Residential Parking in Japan

I'm a big fan of Donald Shoup's book, "The High Cost of Free Parking". If more planners and traffic engineers read his book, I think the world would be a better place! Don's book made me seriously think about parking in the US - but witnessing parking in a dense and crowded multimodal country like Japan sheds a whole new light on the issue, particularly residential parking.

One of the many steps required to register a vehicle in Japan is to prove that there is parking available for it off-street. I'm sure in some parts of the country it's OK to park a car on the street overnight - I just haven't yet seen it! To demonstrate the availability of parking, each residence has a certificate indicating the length, width, and height of the off-street parking spot. (I can't really call these "driveways" as we do in the US, because most of these spots are barely larger than the vehicle - and in fact, all Japanese cars' side-view mirrors either fold in automatically or manually to provide a few extra centimeters from an adjacent wall or column). The local police station verifies the parking spot dimensions, receives a small fee, and issues you a sticker to continue the registration process with the Japanese equivalent of the DMV. In my case, I didn't actually see a policeman come to my house and confirm the measurement - but I had to wait three days before I went back to pick up the sticker.

In spite of this rather bureaucratic process, car ownership is pretty high in Japan (In 2000 there were 651 cars per 1,000 persons in Japan; compared to 771 cars per 1,000 persons in the US, according to Don's book).

The slideshow below illustrates various off-street parking accommodations in my neighborhood in Yokosuka. I'll try to add more as I see them and photograph them. From the pictures, you can see that some people forego owning a car, while others do what is necessary to accommodate more than one car.