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The High Cost of Free Parking
American drivers park for free on nearly ninety-nine percent of their car trips, and cities require developers to provide ample off-street parking for every new building. The resulting cost? Today we see sprawling cities that are better suited to cars than people and a nationwide fleet of motor vehicles that consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production. Donald Shoup contends in The High Cost of Free Parking that parking is sorely misunderstood and mismanaged by planners, architects, and politicians. He proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking so that Americans can stop paying for free parking's hidden costs.
733 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
218 people are currently reading
8259 people want to read
About the author
Donald C. Shoup
14 books30 followersDonald Curran Shoup was an American engineer and professor in urban planning. He was a research professor of urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles and a noted Georgist economist. His 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking identifies the negative repercussions of off-street parking requirements and relies heavily on 'Georgist' insights about optimal land use and rent distribution. In 2015, the American Planning Association awarded Shoup the "National Planning Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer."
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February 10, 2017
If there’s one thing to take away from this book, it’s this: the next time you’re looking for a parking space and getting frustrated, don’t think, “We need more parking here.” Instead think, “there’s a parking shortage here because the price of parking is too low.” Because most parking is free, it leads to a shortage at best, and a “tragedy of the commons” at worst.
Because we don’t pay a fee to park on most of the car trips we take, we’ve been conditioned to think of parking as “free”. The High Cost of Free Parking shows that it’s anything but. For starters, even a simple surface parking lot costs on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per space to build, and then you have to maintain it and pay property taxes for it. A space in a parking structure costs about $125 a month to operate and maintain. Shoup estimates that the total land and construction value of all parking in the United States is greater than the total value of all cars, and possibly all roads.
If it’s so expensive to build and maintain parking, and the people who park there usually aren’t paying for it (consider the enormous lot of free parking at your nearest shopping mall), how did it get there? Since around 1951, most localities have required property developers to provide some minimum amount of parking whenever they build something. Builders of stores, restaurants, houses, and apartments pay to build the parking and then pass that cost on to the rest of us in higher prices for everything else.
Shoup spends a lot of time showing how high these passed-on costs are. Trying to build an apartment complex or house? If the city requires you to supply two parking spaces per dwelling, and if a parking space takes up 330 square feet (counting the space itself plus the driveway needed to get a car in and out of it), then that’s 660 square feet. In a crowded or housing-crunched city like mine, the cost of using up that much land for car storage is intuitive — for 660 square feet, I could have a whole second apartment! But it’s a high cost for people in smaller towns and suburbs, too. Even if you’re building a 3,000 square foot single-family house, that 660 square feet of parking is almost a quarter the size of your living space. You might be fine with that for your own house, but your neighbor might prefer to use one of her spaces for a garden, a hot tub, or some other use of that land that she values more than vehicle storage; minimum parking requirements take away that choice.
So minimum parking requirements are a big burden on property owners (and therefore to everyone). That might not be so bad if the requirements were well crafted, but Shoup’s surveys of city planning departments show that they’re based on essentially nothing. Most cities either copy their neighbors’ zoning ordinances or use parking demand data from the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and the ITE’s data come from such small, skewed surveys that they’re next to useless.
This has real consequences for how land gets used. Or not used — old buildings sometimes sit vacant because the properties they sit on don’t have space for a new use’s required parking. There are lots of useful things you might want to do with your town’s land other than car storage, but minimum parking requirements force your hand. Then there’s the practical and aesthetic arguments against arranging your town as a bunch of stand-alone buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt and metal.
If parking is so expensive to provide, and drivers almost never pay for it themselves, then minimum parking requirements amount to an enormous subsidy for automobile travel. For 1990–1, Shoup estimates the total subsidy across the U.S. was between $76 billion and $223 billion dollars, or between 1.2 and 3.7% of GDP. If you calculate that number against vehicle miles traveled, that’s a subsidy to drivers of between 5 and 14 cents per mile. If we were paying for that subsidy with fuel taxes (instead of spreading it throughout the entire economy), it would require a fuel tax of between $1.27 and $3.74 a gallon.
That enormous subsidy leads us to take more car trips than we would choose to otherwise, and so we pay for it again in extra pollution and traffic. (Plus, many drivers on a city street aren’t actually going anywhere; they’re just circling around looking for a parking spot.)
The high cost of free parking is serious business; Shoup isn’t just some gadfly picking at an obscure pet problem, nor is he some crunchy car-hater. All he wants is to make parking, and therefore land use policy, more rational so we can make better choices. Specifically, we should:
1) Remove the minimum parking requirements that are bogus to begin with. Developers would still be free to build parking, and your local movie theater can still provide a space for every seat in the house if it wants to.
2) Charge a market price for public parking, including curb parking. Recognize that land is a scarce resource and charge a price for its use. For curb parking spaces and publicly owned garages, the price should be adjusted to achieve a roughly 85% occupancy rate. The idea is to provide as much parking as is available while leaving a few spaces open so no one has to circle the block. This is basic economics — charge a price that matches supply to demand. This can be done with fancy new parking meters and sensors, as San Francisco has done with its SFPark program, but it can also be done by sending your planning department’s interns out to count occupied spaces.
3) To win political support for (2), take the resulting revenue and return it to the communities where the parking is located. Instead of parking meters and paid garages looking like a cash grab by the local government, the money goes into fixing potholes, extra police patrols, landscaping, or whatever else the neighborhood wants. (Shoup proposes setting up what he calls “parking benefit districts” made up of neighborhood representatives, and having them decide how to spend the money.)
That’s the short version of Shoup’s prescriptions. There’s lots more in this book, including baby steps that cities can take to get started without completely overhauling their zoning rules.
Despite its length and technicality, the book is pretty easy to read. It’s full of tables and charts, but they’re all straightforward arithmetic and Economics 101. There are extensive citations and very little hand-waving. Shoup does tend to repeat himself, I think for the sake of hammering his point home to the planning professionals at whom the book is aimed.
I really enjoyed the book, and it changed the way I look at cities, but readers who aren’t transportation dorks are probably better off reading Shoup’s shorter essays aimed at the general public.
Speaking of being a dork, when someone would see me reading it and ask about it, I tended to feel self-conscious and joke that it was a book on Monopoly strategy. Shoup draws this comparison:
Because we don’t pay a fee to park on most of the car trips we take, we’ve been conditioned to think of parking as “free”. The High Cost of Free Parking shows that it’s anything but. For starters, even a simple surface parking lot costs on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per space to build, and then you have to maintain it and pay property taxes for it. A space in a parking structure costs about $125 a month to operate and maintain. Shoup estimates that the total land and construction value of all parking in the United States is greater than the total value of all cars, and possibly all roads.
If it’s so expensive to build and maintain parking, and the people who park there usually aren’t paying for it (consider the enormous lot of free parking at your nearest shopping mall), how did it get there? Since around 1951, most localities have required property developers to provide some minimum amount of parking whenever they build something. Builders of stores, restaurants, houses, and apartments pay to build the parking and then pass that cost on to the rest of us in higher prices for everything else.
Shoup spends a lot of time showing how high these passed-on costs are. Trying to build an apartment complex or house? If the city requires you to supply two parking spaces per dwelling, and if a parking space takes up 330 square feet (counting the space itself plus the driveway needed to get a car in and out of it), then that’s 660 square feet. In a crowded or housing-crunched city like mine, the cost of using up that much land for car storage is intuitive — for 660 square feet, I could have a whole second apartment! But it’s a high cost for people in smaller towns and suburbs, too. Even if you’re building a 3,000 square foot single-family house, that 660 square feet of parking is almost a quarter the size of your living space. You might be fine with that for your own house, but your neighbor might prefer to use one of her spaces for a garden, a hot tub, or some other use of that land that she values more than vehicle storage; minimum parking requirements take away that choice.
So minimum parking requirements are a big burden on property owners (and therefore to everyone). That might not be so bad if the requirements were well crafted, but Shoup’s surveys of city planning departments show that they’re based on essentially nothing. Most cities either copy their neighbors’ zoning ordinances or use parking demand data from the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and the ITE’s data come from such small, skewed surveys that they’re next to useless.
This has real consequences for how land gets used. Or not used — old buildings sometimes sit vacant because the properties they sit on don’t have space for a new use’s required parking. There are lots of useful things you might want to do with your town’s land other than car storage, but minimum parking requirements force your hand. Then there’s the practical and aesthetic arguments against arranging your town as a bunch of stand-alone buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt and metal.
If parking is so expensive to provide, and drivers almost never pay for it themselves, then minimum parking requirements amount to an enormous subsidy for automobile travel. For 1990–1, Shoup estimates the total subsidy across the U.S. was between $76 billion and $223 billion dollars, or between 1.2 and 3.7% of GDP. If you calculate that number against vehicle miles traveled, that’s a subsidy to drivers of between 5 and 14 cents per mile. If we were paying for that subsidy with fuel taxes (instead of spreading it throughout the entire economy), it would require a fuel tax of between $1.27 and $3.74 a gallon.
That enormous subsidy leads us to take more car trips than we would choose to otherwise, and so we pay for it again in extra pollution and traffic. (Plus, many drivers on a city street aren’t actually going anywhere; they’re just circling around looking for a parking spot.)
The high cost of free parking is serious business; Shoup isn’t just some gadfly picking at an obscure pet problem, nor is he some crunchy car-hater. All he wants is to make parking, and therefore land use policy, more rational so we can make better choices. Specifically, we should:
1) Remove the minimum parking requirements that are bogus to begin with. Developers would still be free to build parking, and your local movie theater can still provide a space for every seat in the house if it wants to.
