Like Donald Shoup's book, The High Cost of Free Parking, this book covers something so ordinary and obvious that most people pay no attention to it. Moreover, efforts to reform parking policies are sometimes met with emotional, irrational, and non-scientific arguments that make the problems of mispriced parking even worse. Willson in this book takes a practical approach and gives specific guidelines to reforming parking; for example:

• Make parking requirements a policy choice: identify goals and state them rather than allow them to be unstated.
• Look at actual practice and research to understand parking rather than guesswork or non-scientific arguments.
• Look at case studies of where parking policies improve results rather than enact policies that have a proven record of failure.
• Avoid looking only to the past--consider the future needs of the community and patterns of declining automobile use as well as demand for walkability rather than buy into a future of automobile-dependency only.
• Use a toolkit for parking reform that provides flexibility in the number of spaces required and makes clear the regulations on parking.
• Set housing parking requirements to be lower in order to lower housing cost.
• Examine how office parks may have lower perceived quality because of excessive parking requirements.
• Use innovative parking ideas for mixed-use areas such as shared parking.
• Apply incremental efforts to gradually gain improved results in parking policies.