Webinar: Our Common Purpose: Carsharing and Parking Reform
A webinar with CSA Executive Director Pam Cooley, the Parking Reform Network, and the Agence de mobilité durable de Montréal
There’s a conversation that doesn’t happen enough in the mobility world — one between the people fighting for better parking policy and the people operating carsharing services. Both groups are working toward the same city. They just don’t always know each other.
This webinar was an attempt to fix that.
CSA Executive Director Pam Cooley joined Daniel Herriges from the Parking Reform Network and Charles Shephard, Executive Director of Business and Mobility Strategies at the Agence de mobilité durable de Montréal, for a conversation that ranged from the true cost of free parking to mobility hubs in Montreal — and made a compelling case that parking reformers and carsharing advocates are natural allies.
Why parking is everybody's problem
Daniel Herriges opened by laying out the core argument of the Parking Reform Network: parking is not a niche transportation issue. It’s baked into housing costs, business viability, walkability, transit access, and climate outcomes — and for decades, most cities have been getting it badly wrong.
The foundational research here belongs to the late Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA, whose book The High Cost of Free Parking documented how mandatory parking minimums, unpriced curb space, and oversupplied lots ripple through every aspect of urban life. When parking is treated as a right rather than a resource, you end up with cities where more land is dedicated to storing cars than to the things people actually came to do — and yet people still can’t find a space when they need one.
The Parking Reform Network works to change this through research, coalition building, and direct advocacy — pushing cities to eliminate off-street parking mandates, price curb space appropriately, and manage parking as a shared public asset. Over 100 cities in the US and Canada have now eliminated off-street parking minimums, a number that has grown exponentially over the last decade.
Crucially, Daniel noted that carsharing organizations had been missing from the PRN’s coalition graphic — an oversight he corrected on the spot. Because if there’s one mobility mode that benefits most directly from smarter parking policy, it’s carsharing.
Carsharing is the lowest-hanging fruit cities have
Pam Cooley’s contribution was equal parts advocacy and practical argument. The CSA has been supporting carsharing operators and the broader ecosystem since 2010, built on a founding commitment to transit-oriented, environmentally grounded mobility. But the core message she brought to this webinar was simpler: if you’re working on parking reform, carsharing should be in your toolkit.
Here’s why. Carsharing is the only mode you drive yourself that demonstrably replaces personal vehicle ownership. Not supplements it — replaces it. Each carshare vehicle typically removes 10 to 15 privately owned cars from the road. In Halifax, where Pam founded Carshare Atlantic in 2008 before selling it to Communauto in 2019, 350 carshare vehicles are estimated to have taken 3,000 to 4,000 cars off the road in the urban core.
That matters for parking in a very direct way. Fewer private vehicles means less demand for parking spaces. Less demand means cities have more flexibility to repurpose that space — for bike lanes, terraces, green infrastructure, transit stops, mobility hubs, or housing. Parking reform and carsharing are, as Pam put it, working the same problem from different ends.
What carsharing operators need from cities in return is straightforward: secure, dedicated parking permits. On-street where possible — as in Vancouver, where mild winters make year-round on-street carsharing viable — or integrated into developments and neighbourhood hubs elsewhere. When those policies are in place, carsharing grows without friction. When they’re not, operators spend their time lobbying borough by borough, regulation by regulation, instead of serving members.
Zipcar‘s withdrawal from London is the cautionary tale Pam returned to here. The service couldn’t expand consistently across the city’s boroughs because parking regulations were fragmented and inconsistent — a problem strikingly similar to what Charles described in his presentation about Montreal’s 19 arrondissements. When Zipcar left, the reputational damage landed on carsharing as a concept, not on the policy environment that made expansion impossible. That’s a cost the entire industry bears.
The takeaway for parking reformers: advocating for consistent, carsharing-friendly parking policy isn’t just good for operators. It’s good for the reform itself.
What Montreal is getting right
Charles Shephard’s presentation on the Agence de mobilité durable de Montréal was a detailed look at what it means to manage parking as public infrastructure rather than as a revenue stream — and Montreal is a genuinely instructive example.