2) Charge a market price for public parking, including curb parking. Recognize that land is a scarce resource and charge a price for its use. For curb parking spaces and publicly owned garages, the price should be adjusted to achieve a roughly 85% occupancy rate. The idea is to provide as much parking as is available while leaving a few spaces open so no one has to circle the block. This is basic economics — charge a price that matches supply to demand. This can be done with fancy new parking meters and sensors, as San Francisco has done with its SFPark program, but it can also be done by sending your planning department’s interns out to count occupied spaces.
3) To win political support for (2), take the resulting revenue and return it to the communities where the parking is located. Instead of parking meters and paid garages looking like a cash grab by the local government, the money goes into fixing potholes, extra police patrols, landscaping, or whatever else the neighborhood wants. (Shoup proposes setting up what he calls “parking benefit districts” made up of neighborhood representatives, and having them decide how to spend the money.)
That’s the short version of Shoup’s prescriptions. There’s lots more in this book, including baby steps that cities can take to get started without completely overhauling their zoning rules.
Despite its length and technicality, the book is pretty easy to read. It’s full of tables and charts, but they’re all straightforward arithmetic and Economics 101. There are extensive citations and very little hand-waving. Shoup does tend to repeat himself, I think for the sake of hammering his point home to the planning professionals at whom the book is aimed.
I really enjoyed the book, and it changed the way I look at cities, but readers who aren’t transportation dorks are probably better off reading Shoup’s shorter essays aimed at the general public.
Speaking of being a dork, when someone would see me reading it and ask about it, I tended to feel self-conscious and joke that it was a book on Monopoly strategy. Shoup draws this comparison:
In Monopoly, free parking is only one space out of 40 on the board. If Monopoly were played under our current zoning laws, however, free parking would be on every space. Parking lots might cover half of Marvin Gardens, and Park Place would have underground parking. Free parking would push buildings farther apart, increase the cost of houses and hotels, and permit fewer of them to be built at all. Smart players would soon leave Atlantic City behind and move to a larger board that allowed them to build on cheaper land in the suburbs. Connecticut Avenue would not be redeveloped with hotels, the railroads would disappear, and every piece on the board would move more slowly. Even the car would move slowly, but it would park free wherever it wanted.
If we played Monopoly acording to our current zoning regulations, a large share of the money for every new building would disappear into the Community Chest, only to reappear as free parking. Every player would want the car as their token. Players who got the shoe as their token would cry foul, and they would be right — the system would not be fair because much of their money would be going to subsidize the car while everyone else gets left behind. We probably would not want our children to play by these unfair rules, and yet Americans play by these rules in real life every day. Mandatory free parking disfigures the landscape, distorts urban form, damages the environment, and wastes money that could be spent more productively elsewhere. Because we never see the money we spend on parking, it always seems someone else is paying for it. Everything seems all right, but I have tried to show in this book that a great deal is wrong with free parking and it is time to cry foul.
May 6, 2023
"I'm go glad this is over" was my reaction on finishing. And that doesn't speak well of it.
Which is a tragedy because the concept, I think, is five stars. He makes a reasonably compelling case for his three base arguments (we should charge for parking, off-street parking requirements are silly, and we're not even collecting the data we need to address the problem because nobody views it as a problem), and other reviews have gone over those at enough length I don't feel a need to add to that discussion.
But my goodness this is long. It's over six hundred pages to keep hammering those same points over and over again from slightly different angles, now and again with what I can only describe as "out of touch professor who thinks he's hip" metaphors or pop-culture references. Like, I get it. I got the points the first dozen times you explained them. This book could have been half the size and packed a lot more punch...maybe even a third. I think perhaps he feels he's fighting such an uphill battle against entrenched interests (which, to be fair, is likely true) that he has to really cover all possible lanes of attack someone might make against his proposals, but I think he's doing a disservice to himself. They are powerful ideas, and they speak for themselves. They don't need to be pounded flat and lifeless with the amount of repetition he does here.
I was struck powerfully by two points at the end of the book :
1) We're in a circular trap here, and it's not organic. We design for the car because everyone uses cars. But everyone uses cars because we design for cars. If we want to shift modal splits we really need to look at stop prioritizing the car above everything else.
2) The way we measure parking demand is ridiculous. Demand is linked inextricably to price, and he's absolutely right that it's nonsensical we just measure "parking demand" without correlating it to the fact that it's free. If every time I went to a restaurant I could get a free dessert if I wanted, people measuring the demand for dessert would find that a lot more people Demand a cheesecake after dinner than they do currently where I have to pay some amount of money for it.
I'm no longer a know-it-all teenage libertarian who thought everything (literally everything) should be left to the god of the free market to solve. Consequently I did find his faith that if we just turn parking rates over to The Market that it will all work out perfectly for everyone to be a little naive. I couldn't think of ways off the top of my head, but I'm sure they exist. Inevitably, someone finds a way to corrupt the market to their own advantage. I wish he had addressed that possibility better, instead of the blind faith he preached through the entire thing.
Many thanks to my poor public library who had to put up with me renewing this repeatedly to finish it. Looks like...three months to read? Good heavens.
---
ETA, 5/5/23 : Look, it's not even six months since I reviewed this. And that totally not prophetic prophecy I made about people manipulating the market to wreck things? ...is already happening. Recently the state of Oregon, where I live and work, passed a law that essentially decouples the need for housing developers to provide any on-site parking, much as Stroup advocates here. Here's what's happening : a) they either provide no parking at all and just assume they can push all the parking onto the street, which is bad when not coupled with cities charging on-street parking, and also really bad from an equity perspective when you consider the needs of disabled people no longer have to be really taken into account because the laws don't keep up, OR b) they charge for the parking space separately from the rental unit, and then charge an absurd amount or jack it heavily every year as a way to skirt around Oregon renter-protection laws which put caps on the amount you can increase rent every year (and which laws conveniently don't apply to parking spaces). So yay me? The next lottery will be 5 33 24 16 42, by the way.
Which is a tragedy because the concept, I think, is five stars. He makes a reasonably compelling case for his three base arguments (we should charge for parking, off-street parking requirements are silly, and we're not even collecting the data we need to address the problem because nobody views it as a problem), and other reviews have gone over those at enough length I don't feel a need to add to that discussion.
But my goodness this is long. It's over six hundred pages to keep hammering those same points over and over again from slightly different angles, now and again with what I can only describe as "out of touch professor who thinks he's hip" metaphors or pop-culture references. Like, I get it. I got the points the first dozen times you explained them. This book could have been half the size and packed a lot more punch...maybe even a third. I think perhaps he feels he's fighting such an uphill battle against entrenched interests (which, to be fair, is likely true) that he has to really cover all possible lanes of attack someone might make against his proposals, but I think he's doing a disservice to himself. They are powerful ideas, and they speak for themselves. They don't need to be pounded flat and lifeless with the amount of repetition he does here.
I was struck powerfully by two points at the end of the book :
1) We're in a circular trap here, and it's not organic. We design for the car because everyone uses cars. But everyone uses cars because we design for cars. If we want to shift modal splits we really need to look at stop prioritizing the car above everything else.
2) The way we measure parking demand is ridiculous. Demand is linked inextricably to price, and he's absolutely right that it's nonsensical we just measure "parking demand" without correlating it to the fact that it's free. If every time I went to a restaurant I could get a free dessert if I wanted, people measuring the demand for dessert would find that a lot more people Demand a cheesecake after dinner than they do currently where I have to pay some amount of money for it.
I'm no longer a know-it-all teenage libertarian who thought everything (literally everything) should be left to the god of the free market to solve. Consequently I did find his faith that if we just turn parking rates over to The Market that it will all work out perfectly for everyone to be a little naive. I couldn't think of ways off the top of my head, but I'm sure they exist. Inevitably, someone finds a way to corrupt the market to their own advantage. I wish he had addressed that possibility better, instead of the blind faith he preached through the entire thing.
Many thanks to my poor public library who had to put up with me renewing this repeatedly to finish it. Looks like...three months to read? Good heavens.
---
ETA, 5/5/23 : Look, it's not even six months since I reviewed this. And that totally not prophetic prophecy I made about people manipulating the market to wreck things? ...is already happening. Recently the state of Oregon, where I live and work, passed a law that essentially decouples the need for housing developers to provide any on-site parking, much as Stroup advocates here. Here's what's happening : a) they either provide no parking at all and just assume they can push all the parking onto the street, which is bad when not coupled with cities charging on-street parking, and also really bad from an equity perspective when you consider the needs of disabled people no longer have to be really taken into account because the laws don't keep up, OR b) they charge for the parking space separately from the rental unit, and then charge an absurd amount or jack it heavily every year as a way to skirt around Oregon renter-protection laws which put caps on the amount you can increase rent every year (and which laws conveniently don't apply to parking spaces). So yay me? The next lottery will be 5 33 24 16 42, by the way.
March 12, 2010
A great nonfiction book, in my mind, can take a topic no one thinks he's interested in and make finding out about it seem as necessary as breathing air. By that measure The High Cost of Free Parking clocks in as very good, although not nearly as fast-paced or spellbinding as Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do. It's certainly exhaustive and persuasive. Taking 700 pages to present the basic thesis that street parking should cost money and off-street or mandatorily free parking doesn't belong in our zoning laws, Shoup leaves no analogy unmade, example ungiven, or calculation undone.
