Free GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Question

When several cities eliminated rules requiring new apartment buildings near rail stations to include a minimum number of parking spaces, researchers tracked the households that subsequently moved into those buildings. Compared with residents of otherwise similar buildings still subject to the old parking mandates, the new residents owned roughly forty percent fewer cars. Commentators seized on the gap as direct evidence that parking mandates themselves cause car dependence: build the spaces, the argument runs, and people will fill them. Repeal the mandates, and car ownership falls.

That inference, however attractive, outpaces what the data establish. The buildings were not assigned to households at random. People who already prefer to live without a car, or who expect to, are precisely the ones most likely to seek out an apartment that does not bundle an expensive parking space into the rent. A building that omits parking therefore attracts the car-averse, and the resulting low ownership reflects, in part, who chose to move in rather than what the policy did to them after they arrived. The forty percent gap conflates the effect of the rule with the preferences of the residents it selects.

None of this means the mandates are harmless. Even after one accounts for such sorting, a portion of the difference probably does trace to the policy itself, since a household that finds parking inconvenient and costly may gradually drive less and eventually shed a vehicle it once considered essential. The defensible claim is narrower than the headline: repealing parking mandates likely reduces car ownership somewhat, chiefly among residents already inclined toward that choice, rather than transforming the driving habits of the general population. Policymakers who expect the larger result may be disappointed, but those who treat the smaller one as worthless would discard a real, if modest, effect.