Three hometown stories show why parking reform is for everyone.

Earlier this spring, when Port Townsend, Washington, eliminated parking mandates - predetermined numbers of parking spaces required by law for new buildings - the news took the internet by surprise. Not many people expected the first Washington city to make off-street parking fully optional would be a small town of 10,000 residents.

"Seattle getting lapped by…Port Townsend," The Urbanist wrote. Another commenter wrote, "Port Townsend punches well above its weight in a few ways." Even my own colleague Dan remarked on the news, "The politics around abolishing parking mandates is bizarre."

But it's not surprising that towns of Port Townsend's size are leading the way. While large cities like San Jose, California, and Austin, Texas, garner national press coverage for eliminating parking mandates, this policy reform is most commonly enacted in towns with fewer than 25,000 residents.

According to the Parking Reform Network's mandates map, for every large American city (with a population of 250,000 or more) that has fully repealed parking mandates, there are two small towns (fewer than 25,000 people) that have done the same.

To be clear, there are far more tiny towns in the United States than big cities. But small jurisdictions are also likely underrepresented in the Parking Reform Network data. With little to no media coverage of zoning changes in places like Gilman, Wisconsin, or Canandaigua, New York, those parking reforms are less likely to make it onto the map in the first place. The database also fails to acknowledge the multitude of rural communities and small towns that never adopted parking mandates in the first place - or any zoning codes at all - and still manage to get along just fine. My hometown in northern Maine is one of them.

Overall, places with 25,000 or fewer residents make up 40 percent of known jurisdictions in the United States that have returned decisions about parking back to the people who live and work there. Below are just a handful of stories from these communities about why they removed parking minimums and what has happened since.

A town charts an economic revival

Ecorse, Michigan, was already scheduled to update its local zoning code in 2020, when United States Steel, the town's largest employer, announced it would be shutting down most of its operations. The news prompted the city to completely overhaul its zoning, including eliminating parking mandates.

"We didn't really get any pushback against the reduction of parking minimums,"

said planner Nani Wolf.

"We have way more parking than we need, and I think everybody was generally in recognition of that."

The main form of development in Ecorse is renovations of existing buildings. Unfortunately, there are a number of vacant properties. Since its peak in the 1970s, the town has lost almost half its population, now at 9,800 residents.

"Having those parking minimums removed has made it so much easier and quicker for people to reoccupy those buildings,"

said Wolf. She pointed to one example of a former ice cream shop that someone wanted to turn into a Puerto Rican restaurant. The owner's biggest concern was parking: there were only two spaces on the property. In past years, that would have posed a regulatory problem, but Wolf reassured the owner that he was good to go.

In other cases, the city introduced prospective entrepreneurs to nearby businesses that might be amenable to a parking lot sharing agreement.

"We really need to focus on redistributing what already exists, not requiring people to build more,"

said Wolf.

As Ecorse charts a new future, the reduced red tape has made it easier for people to invest in their community.

"Speed of development review is so much faster,"

said Wolf.

"That's true for developers and for city staff. Parking just takes so much time and energy from everybody involved."

Protecting rural land

The town of Chattahoochee Hills incorporated in 2007 with the aim of...