And in general, it's a fascinating read; rarely dry and at times filled with funny bits that I can just picture Shoup telling in the frustrated deadpan of an urban planner, as when he suggests that other methods of parking enforcement might include painting the parts of a car that fall over the lines day-glo colors, or when he describes the game of Monopoly as it would be under today's zoning laws.
To be sure, by the 500th page or so things started to get a little repetitive. By that point yes, we got it: it's OK to charge for parking. This didn't make the book feel any less worthwhile, though, and it is endearing and informative to see someone as passionate about his work as Shoup is make such a convincing argument so clearly. You will never, ever see a parking lot or meter the same way again.
And in general, it's a fascinating read; rarely dry and at times filled with funny bits that I can just picture Shoup telling in the frustrated deadpan of an urban planner, as when he suggests that other methods of parking enforcement might include painting the parts of a car that fall over the lines day-glo colors, or when he describes the game of Monopoly as it would be under today's zoning laws.
To be sure, by the 500th page or so things started to get a little repetitive. By that point yes, we got it: it's OK to charge for parking. This didn't make the book feel any less worthwhile, though, and it is endearing and informative to see someone as passionate about his work as Shoup is make such a convincing argument so clearly. You will never, ever see a parking lot or meter the same way again.
aborted
December 19, 2019While it's true I'll never look at a parking space the same way again, I will continue to chant my "cruising" mantra:
Mother Mary, full of grace,
Help us find a parking space.
(Alternate: "Mother Mary, fair of face...")
I heard about this book somewhere - some article, years ago, probably in Slate. It sounded interesting. But not interesting enough to read 800 pages about the economic (and other) costs of parking and searching for parking. I skimmed, rapidly. It veers in and out of readability, given that it was written for urban planners more than general interest readers.
June 29, 2015
A fascinating premise... that probably could have rested very soundly at around 250 pages instead of over 800. READ AT LEAST SOME OF IT! It will make you think differently about the externalities of parking and land use.
June 14, 2012
A very deep book. It's a mammoth tome-- you wouldn't want to drop it on your toe. I don't think I could do it justice if I tried to summarize it, so instead I've pasted the book's table of contents below. Check it out, just the ToC itself is pretty good reading! At least, it gives you a good idea of what the book's all about.
I agree with the general thrust of Shoup's arguments, and he's clearly done a ton of scholarly research to back up everything he says. It's all clearly written and easy to follow. My only complaint is that that the book doesn't address the issue of free parking being removed in a neighborhood with inadequate public transportation. This isn't just a theoretical debate-- in Potrero Hill they tried putting in meters and it caused a huge uproar, mainly due to
1) being viewed as a pure money grab by the city (i.e. not tied to any actual problem w/ congestion)
2) lack of need for traffic mgmt-- parking is fine in most parts of pot hill, not a lot of cruising
3) lack of good public transportation coverage for the neighborhood-- so people will still have to drive, it just sucks more
I'm sure this guy would have answers to all the above but I looked in the index and was surprised to see "public transportation" only mentioned a handful of times.
Anyway here's the ToC.
Introduction
1. The Twenty-First Century Parking Problem
The Car Explosion
The "Commons" Problem
Skewed Travel Choices
Cures That Kill
The Twenty-First Century Parking Solution
Part I: Planning for Free Parking
2. Unnatural Selection
The Genesis of Parking Requirements
Huddled Masses Yearning to Park Free
Planning without Prices
Planning without Theory
First Strategy: Copy Other Cities
Second Strategy: Consult ITE Data
Five Easy Reforms
Conclusion: The Immaculate Conception of
Parking Demand
3. The Pseudoscience of Planning for Parking
Three-Step Process
Circular Logic
Estimating Demand without Prices
Professional Confidence Trick
Planners in Denial
Parochial Policies
Mobility versus Proximity
Systemwide Effects of Parking Requirements
Parking Spaces Required for a Change of
Land Use
Quantity versus Quality
Conclusion: An Elaborate Structure with
No Foundation
4. An Analogy: Ancient Astronomy
A Parallel Universe
The Muddle Is the Message
5. A Great Planning Disaster
Bundled Parking and the Decision to Drive
Distorted Urban Form
Degraded Urban Design
Higher Housing Costs
Paralysis by Parking Requirements
Limits on Homeownership
Damage to the Urban Economy
Harm to the Central Business District
Harm to Low-Income Families
Price Discrimination
Prices and Preferences
Precedent Coagulates into Tradition
An Analogy: Bloodletting
Conclusion: First, Do No Harm
6. The Cost of Required Parking Spaces
How Much Does a Parking Space Cost?
Monthly Cost of a Parking Space
External Costs of a Parking Space
Conclusion: The High Cost of Required
Parking Spaces
7. Putting the Cost of Free Parking in Perspective
Total Subsidy for Parking
Capital Cost of the Parking Supply
New Parking Spaces Compared with New Cars
Free Parking Compared with the Cost of
Driving to Work
Parking Subsidies Compared with
Congestion Tolls
Simple Arithmetic
Conclusion: A Great Planning Disaster
8. An Allegory: Minimum Telephone Requirements
9. Public Parking in Lieu of Private Parking
Benefits of In-Lieu Fees
Concerns about In-Lieu Fees
How Do Cities Set the In-Lieu Fees?
Why Pay the Fee rather than Provide the Parking?
The Impact Fees Implicit in Parking Requirements
Conclusion: The High Cost of Parking Requirements
10. Reduce Demand Rather than Increase Supply
Transit Passes in Lieu of Parking Spaces
Parking Cash Out in Lieu of Parking Spaces
Car Sharing
Policies Appropriate to Their Locations
Conclusion: Offer the Option to Reduce
Parking Demand
Part II: Cruising for Parking
11. Cruising
Cruising through the Twentieth Century
Detroit
Washington, D.C.
New Haven and Waterbury
London
Paris
Freiburg
Jerusalem and Haifa
Cambridge
Cape Town
New York
San Francisco
Sydney
Cruising without Parking
Conclusion: A Century of Cruising
12. The Right Price for Curb Parking
Is Curb Parking a Public Good?
Time Limits
The Right Price
External Costs of Curb Parking
Demand-Responsive Prices
Can Prices Manage Curb Parking Demand?
Two Later Observations
Conclusion: Charge the Right Price for
Curb Parking
13. Choosing to Cruise
To Cruise or to Pay
Equilibrium Search Time: An Example
The Wages of Cruising
Rent Seeking
Two Pricing Strategies
Elasticities
A Numerical Example
Complications
Is Cruising Rational?
The Role of Information
Conclusion: An Invitation to Cruise
14. California Cruising
Park-and-Visit Tests in Westwood Village
Cheaper Curb Parking Creates More Cruising
Cruising for a Year
Side Effects of Cruising
Solo Drivers More Likely to Cruise
Market Prices Can Attract More People
Wages of Cruising in Westwood Village
Perception versus Reality
Turning Wasted Time into Public Revenue
Conclusion: The High Cost of Cruising
Part III: Cashing in on Curb Parking
15. Buying Time at the Curb
First Parking Meter
The Technology of Charging for Curb Parking
Not Technology but Politics
Conclusion: Honk if You Support Paid Parking
16. Turning Small Change into Big Changes
Parking Benefit Districts
A Logical Recipient: Business Improvement Districts
Pasadena: Your Meter Money Makes a Difference
San Diego: Turning Small Change into Big Changes
Conclusion: Cash Registers at the Curb
17. Taxing Foreigners Living Abroad
A Market in Curb Parking
Residential Parking Benefit Districts
Benefits of Parking Benefit Districts
Conclusion: Changing the Politics of Curb Parking
18. Let Prices Do the Planning
Space, Time, Money, and Parking
The Optimal Parking Space
Greed versus Sloth
Parking Duration and Vehicle Occupancy
The Invisible Hand
Classic Monocentric Models
Efficiency
Practicality
Enforcement
Banning Curb Parking
Where Would Jesus Park?
Removing Off-Street Parking Requirements
Conclusion: Prices Can Do the Planning
19. The Ideal Source of Local Public Revenue
Henry George's Proposal
Curb Parking Revenue Is Public Land Rent
Parking Requirements Act Like a Tax on
Buildings
What Would Adam Smith Say about Charging
for Parking?
Revenue Potential of Curb Parking
Division of Curb Parking Revenue
Similarity to Special Assessments
Property Values
An Analogy: Congestion Pricing
Appropriate Public Claimants
Parking Increment Finance
Equity
Opportunity Cost of Curb Parking
Economic Development
Monopoly, Free Parking, and Henry George
Conclusion: The Revenue Is under Our Cars
20. Unbundled Parking
Parking Costs Unbundled from Housing Costs
Parking Caps or Parking Prices
Effects of Unbundling on VMT and Vehicle
Emissions
Objections to Unbundling
Conclusion: The High Cost of Bundled Parking
21. Time for a Paradigm Shift
Parking Requirements as a Paradigm
Retrofitting America
An Illustration: Advising the Mayor
A New Style of Planning
Part IV: Conclusion
22. Changing the Future
Curb Parking as a Commons Problem
Enormous Parking Subsidies
Unintended Consequences
Enclosing the Commons
Public Property, Not Private Property
Commons, Anticommons, and the Liberal
Commons
Public Property, but without Open Access
Other Commons Problems
Two Futures
Three Reforms
Appendix A: The Practice of Parking Requirements
Three Steps in Setting a Parking Requirement
Land Uses
Bases
Convergence to the Golden Rule
Parking Requirements and Regional Culture
Parking Requirements and Parking Technology
What Went Wrong?
