São Paulo's 2014 strategic master plan discourages excessive parking provision in buildings close to transit corridors by increasing the opportunity cost of providing excessive parking.

This involves setting thresholds for parking provision with buildings in the defined transit corridor zones. Below the relevant threshold, parking provided with a building does not count towards the calculation of allowed Floor Area Ratio (FAR) under the zoning rules. However, parking provided beyond the threshold DOES count towards FAR.

This discourages excessive parking supply because for parking spaces beyond the threshold:
- developers must now choose between useful built area or parking spaces. Useful built area, such as office or residential space is usually of higher sale or lease value per square meter than parking space.
- in cases where developers have the option of paying a development fee for the right to build, this fee will count not just the additional useful built area but also the parking area above the threshold.

Reports on these thresholds have sometimes referred to them as 'maximums' but this label is misleading. Developers are still free to build as much parking as they see fit. However, this policy greatly increases the opportunity cost of providing excessive parking.

This reform is one of the three key parking steps in São Paulo's strategic master plan that was released on 31 July 2014:
1. Eliminating minimum parking requirements (parking mandates) for buildings across the city
2. Prohibiting 'frontage parking'. The plan banned the creation of parking spaces at walkway level in the frontage area between the front of the lot and the building.
3. Discouraging excessive parking provision in buildings within transit corridor zones by making parking provided beyond a certain threshold count towards the Floor Area Ratio (FAR).

This case is about #3. A previous case focused on #1. See https://www.parkingreformatlas.org/parking-reform-cases-1/s%C3%A3o-paulo-parking-minimums-abolition

The transit-corridor zones (or 'areas of influence of the structuring axes of urban transformation') are:
- For mass transit stations: plots that fall completely within 600 m or partially within 400 m of the station (circular zones of influence)
- For bus: plots that fall completely within 300 m or partially within 150 m of the line (linear zones of influence).

Under the strategic master plan, the public transport axes are priority places for urban transformation and optimization of urban land.

The thresholds in the 2014 strategic master plan were:
- Residential: one space per housing unit
- Non-residential: one space per 100 square meters of computable floor area.

For area calculations, the plan takes 32 square meters as the area per parking space (including circulation space and so on).

In 2016, the Land Installment, Use and Occupancy Law (Lei de Parcelamento, Uso e Ocupação do Solo - LPUOS) was enacted to consolidate the strategies presented in the strategic master plan of 2014.

This 2016 zoning law watered down the reform a little for residential buildings (ITDP, 2018, p.23). The residential threshold was changed from one parking space per unit to one parking space per 60 square meters of computable area. As a result, large apartments could again be built with more than one parking space free of counting towards the FAR computation.

Comments from 'Rafael' on the Reinventing Parking article on the 2014 parking reforms provided further insights. Rafael explained that São Paulo has been implementing "paid allowance for building rights". According to Rafael, the basic FAR had been set to 1 in most of the city. However, along the public transport axes, an FAR of up to 4 is possible upon payment of these development fees. This is why extra parking beyond the threshold in transit zones generally attracts a fee.

Incidentally, making some parking count towards the calculation of built area is also used in Singapore where only the required parking is exempted from counting as part of the allowed floor area (gross floor area, GFA) under the development controls (zoning). See https://www.reinventingparking.org/2011/06/deliberate-parking-crunch-in-singapores.html