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Shoup Gauges Progress on Long-Needed Parking Reforms

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Cities of the Future checked in with Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, to gauge the progress of parking reforms he has long recommended to increase economic efficiency, protect the environment and promote social justice. Shoup favors charging fair-market prices for on-street parking, re-investing revenue in the neighborhoods that generate it, and eliminating the requirement that building developments provide off-street parking. One commonality among cities that have successfully implemented these reforms is that green activists have forged a coalition with merchants and other stakeholders, said Shoup, a noted author and leading researcher at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA Luskin. Shoup added that the COVID-19 pandemic has filled streets with bicycles, pedestrians and outdoor restaurants instead of cars, and this has made previously unthinkable parking reforms conceivable and perhaps unavoidable as cities sorely need the money that paid parking can provide.

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Shoup’s Impact on Parking in a Canadian City

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Canada’s National Post featured the work of Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup in a commentary about Edmonton’s decision to remove all minimum parking requirements from real-estate developments in the city. Renters and homeowners who receive a “free” parking space pay a hidden cost regardless of whether they use the space, he argues. Free parking also encourages people to drive to work instead of considering alternatives such as public transit. After decades of research, Shoup came to the conclusion that all public parking spaces should be metered, ideally from hour-to-hour or minute-to-minute, with the money being used in the neighborhood where it was generated. He has encouraged cities to stop requiring an arbitrary number of free parking spaces, arguing that most urban parking lots show less-than-optimum use. Edmonton will be the first city in Canada to allow builders to use their own judgment in allocating parking to housing units and offices.

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Shoup Offers Tips to Improve Parking in Cities

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Urban Planning Professor Donald Shoup spoke to the Parking Podcast about his recommendations for improving parking in cities. First, he recommended charging a fair market price to use the curb. Parking meters are the exception in most cities. Shoup argued that parking “should be priced so there is never a shortage of parking.” He defined the fair market price as the lowest price a city can charge and still have one or two open curb spaces on every block. Next, he argued that cities should limit off-street parking, or at least remove off-street parking requirements. Shoup’s third recommendation is for cities to dedicate all or some revenue from parking meters to fund additional public services on metered streets, including landscaping, cleanliness and accessibility. He noted that if people know how the meter revenue is being spent to benefit the community, they may be less resistant to paying for parking.

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DeShazo on Future of Electric-Car Infrastructure in Indianapolis

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JR DeShazo, director of the Luskin Center for Innovation and professor of public policy, spoke to the Indianapolis Star about the demise of the electric-car-sharing service BlueIndy. The service allowed people to rent a car in one neighborhood and leave it in another for a relatively low cost, but the company never gained traction. After nearly five years of sluggish growth and financial losses, the car service will shut down in May, and the city must decide what to do with the 81 electric car stations that have already been built. City officials are debating between reverting the stations to parking spots or purchasing the charging stations and building upon environmentally friendly infrastructure. According to DeShazo, BlueIndy’s demise creates a potential opportunity for Indianapolis. “Even if the car-share isn’t successful,” he said, “they’ve created a network of charging stations, which can be repurposed to support other charging needs the community might have.”

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Shoup on Battle Over Street Parking in Manhattan

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A New York Times article on a Manhattan transportation panel’s proposal to do away with free street parking in a 50-block stretch of the Upper West Side cited Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning. New York City has installed miles of bus and bike lanes and banned cars from a major thoroughfare. Next year, it will start charging drivers in Manhattan’s most congested zones. Some drivers feel unfairly targeted, while many transportation advocates say car culture has been unjustly subsidized for too long. Shoup, who has long promoted pricing as a way for cities to manage parking demand, noted that New York is the only major city in the country that does not have some form of residential parking permit. Such permits are meant to let people with cars park near where they live and keep outsiders out.

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Shoup on the Real Price of Free Parking

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In an essay for CityLab, Distinguished Research Professor Donald Shoup used vivid examples to lay out his arguments for eliminating parking requirements in urban development. Shoup did the math on the real price of free parking: The average construction cost of a single parking space is $24,000 to $34,000 — more than the net worth of many U.S. households, he found. And nationwide, the area of off-street parking per car (about 900 square feet) is greater than the area of housing per human (about 800 square feet). “A flood of recent research has shown that parking requirements poison our cities, increasing traffic congestion, polluting the air, encouraging sprawl, raising housing costs, degrading urban design, preventing walkability, damaging the economy and penalizing everyone who cannot afford a car,” the urban planning professor wrote. He added, “Simply improving parking policies could be the cheapest, quickest and most politically feasible way to achieve many social, economic and environmental goals.”

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Manville on the ‘Unmitigated Disaster’ of Parking Requirements

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Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning, spoke with Curbed LA about a proposal to eliminate parking requirements for newly constructed apartment and condo buildings in downtown Los Angeles. Parking minimums have been “an unmitigated disaster,” Manville said. “Right now, it’s illegal to build for a tenant who doesn’t care if their car is in the same building with them” or who doesn’t own a car at all, he said.  The requirement to include parking spots in residential buildings has been blamed for higher housing costs, the construction of unsightly garages and the exacerbation of climate change. “When you require parking, you really do encourage driving,” Manville said. Removing the parking requirement is an “absolutely necessary” step, one of many needed to help Angelenos drive less, he said.

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L.A. Parking: How Did We Get Here?

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When LAist set out to create a primer on the lightning-rod issue of L.A. parking — why it’s so exasperating, how we got here and where we are headed — it went straight to the experts at UCLA Luskin: Juan Matute, deputy director of the Institute of Transportation Studies; Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning; and Associate Professor Michael Manville. As our reliance on cars grew in the years after World War II, minimum parking requirements were seen as essential, Matute said. Now, instead of too little parking in L.A., there is too much, Shoup argued. Some cities are relaxing parking requirements for new housing in high-density areas. After analyzing one such program, Manville found that it led to lower costs and more parking flexibility. The primer also cited Shoup’s book arguing that there is no such thing as free parking — the costs are just passed along to the entire community, including nondrivers.

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Too Much Parking ‘Poisons Our Cities,’ Shoup Says

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Donald Shoup, distinguished research professor of urban planning, shared his expertise on parking pitfalls and reforms in a wide-ranging conversation on the American Planning Association’s “People Behind the Plans” podcast. Shoup, author of “The High Cost of Free Parking” and editor of the recent “Parking and the City,” spoke of the long history of inequitable policies and made a case for “parking benefit districts,” which reinvest parking revenues directly into neighborhood improvements. Government-mandated minimum parking requirements for businesses are “a disease masquerading as a cure,” one that “poisons our cities with too much parking,” he said. Such policies have led to vast but vacant Home Depot lots and a six-story underground structure at Disney Hall that discourages Angelenos from stepping outside to create a vibrant urban landscape. Shoup concluded, “If you want more housing and less traffic, you shouldn’t limit the amount of housing at every site and require ample parking everywhere.”

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Manville on Efforts to Relax Parking Requirements

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Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville spoke to KPCC’s AirTalk about parking requirements for new housing developments in California. Manville was surprised to see that San Diego succeeded in eliminating minimum parking requirements for new housing developments. While this would be tough to implement in Los Angeles, he said, he believes it would be a good idea because parking requirements have been harmful to the city. Parking requirements for new housing do not promote the city’s stated goals of encouraging transit use, sustainability and more housing development, Manville said. More parking demands additional land or capital to build expensive underground parking, which results in smaller developments, he said. Manville also discussed proposed legislative solutions that would reduce local jurisdiction of land zoning in order to build more densely near public transit.

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