Appendix B: Nationwide Transportation Surveys
Drivers Park Free for 99 Percent of All Automobile Trips
Cars Are Parked 95 Percent of the Time
Appendix C: The Language of Parking
Appendix D: The Calculus of Driving, Parking, and Walking
Elasticities
Complications
The Price of Time
Appendix E: The Price of Land and the Cost of Parking
Break-Even Land Values
Land Banks
Cost of Complying with Parking Requirements
Appendix F: People, Parking, and Cities
Share of Land in Streets and Parking
People and Land: Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco
Appendix G: Converting Traffic Congestion into Cash
Use of the Toll Revenue
Estimates of the Toll Revenue
Income Distribution and Political Support
Appendix H: The Vehicles of Nations
Afterword: Twenty-First Century Parking Reforms
1. Set the Right Price for Curb Parking
2. Return Parking Revenue to Pay for Local Public Services
3. Remove Minimum Parking Requirements
I agree with the general thrust of Shoup's arguments, and he's clearly done a ton of scholarly research to back up everything he says. It's all clearly written and easy to follow. My only complaint is that that the book doesn't address the issue of free parking being removed in a neighborhood with inadequate public transportation. This isn't just a theoretical debate-- in Potrero Hill they tried putting in meters and it caused a huge uproar, mainly due to
1) being viewed as a pure money grab by the city (i.e. not tied to any actual problem w/ congestion)
2) lack of need for traffic mgmt-- parking is fine in most parts of pot hill, not a lot of cruising
3) lack of good public transportation coverage for the neighborhood-- so people will still have to drive, it just sucks more
I'm sure this guy would have answers to all the above but I looked in the index and was surprised to see "public transportation" only mentioned a handful of times.
Anyway here's the ToC.
Introduction
1. The Twenty-First Century Parking Problem
The Car Explosion
The "Commons" Problem
Skewed Travel Choices
Cures That Kill
The Twenty-First Century Parking Solution
Part I: Planning for Free Parking
2. Unnatural Selection
The Genesis of Parking Requirements
Huddled Masses Yearning to Park Free
Planning without Prices
Planning without Theory
First Strategy: Copy Other Cities
Second Strategy: Consult ITE Data
Five Easy Reforms
Conclusion: The Immaculate Conception of
Parking Demand
3. The Pseudoscience of Planning for Parking
Three-Step Process
Circular Logic
Estimating Demand without Prices
Professional Confidence Trick
Planners in Denial
Parochial Policies
Mobility versus Proximity
Systemwide Effects of Parking Requirements
Parking Spaces Required for a Change of
Land Use
Quantity versus Quality
Conclusion: An Elaborate Structure with
No Foundation
4. An Analogy: Ancient Astronomy
A Parallel Universe
The Muddle Is the Message
5. A Great Planning Disaster
Bundled Parking and the Decision to Drive
Distorted Urban Form
Degraded Urban Design
Higher Housing Costs
Paralysis by Parking Requirements
Limits on Homeownership
Damage to the Urban Economy
Harm to the Central Business District
Harm to Low-Income Families
Price Discrimination
Prices and Preferences
Precedent Coagulates into Tradition
An Analogy: Bloodletting
Conclusion: First, Do No Harm
6. The Cost of Required Parking Spaces
How Much Does a Parking Space Cost?
Monthly Cost of a Parking Space
External Costs of a Parking Space
Conclusion: The High Cost of Required
Parking Spaces
7. Putting the Cost of Free Parking in Perspective
Total Subsidy for Parking
Capital Cost of the Parking Supply
New Parking Spaces Compared with New Cars
Free Parking Compared with the Cost of
Driving to Work
Parking Subsidies Compared with
Congestion Tolls
Simple Arithmetic
Conclusion: A Great Planning Disaster
8. An Allegory: Minimum Telephone Requirements
9. Public Parking in Lieu of Private Parking
Benefits of In-Lieu Fees
Concerns about In-Lieu Fees
How Do Cities Set the In-Lieu Fees?
Why Pay the Fee rather than Provide the Parking?
The Impact Fees Implicit in Parking Requirements
Conclusion: The High Cost of Parking Requirements
10. Reduce Demand Rather than Increase Supply
Transit Passes in Lieu of Parking Spaces
Parking Cash Out in Lieu of Parking Spaces
Car Sharing
Policies Appropriate to Their Locations
Conclusion: Offer the Option to Reduce
Parking Demand
Part II: Cruising for Parking
11. Cruising
Cruising through the Twentieth Century
Detroit
Washington, D.C.
New Haven and Waterbury
London
Paris
Freiburg
Jerusalem and Haifa
Cambridge
Cape Town
New York
San Francisco
Sydney
Cruising without Parking
Conclusion: A Century of Cruising
12. The Right Price for Curb Parking
Is Curb Parking a Public Good?
Time Limits
The Right Price
External Costs of Curb Parking
Demand-Responsive Prices
Can Prices Manage Curb Parking Demand?
Two Later Observations
Conclusion: Charge the Right Price for
Curb Parking
13. Choosing to Cruise
To Cruise or to Pay
Equilibrium Search Time: An Example
The Wages of Cruising
Rent Seeking
Two Pricing Strategies
Elasticities
A Numerical Example
Complications
Is Cruising Rational?
The Role of Information
Conclusion: An Invitation to Cruise
14. California Cruising
Park-and-Visit Tests in Westwood Village
Cheaper Curb Parking Creates More Cruising
Cruising for a Year
Side Effects of Cruising
Solo Drivers More Likely to Cruise
Market Prices Can Attract More People
Wages of Cruising in Westwood Village
Perception versus Reality
Turning Wasted Time into Public Revenue
Conclusion: The High Cost of Cruising
Part III: Cashing in on Curb Parking
15. Buying Time at the Curb
First Parking Meter
The Technology of Charging for Curb Parking
Not Technology but Politics
Conclusion: Honk if You Support Paid Parking
16. Turning Small Change into Big Changes
Parking Benefit Districts
A Logical Recipient: Business Improvement Districts
Pasadena: Your Meter Money Makes a Difference
San Diego: Turning Small Change into Big Changes
Conclusion: Cash Registers at the Curb
17. Taxing Foreigners Living Abroad
A Market in Curb Parking
Residential Parking Benefit Districts
Benefits of Parking Benefit Districts
Conclusion: Changing the Politics of Curb Parking
18. Let Prices Do the Planning
Space, Time, Money, and Parking
The Optimal Parking Space
Greed versus Sloth
Parking Duration and Vehicle Occupancy
The Invisible Hand
Classic Monocentric Models
Efficiency
Practicality
Enforcement
Banning Curb Parking
Where Would Jesus Park?
Removing Off-Street Parking Requirements
Conclusion: Prices Can Do the Planning
19. The Ideal Source of Local Public Revenue
Henry George's Proposal
Curb Parking Revenue Is Public Land Rent
Parking Requirements Act Like a Tax on
Buildings
What Would Adam Smith Say about Charging
for Parking?
Revenue Potential of Curb Parking
Division of Curb Parking Revenue
Similarity to Special Assessments
Property Values
An Analogy: Congestion Pricing
Appropriate Public Claimants
Parking Increment Finance
Equity
Opportunity Cost of Curb Parking
Economic Development
Monopoly, Free Parking, and Henry George
Conclusion: The Revenue Is under Our Cars
20. Unbundled Parking
Parking Costs Unbundled from Housing Costs
Parking Caps or Parking Prices
Effects of Unbundling on VMT and Vehicle
Emissions
Objections to Unbundling
Conclusion: The High Cost of Bundled Parking
21. Time for a Paradigm Shift
Parking Requirements as a Paradigm
Retrofitting America
An Illustration: Advising the Mayor
A New Style of Planning
Part IV: Conclusion
22. Changing the Future
Curb Parking as a Commons Problem
Enormous Parking Subsidies
Unintended Consequences
Enclosing the Commons
Public Property, Not Private Property
Commons, Anticommons, and the Liberal
Commons
Public Property, but without Open Access
Other Commons Problems
Two Futures
Three Reforms
Appendix A: The Practice of Parking Requirements
Three Steps in Setting a Parking Requirement
Land Uses
Bases
Convergence to the Golden Rule
Parking Requirements and Regional Culture
Parking Requirements and Parking Technology
What Went Wrong?
Appendix B: Nationwide Transportation Surveys
Drivers Park Free for 99 Percent of All Automobile Trips
Cars Are Parked 95 Percent of the Time
Appendix C: The Language of Parking
Appendix D: The Calculus of Driving, Parking, and Walking
Elasticities
Complications
The Price of Time
Appendix E: The Price of Land and the Cost of Parking
Break-Even Land Values
Land Banks
Cost of Complying with Parking Requirements
Appendix F: People, Parking, and Cities
Share of Land in Streets and Parking
People and Land: Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco
Appendix G: Converting Traffic Congestion into Cash
Use of the Toll Revenue
Estimates of the Toll Revenue
Income Distribution and Political Support
Appendix H: The Vehicles of Nations
Afterword: Twenty-First Century Parking Reforms
1. Set the Right Price for Curb Parking
2. Return Parking Revenue to Pay for Local Public Services
3. Remove Minimum Parking Requirements
July 12, 2007
this book was so good! who would have thought that a book about parking could flame the passions? shoup presents an impeccably well-reasoned manifesto about the absurdity of the regulation governing parking throughout the US (and the costs--economic, environmental, aesthetic--that they impose on society as a whole). it is so watertight that i can't believe it hasn't started a revolution already. maybe it's because no one's read it because it is so long. don't be intimidated, it's amazing. read it.
