Minimum parking requirements are the least visible and most consequential planning rule in most cities. They say that a building of a certain size must provide a certain number of spaces, and they have quietly shaped every street built since the 1950s.

Two years ago this city deleted the rule. Not reduced it — deleted it. Developers can now build as much or as little parking as they think they can sell.

What actually changed

Fewer spaces than opponents feared, and fewer than campaigners hoped. Across forty-one completed schemes, parking provision fell by about a third. It did not fall to zero, because the market kept asking for it.

What fell much further was the cost of building. A basement level of parking eats between a fifth and a third of a residential scheme's budget. Removing it is the difference between eleven flats and fourteen on the same plot.

Fourteen flats instead of eleven, on a street where the waiting list runs to hundreds of names, is not a rounding error.

“We did not stop building parking. We stopped building parking nobody wanted, in basements nobody will ever see.” — the committee chair who moved the change

The predictable problem

Cars did not vanish, and the streets around the new schemes have absorbed them. Residents' bays in three districts are now over-subscribed, and the council is doing the thing it should have done first: charging for on-street parking so that the price reflects the space.

That is the unglamorous second half of the policy. Removing the rule without pricing the kerb just moves the problem from a basement to a pavement.

Two years is not long enough to declare this a success. It is long enough to say the catastrophe did not arrive, the housing did, and the argument has moved on to the part that actually matters.