For years, cities have required builders to including a minimum number of parking spaces in developments. Planners based the requirements on questionable assumptions, but nobody asked those questions until UCLA Professor Donald Shoup started to.

But now, California has scrapped laws imposing a mandatory, one-size-fits-all parking requirement on developers, giving builders and planners the flexibility to “meet the needs of each neighborhood and the specific demographics of each project,” according to the bill’s author.