October 9, 2023
There's no denying that Shoup's observations and theories about parking have been revolutionary, and that American cities' parking policies have undergone a vast shift in the previous twenty years thanks to this book. I don't disagree with his basic premises that parking minimums are bad public policy, nor that free public street parking distorts the market and creates perversive incentives that cause negative externalities for everyone. (I have some questions about the actual implementation and utility of the parking benefit districts he proposes, but that's just quibbling.)
But I maintain nonetheless that this is a bad book. It is 800 pages; it has no need on God's over-asphalted Earth to be 800 pages. I am not even convinced it has a need to be 400 pages. The repetition is excruciating, the asides are frequently lacking in evidence, the metaphors are unnecessary and have aged poorly. It is a tribute to the strength of Shoup's underlying data that a book this shoddily constructed and edited got any traction at all.
(Also, this is yet another urban planning book that is completely oblivious to the impact of race in American life. Shoup at one point attributes the dilapidation of DC's rowhouses in the 1960s to the lack of sufficient parking. White flight and the MLK assassination riots are apparently too minor factors to mention.)
I am glad I read it. If you care about urban planning, you should probably read it too, but I'm very sorry you have to.
But I maintain nonetheless that this is a bad book. It is 800 pages; it has no need on God's over-asphalted Earth to be 800 pages. I am not even convinced it has a need to be 400 pages. The repetition is excruciating, the asides are frequently lacking in evidence, the metaphors are unnecessary and have aged poorly. It is a tribute to the strength of Shoup's underlying data that a book this shoddily constructed and edited got any traction at all.
(Also, this is yet another urban planning book that is completely oblivious to the impact of race in American life. Shoup at one point attributes the dilapidation of DC's rowhouses in the 1960s to the lack of sufficient parking. White flight and the MLK assassination riots are apparently too minor factors to mention.)
I am glad I read it. If you care about urban planning, you should probably read it too, but I'm very sorry you have to.
June 6, 2016
Shoup makes a convincing case in this book that parking should generally cost more than it does. There are a few equations and tables for readers who might want them, but the author lays out his arguments in language easily accessible to a layperson. The book seems to be designed so that individual sections can be read separately, which means that some bits can be repetitive if you read it from start to finish. Also, it is very focused on the United States in general and California in particular. Still, I learned a great deal and would recommend this tome to anyone interested in urban planning.
January 19, 2019
The High Cost of Free Parking is an extensive economic analysis of parking policy, arguing that free curb parking and minimum parking requirements have had a disastrous effect on land-use, traffic congestion, and the development of cities in America. The book argues that current parking policies amount to a staggering subsidy for questionable gain, when market policies could convert the deadweight loss into cheaper costs for most economic activities, less traffic, and more revenue for local neighborhoods.
You might think – why would anyone but a parking planner want to read this book? But the topic it deals with is much more important to our lives than you might suspect. Consider these notions, as posited by the book’s analyses:
• The value of America’s parking spaces is almost certainly much larger than the value of the entire fleet of America’s cars, and possibly more than the value of its entire road system.
• The value of the subsidy for free parking in America is astonishing in size, roughly on magnitude with the total amount America spends on Medicare or National Defense.
• Every year, in one single 15-block Los Angeles neighborhood, cars seeking (that is, “cruising” for) parking spaces travel the distance to the moon and back, consume 11 years of driver time, consume 47,000 gallons of gas, and produce 730 tons of carbon dioxide.
• Based on this study, people cruising for only 14 parking spaces over the course of a year travel miles roughly equal to the distance around the earth.
• Much of the traffic we associate with cities is caused by cruising for parking. Around 90% of traffic in central business districts at peak hours may consist of cars cruising for parking.
• Minimum parking requirements in Southern California increase the cost of an office building by 37% and reduce the value of the building and tax revenues from it by a similar amount. Moreover, code-required parking for affordable housing in Palo Alto increases the cost of affordable housing by a stupefying 71%.
The book points out that by underpricing curb parking and requiring off-street parking for building uses, we have caused several deleterious effects.
First, free curb parking causes parking shortages, drastically increases traffic, subsidizes those who drive more with the taxes of non-drivers and those who drive less, skews travel choices towards solo driving, and transfers wealth inefficiently. As noted above, the size of this subsidy is truly enormous. Everyone wants something for free, but it’s unclear why we choose to provide free rental of public spaces for parking instead of, say, more subsidized housing, health care, or, well, almost anything else. Moreover, this particular choice of subsidy is a major cause of driver frustration, traffic, and pollution. To paraphrase one economist, “if pizza were free, we'd have a pizza shortage.”
Second, requiring minimum off-street parking for land uses increases the cost of almost everything else in society because the cost of providing free parking becomes bundled into the cost of housing, supermarket foods, clothes, services, and just about everything else. Thus, off-street parking is not free; it’s just paid for by inflated costs on goods and services, and by those who don’t drive or drive less than others. Furthermore, minimum parking requirements destroy cities and create no-places. As Jane Jacobs noted, parking lots are “street desolators.” By forcing land uses to be surrounded by or encompass parking, we prevent redevelopment of underused properties and create barren streetscapes loaded with pedestrian-unfriendly parking lots. In short, parking squeezes out everything else.
But this book is not just a critique of common parking policies. It also contains very concrete and practical solutions for solving the problems it identifies. In brief, the author argues that municipalities should: (1) set curb parking prices through market forces so that each block generally has one to two free spaces; (2) eliminate minimum parking requirement for land uses; (3) develop parking benefit districts to return the cost of spillover parking to affected neighborhoods; and (4) direct any parking revenues back to local communities for non-parking improvement purposes. Much of the book is spent in exploring these proposals and how to make them both politically feasible and practically workable.
Moreover, there’s even more to be found for parking aficionados – including several case-studies, some detailed analysis that shows that current minimum parking requirements are based on virtually no factual or logical basis, just imitation, and several appendices with comparative information on global car use, elasticity curves, and the like.
Although this is a large tome dense with economic analysis, it’s a brisk read. It’s crisply written, stuffed tight with colorful examples and analogies, and the economic analyses are straightforward and laid out cleanly. The argument is well-made and grounded on familiar economic analysis and, where available, observational and experimental studies. I found the ideas thoughtful and convincing. Moreover, it’s totally ingenious at times. At one point in the book, I was skeptical of the book’s argument relating to spillover effects on residential neighborhoods; a page later, the argument on parking benefit districts had completely changed my mind and had me thinking about how to implement it in my own neighborhood.
The book, while packed with brilliant ideas, is not perfect. The main drawback for the casual reader will be its repetitive nature. The same arguments, phrases, and even quotes are used over and over from chapter to chapter, and sometimes even in the same chapter. I assume this is so chapters can be excerpted easily for coursework, but sometimes reading feels like circling the same block repeatedly.
Moreover, on a substantive level, the book could benefit from further analysis of different environments, both geographically and by development character. The argument relies too heavily on studies that relate to a few Californian cities over a short time-frame, so it’s hard to know how the policy proposals would apply to suburban or residential areas, or areas with dissimilar regulatory or public transportation environments.
In addition, the book lacks analysis of the effects of the proposed changes on existing businesses. If minimum parking requirements are eliminated, new development will immediately become cheaper than old development built to satisfy old requirements. If the economic impacts of parking requirements are as large as the author believes, the author’s proposal could cause short-term seismic shifts in housing and business costs, to the detriment of current owners and operators. Analysis of housing prices and of the competitiveness of businesses hampered by long-term investment in current infrastructure, and proposals on how to ameliorate those impacts without causing medium-term harm and major transition costs, would be welcome.
Finally, the book is a little too glib in dismissing impacts on lower-income populations. Even though it has thoughtful suggestions on how to address these effects, they are described briefly and as options; more discussion of lifeline pricing would surmount likely objections in many cities.
This book should be required reading for all American planning boards, county councils, and urban engineers.
You might think – why would anyone but a parking planner want to read this book? But the topic it deals with is much more important to our lives than you might suspect. Consider these notions, as posited by the book’s analyses:
• The value of America’s parking spaces is almost certainly much larger than the value of the entire fleet of America’s cars, and possibly more than the value of its entire road system.
• The value of the subsidy for free parking in America is astonishing in size, roughly on magnitude with the total amount America spends on Medicare or National Defense.
• Every year, in one single 15-block Los Angeles neighborhood, cars seeking (that is, “cruising” for) parking spaces travel the distance to the moon and back, consume 11 years of driver time, consume 47,000 gallons of gas, and produce 730 tons of carbon dioxide.
• Based on this study, people cruising for only 14 parking spaces over the course of a year travel miles roughly equal to the distance around the earth.
• Much of the traffic we associate with cities is caused by cruising for parking. Around 90% of traffic in central business districts at peak hours may consist of cars cruising for parking.
• Minimum parking requirements in Southern California increase the cost of an office building by 37% and reduce the value of the building and tax revenues from it by a similar amount. Moreover, code-required parking for affordable housing in Palo Alto increases the cost of affordable housing by a stupefying 71%.
