As car ownership rose, cities stacked parking vertically in dedicated structures with ramps or mechanical lifts to store many vehicles on a small footprint. Early ramped garages appeared in American cities from around 1918, and the parking structure became a standard downtown building type. Minimum-parking requirements written into zoning from the mid-twentieth century made such structures, and vast surface lots, near-mandatory for new development. Parking provision came to dictate the bulk, cost and ground-floor character of buildings.
The parking structure and the parking standards behind it reshaped downtown form and land economics, often hollowing street life to accommodate the car.
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