Donald Shoup, professor famed for his innovations in parking policy, dies
- Parking cash-out. [Allows a developer to not include parking on site in return for a cash payment]
- Eliminate requirements that force real estate developers to accommodate a minimum number of parking spaces per construction project, a practice that Shoup viewed almost as “an established religion” in the planning profession.
- Charge drivers for parking on city streets and in city lots, setting the price to ensure one or two open spaces on every block.
- Make the practice of paying for parking politically popular by dedicating the revenue to additional public services. “So, if anybody puts a dollar in a parking meter, it comes right out the other side to clean the sidewalk or repair the street or plant trees,” Shoup explained. ("Long road to success," UCLA webpage)
-- original journal article from 1997
-- full text book on Dropbox
-- preface from the book
-- Parking Reform Network
-- "Donald Shoup Wasn't Just About Parking. He Was About The Economics Of Public Goods," California Planning and Development Report
I crossed paths with him in person only once, when he participated in a DC "Great Streets" conference, where under then DDOT director Dan Tangherlini, they aimed to foster urban revitalization through streetscape improvements.
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Photo: Robert Gauthier, Los Angeles Times.
On transportation demand management and stadiums and arenas, basically free transit access with ticket.
And sidewalk networks and improvements--he advocated that when a house was sold, if it didn't have a sidewalk or the sidewalk was in desperate need of repair, it should be replaced at that time, or that if repaired earlier, postponing payment until sale which he called "pay on exit" ("How L.A. can fix our scary sidewalks for the Olympics," Los Angeles Times).
I'm sure he was a thought leader involved in other urban planning matters too.
He will be missed.
Labels: parking and curbspace management, sidewalks, transportation demand management, urban design/placemaking, urban planning
posted by Richard Layman @ 4:00 AM&Permanent Link
7 Comments:
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/free-parking-in-bellevue-may-be-ending
“Drivers of course like free parking. They also like to find parking,” said Chris Long, the city’s assistant director of mobility operations. “That’s what we’re trying to solve here.”
There are about 600 on-street spaces within that area — 350 of which are downtown. Tens of thousands more spots — about 42,000 as of 2013, when the city last counted them — are in private lots and garages. With recent development and land-use rule changes, both Wilburton and BelRed are expected to see a lot more people — and cars. The Spring District also has seen significant growth with the arrival of Sound Transit’s 2 Line light rail.
But it was players in the new economy that kicked off the proposal.
“What really set this in motion was the increase in e-commerce and delivery vehicle traffic,” Long said. “There’s all this new demand for the curb that we didn’t have before.”
Drivers with companies like Grubhub, Uber Eats and DoorDash, not to mention rideshares and Amazon, are a different kind of parker than the average shopper. They typically want a spot next to the restaurant, and they don’t want to linger.
No free parking on Sundays? San Diego wants to overhaul how people park, and pay to park. Here’s how.
The ambitious proposals, which could raise as much as $100 million a year, come after voters rejected a one-cent sales tax hike that would have raised $400 million a year.
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/02/09/no-free-parking-on-sundays-san-diego-wants-to-overhaul-how-people-park-and-pay-to-park-heres-how
“You don’t want rates so low that people are not incentivized to go visit a business and exit,” said Heather Werner, who is leading the parking updates effort as interim director of the city’s Sustainability and Mobility Department. “But you don’t want rates so high that people think ‘I can’t even afford to go to that shop or store.’”
Werner said the city has the dual goals of having parking spots get used as much as possible and yet having a space available whenever someone needs one.
The tools the city would most likely use to determine fluctuations in demand — and then adjust prices — would be data from sensors and license plate recognition software.
Rates might go up on weekends or during evening hours in areas with lots of restaurants. But Werner said San Diego might also vary rates based on tourists visiting during the summer.
“You might have a dynamic solution that isn’t hour-by-hour but season-by-season in certain areas,” she said.
Another change the study recommends is ending free Sunday parking in popular areas. The average occupancy of parking spots spiked on Sundays in every area of San Diego that the study analyzed, including downtown, where the average occupancy was 91 percent on Sunday and the peak occupancy was 99 percent.
The study made similar findings regarding occupancy during late-evening hours — when meters and on-street rules are no longer in effect.
The study also recommended San Diego make it easier for neighborhoods and business districts to add meters quickly.
They’ve generally been required to create a community parking district that would handle the money. But the study recommends making that a separate process.
“Separating these two processes can help streamline the deployment of parking meters,” said Ahmad Erikat, a city parking districts program manager.
