sprawl, and worsening urban smog.More than 90 percent of all car trips end in free parking spaces. But they aren’t really free. In fact, as a nation we pay more to store our vehicles during the 23 hours a day when they’re immobile than we do to keep their tanks full.

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Fully 50 percent of the cost of parking is paid by employers, businesses, and taxpayers. Another 40 percent is paid through rent and mortgages for off-street parking at home. With everybody splitting the cost of free parking, it’s no wonder that drivers have almost nothing to gain by leaving their cars at home. The remaining 10 percent of the nation’s parking bill is pay-per-use at meters, lots, or garages—a far smaller share than most nations. Pay parking is rare outside the center of big cities because antiquated provisions in zoning and tax codes—along with auto-centered street designs—bloat the parking supply and glut the market. Most zoning codes require a surplus of parking spaces. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, office buildings are required to provide up to four spots per 1,000 square feet of floor space. Many stores provide enough parking to accommodate cars on the Friday after Thanksgiving—the busiest shopping day of the year—and most of the lot is empty (and the land wasted) for the next 364 days.