Parking is the act of stopping a vehicle and leaving it unoccupied for more than a brief time. It is against the law virtually everywhere to park a vehicle in the middle of a highway or road; parking on one or both sides of a road, however, is commonly permitted. Parking facilities are constructed in combination with most buildings, to facilitate the coming and going of the buildings' users.

Parking facilities

Parking facilities include indoor and outdoor private property belonging to a house, the side of the road where metered or laid-out for such use, a parking lot or car park, indoor and outdoor multi-level structures, shared underground parking facilities, and facilities for particular modes of vehicle such as dedicated structures for cycle parking.

In the U.S., after the first public parking garage for motor vehicles was opened in Boston, May 24, 1898, livery stables in urban centers began to be converted into garages. In cities of the Eastern US, many former livery stables, with lifts for carriages, continue to operate as garages today.

The following terms give regional variations. All except carport refer to outdoor multi-level parking facilities. In some regional dialects, some of these phrases refer also to indoor or single-level facilities.

• Parking ramp (used in some parts of the upper Midwestern United States, especially Minneapolis, but sometimes seen as far east as Buffalo, New York). Elsewhere, the term "ramp" would apply to the inclines between floors of a parking garage, but not to the entire structure itself.
• Multi-storey car park
• Car park (UK, Hong Kong)
• Parkade (Canada, South Africa, Northeastern Pennsylvania)
• Parking structure (Western U.S.)
• Parking garage (Canada and USA, where this term does not always distinguish between outdoor above-ground multi-level parking and indoor underground parking.
• Parking deck (Eastern USA, an outdoor above-ground multi-level parking facility)
• Carport (open-air single-level covered parking)
• Cycle park (UK)

Modes of parking

For most motorised vehicles, there are four basic modes of parking, based on the arrangement of vehicles — parallel parking, perpendicular parking, angle parking, and Anderson parking. These are self-park configurations where the vehicle driver is able to access the parking independently.