The missing piece in urban mobility strategies: Private parking garages

When city leaders map out their mobility strategies, the usual suspects tend to show up: transit expansion, bike lanes, rideshare integration and congestion pricing. What rarely makes the list is the humble parking garage — the concrete, utilitarian structures that quietly absorb thousands of commuters every day. 

Across American downtowns, paid monthly parking remains one of the most common ways workers access central business districts, yet it operates almost entirely outside the digital infrastructure cities are building around everything else. Bus arrivals are tracked in real time. Dynamic traffic signals adjust to live congestion data. Scooter fleets broadcast their locations by the minute. But the garage on the corner still runs on phone calls, paper waitlists and institutional inertia. 

That gap is taking on new urgency as cities push to accelerate EV adoption. Unlike gasoline-powered cars, electric vehicles depend on reliable access to charging infrastructure — and that infrastructure lives in garages, not on street corners. A monthly parker with a dedicated garage spot is a driver who can charge during the workday, turning a routine commute into an emissions-free one.  

The fix doesn't require new infrastructure or public dollars. It requires cities to do something they've already learned to do with transit, scooters and rideshare: Bring private operators into a connected ecosystem where supply is visible to the people who need it most. 

The Cost of Standing Still 

Traffic congestion exacts a measurable tax on local economies. According to INRIX's 2024 Global Traffic Scorecard, the average American driver lost 43 hours to traffic in 2024, equivalent to $771 in lost time and productivity. In the most congested cities, the toll is far steeper: Drivers in New York and Chicago each logged 102 hours of delay, equivalent to more than $1,800 in wasted time. Nationally, the cost of congestion exceeded $74 billion. 

Local businesses feel this acutely. Chambers of commerce in dense urban corridors have long understood that a customer who can't reliably get downtown is a customer who shops elsewhere. The same logic applies to employers anchored in central business districts: When congestion becomes chronic, it quietly erodes the economic vitality that makes downtowns worth investing in. 

What's less appreciated is how much of that congestion is inflicted by inadequate parking systems. Researchers have long documented the phenomenon of "cruising” drivers circling downtown streets in search of an available space. Recent studies have found that cruising accounts for anywhere from 18% to 68% of traffic in downtown cores, with drivers spending an average of eight minutes searching for a space. Every car circling the block is a car that hasn't reached its destination — and a source of delay for everyone else on the road. 

Hiding in Plain Sight 

Here's what makes this problem particularly tractable: In most American downtowns, the parking supply already exists. Private garages — structures operated by independent owners, residential developers and similar — represent an enormous reservoir of long-term monthly spaces that sits largely invisible to the commuters who need it and the city systems designed to manage mobility. 

The reason this supply stays hidden is structural. Most cities have invested in digitizing public street parking with technologies like smart meters, real-time occupancy sensors and parking apps tied to municipal systems. But all that infrastructure ends abruptly at the private parking garage gate.  

Private operators have historically filled their monthly inventory through word of mouth, external signage and phone or email inquiries, with no common platform or shared data standard connecting them to the transit and mobility dashboards city planners rely on. The result: A commuter can check real-time bus arrivals and bike-share availability on a single city app but has no reliable way to discover that a garage two blocks from their office has open monthly spots. 

The consequences are predictable. Underutilized garage space pushes more drivers toward street parking, feeding the very cruising behavior that clogs downtown corridors. Cities make infrastructure decisions based on an incomplete picture of actual supply. And a resource that could be quietly absorbing thousands of commuters sits under-deployed, invisible to the people it could serve. 

A More Complete Mobility Picture 

Cities don't need to build anything new to close this gap. The model already exists — they just need to extend it. 

Over the past decade, cities have gotten remarkably good at weaving private operators into public mobility infrastructure. Rideshare companies, scooter- and bike-share providers and private transit shuttles now feed data into city systems and operate under frameworks that give cities meaningful visibility into how they're being used. The underlying principle is straightforward: When private mobility supply becomes viewable in a public system, everyone benefits. 

There is no technical reason private parking garages couldn't function the same way. What's missing is a connecting layer between private garage operators, who hold the inventory, and the city systems and commuters who need to find it. Digital platforms designed specifically for the monthly parking market already exist in a number of cities, matching commuters with available garage spaces the way transit apps match riders with routes. 

The logical next step is for cities to bring those platforms into their broader mobility ecosystems — establishing data-sharing agreements, incorporating garage availability into city-facing dashboards and treating private long-term parking as a legitimate component of the transportation network. 

The payoff is immediate. Commuters gain a reliable, searchable view of long-term parking options. Garage operators fill vacancies that currently go unnoticed. And cities gain something they've never had: real visibility into how private parking supply functions across their downtown. That fuller picture, in turn, makes it easier to plan transit, manage congestion and shape land use. 

Don't Build it. Connect it. 

Mobility strategies tend to gravitate toward the new: the next transit line, the next technology pilot and the next infrastructure investment. But some of the most effective interventions available to city leaders right now don't require budget appropriation or ribbon cutting. 

Private parking garages don't generate headlines or anchor economic development announcements. But they absorb an enormous share of the daily commuter load in virtually every American downtown — and right now they do it in isolation, disconnected from city systems and inaccessible to commuters who don't already know they're there. That's a solvable problem and solving it costs remarkably little. 

City leaders have a practical starting point: Audit your existing mobility framework for this gap. Identify the private garage operators downtown. Find out whether platforms exist in your market that are already aggregating monthly parking inventory. Ask whether your city's mobility apps and dashboards could incorporate that data. In many cases, the operators and the technology are already there — they're just not yet part of the conversation. 

Josh Eisen is an international parking veteran with more than 20 years of experience across every major vertical in the industry, specializing in the development and deployment of next‑generation parking technologies worldwide. As CRO for Spacer, he leads revenue optimization initiatives for the largest residential asset owners in North America.