Donald Shoup, UCLA urban planning professor, died earlier this month at 86. His 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, made a dull topic exciting, and offered a practical blueprint for reshaping the American landscape. Shoup accomplished this feat by seeing one big, obvious thing that no one else saw—and he got others to see it by using patience, kindness, and humor.
Shoup’s interest in how free parking distorts American cities, towns, and suburbs dated back more than half a century. In the mid-1960s, as an economics Ph.D. student, Shoup interned at New York’s Institute of Public Administration. He noticed, he told a city Department of Transportation podcast last year, that near the institute’s midtown offices, “almost all cars were parking for free on some of the most valuable land on earth.”
By the mid-1970s, Shoup was writing academic papers about parking. He had the field to himself for “nearly 50 years,” he noted, “because it’s such a low-status thing to study.” Compared with international and national affairs, local government was already low on the elite list. And even at the local level, parking policy ranked, Shoup said, down there with “sewage” as the “least prestigious thing.”
What Shoup saw before anyone else was that free parking, both on public streets and in private parking lots, took up so much space that it remade cities and towns—and not in a good way. It’s hard to build an apartment building when a developer must fill up the first few floors with a parking garage. It’s hard to cross the street with a baby carriage when drivers are circling the block for a parking spot. It’s hard to walk from your hotel to a restaurant when both are surrounded by vast parking lots. Without the lots, the buildings might be closer together.
America has so many parking spots because twentieth-century planners thought that parking should be free. With no price to govern demand, older cities quickly ran out of curbside space. Then, as cities grew out into new suburbs, state and local officials required developers to include a minimum number of parking spots to make sure there was never such a shortage.
Shoup dismissed parking minimums as “pseudoscience” with no planning basis. Instead, he offered three solutions.
First, end minimum parking requirements. Developers would still build parking space, but only for as many spots as they thought residents or customers needed. Second, charge the market price for public street parking. This would be the price, varying with demand, that would result in one or two curbside parking spots open on any block. Finally, create “parking benefit districts” to put the money from parking fees back into the neighborhood—whether in the form of more frequent bus service, tree plantings, or just cash rebates—so that people didn’t perceive charging for parking as yet another tax.
Around the turn of the millennium, something strange happened: people in power began listening to Shoup. Cities from Houston to Pasadena to San Francisco at least partially adopted his policies.
How did Shoup change minds over one of car-centric America’s most fraught topics—the right to drive anywhere without paying to park?
He succeeded partly because he was incremental. The ideas Shoup suggested were bold, but implementation could be slow and steady. The market price for street parking might, in some areas, be set as low as a dollar an hour. Cities could make a difference just by targeting their busiest commercial strips, leaving less trafficked areas alone.
Shoup was also apolitical. He spoke to conservative and progressive groups, advised Democratic and Republican mayors.
Finally, Shoup remained curious, and eager to apply his theories in the most resistant of places. When I interviewed him for my own book’s two parking chapters, he observed that as other cities had embraced paid parking, New York City was still refusing to price its curbside parking in residential neighborhoods.
Less than a year before he died, Shoup attended a community board meeting on the Upper West Side. In an area where only one-fourth of households own a car, the outrage at the idea of paying for parking tested his reputation for patience and kindness. Observing that “a small but vocal minority can take over any public meeting and create the impression that everyone wants free parking,” he called car owners’ attachment to their entitlement “selfish.”
As New York prepared to launch congestion pricing, Shoup recommended that the city charge for curb space just outside the congestion zone, to ensure that drivers didn’t clog up parking spaces. The city could rebate the money to nearby residents, perhaps in the form of transit cards. “Why not give a parking benefit district a try?” he asked.
Yes, why not inch toward some form of market pricing for the curb? As Howard Yaruss, an NYU assistant professor and Upper West Sider, told me, “public space filled with free car storage may seem like it’s part of the natural order, since that is the way it has been for literally all of our lives. Donald Shoup showed us that it’s merely a political choice, and a bad one at that. . . . Fortunately, he has left a rich legacy that the optimists among us believe will ultimately lead to better choices, more vibrant public spaces, and a healthier New York.”
Photo by Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
