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Shoup on Pasadena’s Proposed Prorated Parking Plan

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UCLA Luskin’s Donald Shoup joined StreetsBlogLA’s SGVConnect podcast to discuss parking in Pasadena as the city nears approval of a new strategic parking plan. If approved, it calls for market-based prices on city and shopping district parking based on popularity, or demand. The plan also envisions longer parking durations. “It is an improvement,” said Shoup, author of the classic 2005 book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.” Shoup said of the report provided by consultants for the new plan: “They recommended just about everything I would recommend.”  He also noted Pasadena’s experience with implementing the latest technology. “I think that there are these two things that have helped in Pasadena … putting in the parking meters to manage the parking and two, spending the revenue with the right place,” he said.

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Shoup on Reclaiming Land for People, Not Cars

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Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup and California Assemblywoman Laura Friedman co-authored a CityLab article calling for an end to minimum parking requirements, arguing that the outdated mandates drive up poverty, homelessness and carbon emissions. “We’ve essentially built many of our cities for cars and made housing for humans incidental to that use,” the authors wrote. Across the United States, they noted, there is an average of 1,000 square feet of parking per car but only 800 square feet of housing per person. Shoup and Friedman urged passage of Assembly Bill 1401, which would end California parking mandates for new buildings near public transit and in walkable neighborhoods, while still giving developers the option to add parking if needed. If the bill becomes law, it would reduce the cost of housing and serve as a model of sustainability, they argued. “In this era of climate change and a crisis of affordability, we have to reclaim urban land for people,” they wrote.

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Parking Is a Money Pit, Manville Says

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to The Real Deal, a real estate news site, about a Los Angeles Planning Commission proposal to eliminate required parking spaces in new downtown housing developments, with the goal of creating more room for housing and decreasing the number of cars on the road. Manville said this policy is in line with cities such as San Francisco and Portland, which have begun easing downtown parking requirements. If eliminating parking requirements becomes the standard, business would improve for developers, he said. “As a conservative lender – and most institutional lenders are conservative – you might not loan on something that’s not the market standard,” he explained. But a developer with non-institutional funding who builds housing without parking spaces would spur more of this kind of development, he said. In the long term, eliminating parking requirements would lower the cost of development because “parking is a money pit,” Manville said.

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Torres-Gil and Shoup on Disabled Parking Fraud

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In a story about the Los Angeles City Council’s recent vote to increase the disabled-parking fraud fine from $250 to $1,100, the Los Angeles Times spoke to two UCLA Luskin authorities. Fernando Torres-Gil, social welfare and public policy professor and director of the Center for Policy Research on Aging, said that increasing disabled parking places, stiffening the fine and stepping up enforcement will not solve the problem of disabled parking fraud. Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, added, “Someone who has a real disability should be very outraged at the lax enforcement of placard abuse and the lax enforcement of placard issuance.” Torres-Gil and Shoup advocate for a reform that would limit the number of disabled people who have access to the parking placards. They argued that the reform should not be feared. “Let’s just bite the bullet and deal with it now,” Torres-Gil said.

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