Washington flips the switch on parking reform

Today, I am covering something that happened two months ago, as I was preparing for CNU, so I didn’t have time to report on it then. However, it is important enough to revisit now.

The State of Washington adopted a new approach to statewide parking reform that the Sightline Institute calls “the strongest statewide rollback of costly parking mandates in the US.” 

The story is not just that the legislation is strong—it is clever politically. As Sightline explains, Oregon and California had adopted parking reform in locations near transit in 2022. Washington attempted a similar legislation in 2023. “However, debate over the bill became overrun by concerns that transit service often isn’t good enough for residents to go car-free and that even those with access to good transit often still need to drive for some trips. The bill’s transit focus ended up being a political liability,” Catie Gould at Sightline explains. “Not to mention that limiting reform to within a small radius of a transit stop left out a huge portion of the state’s urbanized land and was vulnerable to small changes in distances gutting the bill.”

The parking reform sponsor, State Sen. Jessica Bateman, took a different approach in 2025. She flipped the approach from asking “ ‘where should mandates apply’ (geographically), to ‘when should mandates apply’ (in what circumstances).” This proved the key to unlocking far more comprehensive reform. 

SB 5184, which was adopted by a wide majority in both houses, exempts all homes smaller than 1,200 square feet from parking mandates. “The average new apartment in the United States is 904 square feet, and even the typical two-bedroom averages only 1,097 square feet. In other words, the vast majority of apartments built anywhere in Washington will have full parking flexibility. Same goes for ADUs and a significant portion of middle housing,” Gould says. 

The bill also reduces requirements for commercial properties, which is particularly important in mixed-use areas, and will aid suburban retrofit. “It fully exempts commercial spaces smaller than 3,000 square feet or located on the ground floor of a mixed-use apartment building. It also grants full parking flexibility to childcare facilities, subsidized affordable housing, housing for seniors, and existing buildings undergoing a change of use,” Gould explains. For homes and businesses that don’t fall under these broad exemptions, the following parking mandate caps in the bill will apply:

• 0.5 spaces per home for multifamily  
• 1 space for a detached house  
• 2 spaces per 1,000 square feet of commercial space

Originally, the bill applied to all municipalities; however, a compromise excluded cities with fewer than 30,000 residents. The bill still applies to cities where 83 percent of the state population resides. In contrast, only 20 percent of Washington residents live within a half-mile of 15-minute transit service.

I agree with Sightline that this is a fantastic outcome and could be the new best practice for parking reform. It should go without saying that parking reform is a key to making walkable urbanism more broadly available.