The book points out that by underpricing curb parking and requiring off-street parking for building uses, we have caused several deleterious effects.
First, free curb parking causes parking shortages, drastically increases traffic, subsidizes those who drive more with the taxes of non-drivers and those who drive less, skews travel choices towards solo driving, and transfers wealth inefficiently. As noted above, the size of this subsidy is truly enormous. Everyone wants something for free, but it’s unclear why we choose to provide free rental of public spaces for parking instead of, say, more subsidized housing, health care, or, well, almost anything else. Moreover, this particular choice of subsidy is a major cause of driver frustration, traffic, and pollution. To paraphrase one economist, “if pizza were free, we'd have a pizza shortage.”
Second, requiring minimum off-street parking for land uses increases the cost of almost everything else in society because the cost of providing free parking becomes bundled into the cost of housing, supermarket foods, clothes, services, and just about everything else. Thus, off-street parking is not free; it’s just paid for by inflated costs on goods and services, and by those who don’t drive or drive less than others. Furthermore, minimum parking requirements destroy cities and create no-places. As Jane Jacobs noted, parking lots are “street desolators.” By forcing land uses to be surrounded by or encompass parking, we prevent redevelopment of underused properties and create barren streetscapes loaded with pedestrian-unfriendly parking lots. In short, parking squeezes out everything else.
But this book is not just a critique of common parking policies. It also contains very concrete and practical solutions for solving the problems it identifies. In brief, the author argues that municipalities should: (1) set curb parking prices through market forces so that each block generally has one to two free spaces; (2) eliminate minimum parking requirement for land uses; (3) develop parking benefit districts to return the cost of spillover parking to affected neighborhoods; and (4) direct any parking revenues back to local communities for non-parking improvement purposes. Much of the book is spent in exploring these proposals and how to make them both politically feasible and practically workable.
Moreover, there’s even more to be found for parking aficionados – including several case-studies, some detailed analysis that shows that current minimum parking requirements are based on virtually no factual or logical basis, just imitation, and several appendices with comparative information on global car use, elasticity curves, and the like.
Although this is a large tome dense with economic analysis, it’s a brisk read. It’s crisply written, stuffed tight with colorful examples and analogies, and the economic analyses are straightforward and laid out cleanly. The argument is well-made and grounded on familiar economic analysis and, where available, observational and experimental studies. I found the ideas thoughtful and convincing. Moreover, it’s totally ingenious at times. At one point in the book, I was skeptical of the book’s argument relating to spillover effects on residential neighborhoods; a page later, the argument on parking benefit districts had completely changed my mind and had me thinking about how to implement it in my own neighborhood.
The book, while packed with brilliant ideas, is not perfect. The main drawback for the casual reader will be its repetitive nature. The same arguments, phrases, and even quotes are used over and over from chapter to chapter, and sometimes even in the same chapter. I assume this is so chapters can be excerpted easily for coursework, but sometimes reading feels like circling the same block repeatedly.
Moreover, on a substantive level, the book could benefit from further analysis of different environments, both geographically and by development character. The argument relies too heavily on studies that relate to a few Californian cities over a short time-frame, so it’s hard to know how the policy proposals would apply to suburban or residential areas, or areas with dissimilar regulatory or public transportation environments.
In addition, the book lacks analysis of the effects of the proposed changes on existing businesses. If minimum parking requirements are eliminated, new development will immediately become cheaper than old development built to satisfy old requirements. If the economic impacts of parking requirements are as large as the author believes, the author’s proposal could cause short-term seismic shifts in housing and business costs, to the detriment of current owners and operators. Analysis of housing prices and of the competitiveness of businesses hampered by long-term investment in current infrastructure, and proposals on how to ameliorate those impacts without causing medium-term harm and major transition costs, would be welcome.
Finally, the book is a little too glib in dismissing impacts on lower-income populations. Even though it has thoughtful suggestions on how to address these effects, they are described briefly and as options; more discussion of lifeline pricing would surmount likely objections in many cities.
This book should be required reading for all American planning boards, county councils, and urban engineers.
October 15, 2023
This book has a lot of words. I know what you are thinking: it is a book of course it is full of words, what else would you expect? But this book has a particularly large words to idea ratio. I think this is a hazard of works presenting novel ideas -- because the ideas are likely to face resistance and because they haven't been explored well enough to simplify them, it is easy to end up trying to be exhaustive. It is also clearly intended to be read in parts rather than all in one go.
The ideas were also not a particularly hard sell for me: I understand the idea of allocation with prices, as someone who seldom drives I am not attached to free parking the way people who drive often are, and I am more often inconvenienced than helped by car infrastructure.
The book is very strongly focused on one thing, and that thing only. It is explored exhaustively and singularly. Shoup occasionally tries to opine on why something has developed the way it has and in these times it is good that Shoup quickly returns to parking. Shoup is also bit of a technology optimist it ways that I wonder about, and is very strongly looking at things from a Los Angeles perspective. LA is arguably the center of parking, but some things seem odd when your default of how things are is not LA. The places used as examples are a good tour of the UC system.
It would make a surprisingly good introduction to economics text as it covers a good breath of what I would hope people take away from Into Economics. (That said, I imagine that it would take a very particular student to be motivated to learn because of the subject matter.)
I am really glad this book was written, I think the ideas are very important; it is extremely thoroughly explores parking from an urban planning perspective. If reading this many words about parking seems exciting to you, I highly recommend it. If not, the conclusion is very accessible
The ideas were also not a particularly hard sell for me: I understand the idea of allocation with prices, as someone who seldom drives I am not attached to free parking the way people who drive often are, and I am more often inconvenienced than helped by car infrastructure.
The book is very strongly focused on one thing, and that thing only. It is explored exhaustively and singularly. Shoup occasionally tries to opine on why something has developed the way it has and in these times it is good that Shoup quickly returns to parking. Shoup is also bit of a technology optimist it ways that I wonder about, and is very strongly looking at things from a Los Angeles perspective. LA is arguably the center of parking, but some things seem odd when your default of how things are is not LA. The places used as examples are a good tour of the UC system.
It would make a surprisingly good introduction to economics text as it covers a good breath of what I would hope people take away from Into Economics. (That said, I imagine that it would take a very particular student to be motivated to learn because of the subject matter.)
I am really glad this book was written, I think the ideas are very important; it is extremely thoroughly explores parking from an urban planning perspective. If reading this many words about parking seems exciting to you, I highly recommend it. If not, the conclusion is very accessible
January 8, 2019
Parking is a huge, hidden subsidy we barely think about, the costs of which are embedded in many facets of our lives (if your house/apt has a parking space, that increased the cost of your home by a third, for example). We all pay higher costs in terms of housing and health because we take for granted that parking should be "free" when it never actually is free. "Free" parking leads to ugly, poorly designed cities, poorer health outcomes, higher housing costs, bad land use generally, and no doubt contributes to our ongoing civic dissolution. Shoup does a great job backing up with data how absurd ceding parking policy to the whims of drivers has been over the last 80 years and offers some common sense (if politically utopian) solutions for changing our relationship to parking policy.
December 25, 2022
completely engrossing read that boggled my mind!! who pays for parking?? the answer is us! everyone!! driving is a HEAVILY subsidized activity, and much of it in the form of parking, a practice both mundane and sinister. Shoup does an amazing job breaking down all the ways “free” parking has poisoned our infrastructure and housing development, and how planners have mindlessly given in. but let us rage against it!!!! grrr!!!
October 9, 2024
5 stars since this is the godfather book of my favorite genre - urbanist, pedestrian-centric non-fiction. Shoup's textbook sets the standard for how to understand the true cost of building American cities to cater to cars over the livelihoods of people. Can't really *recommend* since it's a lot of tables and analyses and citations, but wish I could have taken a course like this in college so goddamn badly. Shoupistas rise up.
July 18, 2025
Five star subject matter delivered in way too many pages. Would still recommend to the real urbanist sickos out there, but it’s a marathon of a read.
Read
October 27, 2025DNF @ 35%
Interesting discussion but I don’t know what could be said in the next 17 hours of the audiobook that is strongly different than the first 7…
Definitely an in-depth look at the topic, but as someone with very strong thoughts and background on the (non) availability of public transit and pedestrian paths, I felt like I got most of what I needed from the intro.
Interesting discussion but I don’t know what could be said in the next 17 hours of the audiobook that is strongly different than the first 7…
Definitely an in-depth look at the topic, but as someone with very strong thoughts and background on the (non) availability of public transit and pedestrian paths, I felt like I got most of what I needed from the intro.
July 15, 2012
Good points made poorly. Lots of redundant, circular writing to get to the point summed up in a seven-line paragraph in the conclusion:
"These three reforms -- charge fair-market prices for curb parking, return the resulting revenue to neighborhoods to pay for public improvements, and remove the requirements for off-street parking -- will align our individual incentives with our common interests, so that private choices will produce public benefits. We can achieve enormous social, economic, and environmental benefits at almost no cost simply by subsidizing people and places, not parking and cars."
After about 150 pages I just started skimming, and I think the most salient lesson from the book is that almost no study has been done to determine the effects of parking requirements on urban planning. The true cost of and need for parking is invisible to the disciplines most in need of insight, which probably goes a long way to explaining urban and suburban sprawl, as well as most of our traffic congestion.
"These three reforms -- charge fair-market prices for curb parking, return the resulting revenue to neighborhoods to pay for public improvements, and remove the requirements for off-street parking -- will align our individual incentives with our common interests, so that private choices will produce public benefits. We can achieve enormous social, economic, and environmental benefits at almost no cost simply by subsidizing people and places, not parking and cars."
