Skip to content
News
If John Locke Pulled Up to the Curb and Found No Space
John Locke probably wasn’t thinking about parking when he wrote his “Second Treatise of Government.” But his 17th-century principle — what’s now called the Lockean Proviso — might still help us understand the tangled web of private property rights, public space, and parking rules in North America today.
The proviso says that it’s okay to claim private property from the commons — if your use doesn’t leave others worse off. In Locke’s words, your claim is legitimate only if you leave “enough and as good” in the commons for everyone else. It’s a basic rule of fairness: use what you need, but don’t take so much that others are pushed out.
This isn’t just academic theory. The Lockean Proviso captures something many of us feel intuitively when we see the side effects of private decisions, like when someone builds without enough parking and the impact spills out into crowded curbs, blocked sidewalks, and jammed bike lanes. In that light, parking minimums can seem like a reasonable safeguard: a way to keep private actions from damaging shared public space.
But that line of thinking comes with serious costs, not just for private projects but for public ones, too.