The second wave of changes is likely to be more controversial. Parking in beach lots and at the city’s two most popular regional parks — Mission Bay and Balboa — has always been free.
In addition to a likely backlash from people frustrated by the new fees, the city will need to convince the Coastal Commission that the new fees are OK. The commission aggressively scrutinizes any new fees that make it harder for ordinary residents to access the coast affordably.
https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2025-02-13/donald-shoup-ucla-professor-and-parking-guru-dies-at-86
Shoup’s central argument, published most expansively in his 700-page seminal work “The High Cost of Free Parking,” was that everything that most people think about parking was wrong.
Free street parking, Shoup wrote, makes parking and driving worse. The low cost creates a scarcity of spaces that leads people to spend time and fuel circling blocks in misery. And city planners’ efforts to solve this problem by mandating that homes and businesses provide more cheap parking only worsen the situation.
According to Shoup, this parking conundrum is foundational to many of the ills in modern urban life: congestion, sprawl, pollution and high housing costs.
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https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-morrison-shoup-20140702-column.html
Donald Shoup, UCLA’s parking guru, on how L.A. should manage its meters
If you did simply reduce most violations to $23, the lion’s share of the benefit would go to repeat offenders. [Cars] with four or more violations account for almost a third or more of all violations. There are some people who are gamblers or who think of it as a cost of doing business. John Van Horn, the editor of Parking Today magazine, said about 95% of all violations aren’t ticketed. He tried it for a month [in L.A.] — never paying at a meter — and it turned out to be a better deal than paying because citations are so rare and random.
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He puts parking in its place
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-oct-16-la-me-1016-shoup-20101016-story.html
His earlier work led to passage in 1992 of California’s parking cash-out law, which requires many employers who offer free parking at work to offer commuters the option to take the cash value of a free parking space in exchange for not using a space.
In 1997, Shoup studied eight employers in the L.A. area and found that cash-out programs reduced solo driving to work by 17%. Transit use increased by 50% and carpooling increased by 64%. A bill now in Congress would extend California’s requirement nationwide.
Getting rid of free parking in Golden Gate Park creates many benefits for S.F.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/letterstotheeditor/article/sf-parking-school-trump-20185962.php
https://www.ft.com/content/cd0b8178-5517-400b-a519-ad7e852cd31e
Life lessons from Donald ‘Shoup Dogg’ Shoup
3/6/25
Second, he didn’t just rely on a theoretical argument. Shoup assembled an encyclopedic array of details about irrational regulations, their consequences and their costs. He was interested, for example, in the problem of drivers cruising around looking for a convenient kerbside space. Together with some graduate students, he investigated the problem first hand, by looking for parking spots and noting how long it took to find them. Shoup reckoned that in a small Los Angeles neighbourhood — just 15 blocks — drivers collectively drove an extra million miles a year in their hunt for a good spot. “Shoup concluded that nearly one-third of all the cars in parking-scarce neighbourhoods were looking for a place to park,” writes Grabar.
At the same time, new buildings were hemmed in by mandatory, and often absurdly generous, parking requirements. An apartment parking lot would be vacant during the day, while the office and retail would be empty at night. Regulatory parking minimums did not allow for sensible ideas such as the idea that an apartment building might share parking with a neighbouring mall — still less for the radical idea that building developers might have an incentive to balance the attractions of parking with the costs of providing it.
Third, Shoup suggested solutions. Some of these were technical, and rather obvious: abolish regulatory parking minimums, introduce parking meters and set the prices sufficiently high that people don’t have to waste time looking for a space — although they may instead walk, cycle, switch to public transport or drive at a less busy time. But the game-changing idea was to propose that parking revenue from kerbside meters should be invested in local improvements to the streetscape such as litter collection, tree-planting or pleasantly paved sidewalks. This, says M Nolan Gray, one of Shoup’s many acolytes, was his “greatest contribution”. Locals stopped opposing parking meters, and started demanding them.
Grabar's book gets into more history, worries about parking supply to support downtowns, etc.
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World — a surprisingly engrossing book
Henry Grabar convincingly makes a case for how parking has had a destructive impact on housing, urban life and design
https://www.ft.com/content/032cce0c-27fe-4bbe-9be3-a3d83b222f39
City of San Diego looks to set parking fees at Balboa Park, Mission Bay | cbs8.com
https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/san-diego-looks-to-implement-parking-fees-balboa-park-mission-bay/509-c9deec95-18f1-4082-96fe-e581c888b6ab
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