After about 150 pages I just started skimming, and I think the most salient lesson from the book is that almost no study has been done to determine the effects of parking requirements on urban planning. The true cost of and need for parking is invisible to the disciplines most in need of insight, which probably goes a long way to explaining urban and suburban sprawl, as well as most of our traffic congestion.
February 9, 2013
This is book has made me a convert to a somewhat radical view of parking, if you can imagine such a thing, especially for a city dweller, that free parking is a fundamental problem in the U.S. I've even joined The Shoupistas on Facebook, I've been so fired up about it.
So, is it worth it to read a 700-page book on parking? Well, maybe. To be a systematic take-down of the underpinnings of how parking is managed in the U.S. takes some detail. My background is economics, so this appealed to the market-focused part of my brain. As someone who has lived for years in areas chronically short of residential parking, it provided a new way of thinking about our situation. Shoup is an engaging writer who makes all the concepts very clear and also grounds the narrative in the history of parking.
If you don't want to commit to the full book yet, a summary of the key points are on this CBC podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013...
So, is it worth it to read a 700-page book on parking? Well, maybe. To be a systematic take-down of the underpinnings of how parking is managed in the U.S. takes some detail. My background is economics, so this appealed to the market-focused part of my brain. As someone who has lived for years in areas chronically short of residential parking, it provided a new way of thinking about our situation. Shoup is an engaging writer who makes all the concepts very clear and also grounds the narrative in the history of parking.
If you don't want to commit to the full book yet, a summary of the key points are on this CBC podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013...
January 31, 2022
The High Cost of Free Parking is a research odyssey from legendary Georgist economist and UCLA professor Donald Shoup. Distilled to its most essential point, Free Parking argues (persuasively) that we in the United States offer massive subsidies to drivers in the form of curbside parking and parking requirements for buildings -- at tremendous but largely invisible cost to our society in the form of construction costs, residential rents, and ugly built landscapes.
It’s a bit long and academic. It biases towards comprehensiveness instead of concision (sort of like reading a Cell paper). But the reward of working through is understanding a very real policy failure that was hard to see before reading Shoup.
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In the middle of the 20th century, American car ownership surged: up to 1 vehicle per household by 1950 and exceeding 2 vehicles per household by 1975.
While American roads grew more crowded, the number of curb spots in downtown Amityville didn’t much change. Cars began showing up in residential side streets. Residents began complaining about congested streets and insufficient parking.
Somewhere along the way, many American cities implemented formal parking requirements for various land uses -- 71% of cities had such requirements by 1951 [24]. With any new construction or changes of use for an existing property, an authority would mandate a certain number of on-site parking spaces to be provided by the property owner. Cities would be able to grow while ensuring that enough spots were provisioned for new homes, offices, and stores.
But what’s an equitable way to assess the right number of spots? Most planners referred to the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE) Parking Generation report. There the learned minds of ITE prescribe requirements of e.g. 5 spaces per 1,000 sqft of retail space [35-40]. For any land use, experts at the ITE have determined the appropriate number of spots to meet peak demand. (ITE is a standards setting nonprofit with some kind of official designation from USDOT. I would have liked to hear more about its composition and goals and how it’s held accountable and to what goals).
So now we have parking for everyone and it’s great right? No cars on residential streets, ample parking day or night.
In reality, parking requirements have been a barely-mitigated disaster for the American public.
First, ITE parking requirements are vastly overstated. They were calculated with the assumption of meeting peak demand for free parking; they were literally designed to guarantee a free parking spot for everyone, everywhere, every single day of the year, without considering the tradeoffs this entails. Planners, Shoup opines, did not protest this ITE methodology because “planners and politicians want to avoid criticism for allowing development that later creates parking spillover… the desire to avoid criticism about not having enough free parking helps explain why planners seem to assume that every household owns at least two cars and everyone travels everywhere by car” [41-42]
These mandatory and excessive parking requirements mean parking spots must be paid by developers and passed on to tenants both commercial and residential -- invisible wealth redistribution from nondrivers to drivers. In Palo Alto, for instance, the per sqft cost of developing a new office building is literally doubled by parking requirements [238]. Everyone’s wages take a hit… so that we can have a parking lot that is statistically never more than 85% occupied and often empty.
Parking requirements also disfigure urban landscapes. Older buildings can be harder to repurpose for a new use if parking can’t be integrated into their design, leading to demolition of patches of old downtowns to reach compliance [131]. Re-use is hard, and the parking requirements bias us to exclusively strip malls and mega malls with massive lots [134]. One reason we can’t build beautiful old structures we used to because the parking requirements are often so onerous.
Put simply by Shoup, off street parking requirements “cost a lot of money, although this cost is hidden in higher costs for everything except parking itself” [127].
It gets worse though. If you consider that urban land given to curb parking would be quite valuable if made private and given over for development, some back of the envelope math sees a subsidy on the order of our defense budget given over to free parking each year [591].
Shoup does have some solutions for us – things such as in lieu fees and neighborhood benefit groups for collecting and distributing parking revenues. I won’t get in to all of these here. The point though is that there’s opportunity to patch things up a bit and avoid the greatest issues of the current regulatory regime.
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One of the themes embedded in Free Parking is a favorite recent theme of mine: failure of the administrative state. Keen mainly on avoiding blame, city planners deferred to academics in the ITE who provided data ... but not judgement about the tradeoffs a society should make. With nobody wearing the pants, nobody was wearing the pants, and now we have Dallas, TX.
On the bright side, autonomous driving will truly eliminate the need for free or really any parking. Imagine the beautiful urban environments we can build then!
It’s a bit long and academic. It biases towards comprehensiveness instead of concision (sort of like reading a Cell paper). But the reward of working through is understanding a very real policy failure that was hard to see before reading Shoup.
----------
In the middle of the 20th century, American car ownership surged: up to 1 vehicle per household by 1950 and exceeding 2 vehicles per household by 1975.
While American roads grew more crowded, the number of curb spots in downtown Amityville didn’t much change. Cars began showing up in residential side streets. Residents began complaining about congested streets and insufficient parking.
Somewhere along the way, many American cities implemented formal parking requirements for various land uses -- 71% of cities had such requirements by 1951 [24]. With any new construction or changes of use for an existing property, an authority would mandate a certain number of on-site parking spaces to be provided by the property owner. Cities would be able to grow while ensuring that enough spots were provisioned for new homes, offices, and stores.
But what’s an equitable way to assess the right number of spots? Most planners referred to the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE) Parking Generation report. There the learned minds of ITE prescribe requirements of e.g. 5 spaces per 1,000 sqft of retail space [35-40]. For any land use, experts at the ITE have determined the appropriate number of spots to meet peak demand. (ITE is a standards setting nonprofit with some kind of official designation from USDOT. I would have liked to hear more about its composition and goals and how it’s held accountable and to what goals).
So now we have parking for everyone and it’s great right? No cars on residential streets, ample parking day or night.
In reality, parking requirements have been a barely-mitigated disaster for the American public.
First, ITE parking requirements are vastly overstated. They were calculated with the assumption of meeting peak demand for free parking; they were literally designed to guarantee a free parking spot for everyone, everywhere, every single day of the year, without considering the tradeoffs this entails. Planners, Shoup opines, did not protest this ITE methodology because “planners and politicians want to avoid criticism for allowing development that later creates parking spillover… the desire to avoid criticism about not having enough free parking helps explain why planners seem to assume that every household owns at least two cars and everyone travels everywhere by car” [41-42]
These mandatory and excessive parking requirements mean parking spots must be paid by developers and passed on to tenants both commercial and residential -- invisible wealth redistribution from nondrivers to drivers. In Palo Alto, for instance, the per sqft cost of developing a new office building is literally doubled by parking requirements [238]. Everyone’s wages take a hit… so that we can have a parking lot that is statistically never more than 85% occupied and often empty.
Parking requirements also disfigure urban landscapes. Older buildings can be harder to repurpose for a new use if parking can’t be integrated into their design, leading to demolition of patches of old downtowns to reach compliance [131]. Re-use is hard, and the parking requirements bias us to exclusively strip malls and mega malls with massive lots [134]. One reason we can’t build beautiful old structures we used to because the parking requirements are often so onerous.
Put simply by Shoup, off street parking requirements “cost a lot of money, although this cost is hidden in higher costs for everything except parking itself” [127].
It gets worse though. If you consider that urban land given to curb parking would be quite valuable if made private and given over for development, some back of the envelope math sees a subsidy on the order of our defense budget given over to free parking each year [591].
Shoup does have some solutions for us – things such as in lieu fees and neighborhood benefit groups for collecting and distributing parking revenues. I won’t get in to all of these here. The point though is that there’s opportunity to patch things up a bit and avoid the greatest issues of the current regulatory regime.
----------
One of the themes embedded in Free Parking is a favorite recent theme of mine: failure of the administrative state. Keen mainly on avoiding blame, city planners deferred to academics in the ITE who provided data ... but not judgement about the tradeoffs a society should make. With nobody wearing the pants, nobody was wearing the pants, and now we have Dallas, TX.
On the bright side, autonomous driving will truly eliminate the need for free or really any parking. Imagine the beautiful urban environments we can build then!
