The Distributional Cost of Residential Parking in Cambridge
A memo to the Cambridge City Council, May 27, 2026, by Kavish Gandhi, Vince Young, J.D., and Lucien Wallace, master’s in city planning candidates at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Read the memo (PDF) · Read it in your browser
What the memo found
- Cambridge’s resident parking permit program costs about $2.74 million a year to run, compared to about $795,000 in permit fees, based on April 2026 estimates from the City.
- At an estimated cost of $100 per permit and a $25 fee, each of the roughly 16,400 Cambridge households without a car, about one in three, paid about $58 a year toward other residents’ permits. That is about $950,000 a year in total, flowing regressively to the roughly 33,000 households with cars.
- Car-free households are disproportionately renters, lower-income, and close to the T. In the median census tract, 44% of renter households have no car, compared with 12% of owner households.
- Based on this, we supported the proposed raising of the permit fee to $75, and recommended pairing it with a(n under consideration) self-attested opt-out for low-income residents.
Update, October 2026
At the time, the fee change was a proposal, but the City has since adopted it, beginning with the 2027 permit season (City of Cambridge, September 24, 2026). In particular, it adopted the following changes:
- The standard resident permit fee is raised from $25 to $75.
- Residents for whom $75 is a financial hardship can have the fee waived.
- There is no longer an automatic waiver for residents 65 and older.
- Each resident may have at most two permits, down from four.
Data and sources
- Permits: City of Cambridge Open Data, Resident and Visitor Parking Permits, downloaded March 27, 2026.
- Households, tenure and vehicles: American Community Survey, 2020–2024 5-year estimates. Income and vehicles: ACS 2019–2023 Public Use Microdata Sample.
- All other sources are cited in the memo’s footnotes.
How to cite
Gandhi, Kavish, Vince Young, and Lucien Wallace. 2026. “The Distributional Cost of Residential Parking in Cambridge.” Memo to the Cambridge City Council, May 27, 2026. https://kmbrgandhi.github.io/cambridge-parking-permits/