The Agence was created in 2020 when the city unified parking management (previously handled by the Chamber of Commerce) with parking enforcement (previously under the city police). All parking revenue goes directly back to the City of Montreal, which means every recommendation the Agence makes is evaluated on mobility and community benefit, not on what it generates for the agency’s own budget. That’s a structural feature with profound implications — it removes the financial incentive to oversupply or undercharge for parking, and it aligns the agency’s interests entirely with the city’s goals.
Montreal’s carsharing credentials are already impressive. It’s home to Communauto, one of the oldest and largest carsharing organizations in North America, as well as BIXI, the bike-sharing system that has since been exported to New York, London, and dozens of other cities. The city has the fully separated REV (Réseau express vélo) cycling network, a completely electric taxi fleet, and one of the highest rates of transit use in North America.
The Agence’s most tangible innovation is what Charles called the curbside management framework — a recognition that the kerb is not a parking lot, but a shared public asset serving many competing uses simultaneously. His numbers from Montreal were striking: a high-frequency bus stop serves more than 1,000 passengers per day from the same stretch of road that accommodates perhaps 18 parked cars. A BIXI station serves around 50 users from that same space. The curb, unmanaged, defaults to its lowest-value use. Managed well, it becomes infrastructure for the entire city.
The mobility hubs the Agence has begun developing are the most visible expression of this philosophy. Former surface parking lots — and Montreal has no shortage of those — are being converted into multi-modal, eco-responsible spaces that integrate carshare parking, BIXI docking stations, EV charging, parcel lockers, green infrastructure, and public seating. The design prioritises permeable paving to reduce heat island effects and manage rainwater. The first hub opened on Mason Street; the second, in Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, followed last fall.
Carsharing is a named component of each hub. Charles was direct about why: carsharing operators want to expand, but they can’t do so without parking. The city has parking. The question is whether it allocates that parking to one more empty lot or to services that multiply the value of the space many times over.
On data, the Agence has developed something that Charles described as genuinely unusual even globally: using licence plate recognition technology not just for enforcement, but as a permanent, surgical curb-use analysis tool. Every enforcement patrol generates a dataset — vehicle categories, parking duration, origin of vehicles, occupancy rates. This is the kind of granular, real-time information that cities have historically lacked entirely. The most recent parking inventory for off-street parking across the island of Montreal dates to 1998. The Agence is building the foundation to replace that with something that actually reflects how people use cities today.
The synthesis
What emerged from the conversation wasn’t a set of abstract principles but a practical argument: parking reform and carsharing advocacy need each other.
Parking reformers benefit from having a concrete, visible alternative to offer when they make the case for reducing parking supply. “Fewer spaces” is a hard sell. “Fewer spaces, plus a carshare vehicle five minutes from your door” is a different conversation. Carsharing operators benefit from the policy environment that parking reform creates — one where dedicated on-street permits are treated as reasonable infrastructure investment rather than a favour, and where development approvals routinely include carshare provisions.
Both communities are also working on the same measurement challenge: demonstrating impact in terms that city governments can use. Vehicle trips removed, emissions reduced, land value recovered, congestion reduced — these numbers exist and they’re compelling, but they need to be part of the active case cities and operators make together.
Get involved
If you’re a carsharing operator, city planner, or parking reform advocate, these are the conversations worth having. There are two ways to go deeper:
Parking Reform Network — Join the network, explore their Parking Lot Maps and Parking Mandates Map, and connect with parking reformers in your city.
CSA — Join the Carsharing Association, access resources for operators and advocates, and subscribe to the newsletter at carsharing.org.
And if you want to be in the room where these conversations happen in person — join us at the CSA Annual Conference, October 5–6, 2026 at the Pinnacle Hotel at the Pier in North Vancouver. This year’s theme is Carsharing at the Core. Early bird tickets are available now at carsharing.org.
The CSA is a global industry association supporting carsharing operators and the broader shared mobility ecosystem. Learn more at carsharing.org.