April 23, 2022
This book reads like a fugue - the core idea is simple, and the book repeats it over and over and over until you can't help but see the world in a totally different way. I think that the core thesis is a five-star idea; the book is a three-star book from a stylistic perspective, so I ranked it in the middle.
The core problem Shoup unmasks is simple: cars are big, and they spend 95% of their time parked. This means that parking cars takes up a tremendous amount of space. In many cases, the annual cost of parking a car vastly exceeds the cost of buying a car. And yet, car owners feel entitled to free parking!
So in a complex, multi-decade feedback loop, municipalities started mandating that developers provide free parking. No one knew how much parking was the right amount, so a random organization called the Institute of Transportation Engineers did some basic math with some subtly crazy assumptions. They assumed that we should provide enough parking to meet peak demand - which is WILD.
And then most municipalities just copied and pasted this zoning requirement liberally, such that everyone was required to vastly overprovision parking spaces. This had a vast number of negative externalities (increasing the cost of development, complicating the repurposing of existing historical buildings, forcing the built environment to become car-scale rather than human scale). All of which were caused by some hidden language sourcing back to an obscure study which laundered normative beliefs about how society should be structured via a publication claiming scientific authority.
As a complement to cars, driving down the cost of parking drove down the fully-loaded price of cars, which increased demand thus creating a pathological feedback loop. The result was an annual parking subsidy from society to car owners that Schoup estimates is similar in size to our annual defense budget. Given car ownership is generally a marker of wealth, this subsidy is deeply regressive, and takes money away from investments in public transit which could benefit all.
Many of these specific problems may go away with the advent of autonomous vehicles.
But the general challenges of balancing collective and local control (e.g. via parking benefit districts), the tension between political accountability and unaccountable experts, and the outsized impact of small, but important, mistakes deep in the bowels of the administrative state are critical to reflect on as we think about how to organize society in an increasingly complex world.
Parking isn't left wing or right wing - it's a non-issue for most people. And yet, as MattY points out in his recent post, "there is unfortunately no really good alternative to getting the analysis right all the time, showing good judgment, and enacting policies that are actually good." We got parking wrong, and our entire world has suffered as a result.
The core problem Shoup unmasks is simple: cars are big, and they spend 95% of their time parked. This means that parking cars takes up a tremendous amount of space. In many cases, the annual cost of parking a car vastly exceeds the cost of buying a car. And yet, car owners feel entitled to free parking!
So in a complex, multi-decade feedback loop, municipalities started mandating that developers provide free parking. No one knew how much parking was the right amount, so a random organization called the Institute of Transportation Engineers did some basic math with some subtly crazy assumptions. They assumed that we should provide enough parking to meet peak demand - which is WILD.
And then most municipalities just copied and pasted this zoning requirement liberally, such that everyone was required to vastly overprovision parking spaces. This had a vast number of negative externalities (increasing the cost of development, complicating the repurposing of existing historical buildings, forcing the built environment to become car-scale rather than human scale). All of which were caused by some hidden language sourcing back to an obscure study which laundered normative beliefs about how society should be structured via a publication claiming scientific authority.
As a complement to cars, driving down the cost of parking drove down the fully-loaded price of cars, which increased demand thus creating a pathological feedback loop. The result was an annual parking subsidy from society to car owners that Schoup estimates is similar in size to our annual defense budget. Given car ownership is generally a marker of wealth, this subsidy is deeply regressive, and takes money away from investments in public transit which could benefit all.
Many of these specific problems may go away with the advent of autonomous vehicles.
But the general challenges of balancing collective and local control (e.g. via parking benefit districts), the tension between political accountability and unaccountable experts, and the outsized impact of small, but important, mistakes deep in the bowels of the administrative state are critical to reflect on as we think about how to organize society in an increasingly complex world.
Parking isn't left wing or right wing - it's a non-issue for most people. And yet, as MattY points out in his recent post, "there is unfortunately no really good alternative to getting the analysis right all the time, showing good judgment, and enacting policies that are actually good." We got parking wrong, and our entire world has suffered as a result.
June 28, 2023
i wish i had bought this book instead of renting because i could ANNOTATE EVERYTHING !!!!! chalk full of great info and I’m looking forward to reading it again. the arbitrary nature of parking requirements, the fact that not only are they stupid but setting them for peak demand is inefficient, they are basic waste of land space, an environmental disaster, and not economically viable. I can see why this book is considered the parking bible. There is so much i’m going to be thinking about as i move through my city (how much could that parking be, how can we meter it, how can we eliminate parking requirements, etc). This was such a great book. It would be interesting to see an updated version since it has been 19 years. As an aside I was almost hit by a car that was cruising for parking. If Shoup wanted to he could talk about the rates of pedestrian / cyclist injuries as a result of parked cars. Being doored anyone? What an eye opening book and i can’t wait to enter the urban transport world and start to use these tools to reshape our cities for the better. Nothing in life is free and we need to start charging actual rates for parking! Also so interesting the info on how free parking increases the cost of housing / development, food costs, and basically everything we buy. If we frame it like this i think it’ll be much easier to get those free parking lovers to see sense. Wowie i wish i could give this book 10 stars
December 20, 2024
A book that seems so obvious to the point of banality when reading now. It is INCREDIBLY thorough and rigorous in its analysis, justification, and recommendations, while at the same time being so incredibly simple in its fundamental principle.
The market for automobiles has been so incredibly warped by a (well-intentioned) policy of ensuring plentiful free parking. Shoup convincingly argues that all of society’s ills could be fixed by charging an intelligent market rate for street parking and removing parking minima. Ok that’s an exaggeration, but many of the issues that free parking is intended to solve (but actually exacerbates) could clearly be slowly ameliorated by removing these politicizes and realigning incentives for a human oriented wold.
Shoup does an especially good job of engaging with the problem not only from an economic/technocratic angle, but also from the very hard (wicked, even) policy problems that are involved. He does a great job of defining the problems (I especially loved the Kuhn references) and using those complex definitions to propose workable solutions.
The market for automobiles has been so incredibly warped by a (well-intentioned) policy of ensuring plentiful free parking. Shoup convincingly argues that all of society’s ills could be fixed by charging an intelligent market rate for street parking and removing parking minima. Ok that’s an exaggeration, but many of the issues that free parking is intended to solve (but actually exacerbates) could clearly be slowly ameliorated by removing these politicizes and realigning incentives for a human oriented wold.
Shoup does an especially good job of engaging with the problem not only from an economic/technocratic angle, but also from the very hard (wicked, even) policy problems that are involved. He does a great job of defining the problems (I especially loved the Kuhn references) and using those complex definitions to propose workable solutions.
February 9, 2025
RIP, I'll be brief since I'm reviewing this retroactively now that the author has passed.
I'm really happy to have read this book before starting my career in planning. It wasn't a part of any course -- I found a damaged copy in a used bookstore and picked it up having recognized the title from a Professor's recommendation.
Even by just reading the preface and the first chapter, your understanding of parking in the US will be completely changed. I'm sure newer and more applicable literature is now available as this was written in the mid-2000s, but you will still find value in reading this book given its broader impact on both the planning profession and the public at large.
I'm really happy to have read this book before starting my career in planning. It wasn't a part of any course -- I found a damaged copy in a used bookstore and picked it up having recognized the title from a Professor's recommendation.
Even by just reading the preface and the first chapter, your understanding of parking in the US will be completely changed. I'm sure newer and more applicable literature is now available as this was written in the mid-2000s, but you will still find value in reading this book given its broader impact on both the planning profession and the public at large.
October 30, 2024
This is comprehensive done the right way. The book is full not only of data and evidence, but of proposed solutions, responses to counter-arguments, and examples of locations where partial fixes have been tried.
Each time that I was growing frustrated by Shoup's description of parking history or the various problems, he was there to propose an evidence-backed solution. While I am skeptical of the Homo Economus rationalizing of how individuals will respond to the proposals, Shoup's suggestions are in no way "all or nothing", and he provides multiple ways that each scenario could play out.
Each time that I was growing frustrated by Shoup's description of parking history or the various problems, he was there to propose an evidence-backed solution. While I am skeptical of the Homo Economus rationalizing of how individuals will respond to the proposals, Shoup's suggestions are in no way "all or nothing", and he provides multiple ways that each scenario could play out.
April 19, 2017
This was an integral book to transforming the profession of land use planning. Charging a fair market price for curb parking, returning those revenues to a local parking district for investments in the public realm, and eliminating parking requirements are crucial to bringing balance back to how we treat our streets and land development in our urban areas.
January 31, 2022
I mean really, I loved this book. It married two of my favorite topics, economics and transportation. It can be repetitive, but for a good reason, parking shouldn't be free!!! I don't know that someone outside of the planning and transportation industry would love this, but if you're interested at all, give it a try.
January 21, 2023
Everything you could possibly want to know about free parking. It could really use a large edit because it is repetitive and it's thesis can be summarized in three bullet points, but it is compelling and quite convincing.
September 28, 2025
About the dark matter ruining our cities
December 14, 2025
Don't let the page count intimidate you. The preface (in the updated edition) has everything you need to grasp the argument. The remaining 700 pages exist to address various "but what about X" and "hmm...". Read what's relevant to you. The US focus does mean you'll spend time figuring out what translates to your context and what doesn't. Overall, the structure & level of detail served the argument well.
March 16, 2022
Good stuff, but a long-ass book. I believe in this book 100% but it's too dense for my casual reading needs. DNF (unfortunately) but maybe I'll return to it one day. Let's read a chapter together and discuss it!
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