The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup
worksinprogress.news
worksinprogress.news
Many home builders still add parking to new projects because there is market demand for it - and they are also competing for tenants or buyers against existing housing which has parking.
But there is now the flexibility to do some projects without parking, which really helps at the affordable end of the spectrum, and is a good fit for more walkable locations.
BTW, Nolan Gray, cited as the author, has a book out himself that's really approachable and good reading if you're interested in cities: https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines
I lived in an area that allowed "senior" developments for 55+ people. As old people are all retired and so do not commute/drive, there were far fewer necessary parking spots and the development was deemed not to increase local traffic. Without the need to commute to work, upgrades to mass transit were deemed unnecessary. Total BS. All the care providers and visiting families ended up parking at the nearby mall. And retired people still drive. They don't commute to work but they don't sit still at home all day either. The whole pack of lies was simply a way to bypass parking regs and squeeze more condos onto the lot to the detriment of the surrounding community.
More people got a home to live in that costs less, and some formerly squandered land was better utilized.
And if you start doing other things like legalizing corner stores and neighborhood businesses, rather than designing everything for the automobile Uber alles, maybe some of those people will find they don't need a car.
Also, policy changes almost never happen in one nice tidy package where you do all the things at once, like eliminating expensive and arbitrary parking rules, adding a bunch of transit, re-legalizing neighborhood commercial, right-sizing roads, etc... so there are going to be fits and starts and bumps along the way. Still worth doing though.
It’s insane that so much land is dedicated to giving people free space to store their personal vehicles.
“But that’s unfair!” People can take the bus.
“But the bus service isn’t good!” That’s because no one uses the bus, if there’s demand, supply will be added. The biggest determinant of transit use is the availability of parking.
And honestly, it’s questionable whether it warrants a car too. In Tokyo it would be perfectly fine to do those trips by public transport. My biweekly cleaner gets around by train to all the places she works at. And local delivery companies all use bicycles for last mile delivery.
Maybe that’s not viable right now, but I think that’s the point of Donald’s advocacy. By not pricing parking correctly we provide perverse incentives as a society that lead us down a vicious cycle. Free parking means more cars means less transit ridership means we need more free parking, and repeat.
This shapes our cities into places that prioritize cars over humans. High housing costs, air pollution, less mobility, less freedom.
If you price parking appropriately, you get a virtuous cycle instead. Expensive parking means less driving means more transit ridership means more free parking slots means more room for other development, etc.
>Telling them to take the bus is about as effective as telling Amazon to abandon delivery vans in favor of bicycles.
Ironic that you bring this up as an absurd example, when this is exactly what happens in dense cities with good cycling infrastructure (Holland, Denmark, etc).
You need to solve this problem before you take away parking, not after. Otherwise people will never accept your proposal (and nor should they tbh, as there's no guarantee that the promised supply will arrive). Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo. In a democratic system of government, that means you need to convince them to change, and that won't happen unless you address their objections in advance.
Some communities are starting to enforce against amazon trucks that park inappropriately on the street. They often force traffic into dangerous situations as everyone must skirt around them.
The whole urbanism movement of the past decade is evidence of that I think.
Moreover, even if a community is happy with free parking and expensive housing within that community, it doesn’t mean that people outside that community are happy with it.
I think it’s a bit more complicated than people are happy with the status quo.
Isn't pricing street parking the solution the parent comment proposed? It increases parking availability in the short term, while increasing demand for public transport.
If you can't change anything then you can't change anything. Replacing parking spaces with bus lanes can be a huge improvement, but obviously you have to take the parking space away before you can put the bus lane in.
> Right now people are, by and large, content with the status quo.
Boomers might be. Young people who have no hope of ever owning a home anywhere where the jobs are aren't.
Public transport is not some enterprise, but rather public service. It's literally in the name. You flip the chicken and egg problem around with corporate bs: make public transport usable and use will skyrocket.
The biggest determinants of quality of service are geographic coverage and frequency. Good luck getting political will to increase frequency or extend geographic coverage on routes that no one is riding.
If applied to an area that already is only middle-class people, then sure.
Or resident parking permits.
And more housing is what is needed to contain housing costs.
I'm of the opinion that when public goods are cheap enough to face shortages all the time the market economy steps up because better off people will spend more to save time/hassle.
The problem is when things are expensive enough to kick out a lot of people, but not enough people actually alleviate shortage, which is basically how it currently goes with parking.
If you're worried about the transition, subsidize other forms of transport and build that out first, but forcing poor people to own cars just to make it to work is not a good way to help them.
Sorry for the cynicism, I'm actually for increasing the price of parking, but recent political events have robbed me of any illusions that environmentally friendly policies have a future. When they have a choice between the environment and paying less money (short-term), most people will choose paying less money.
No, it's the opposite. A city built around everyone having a car makes car ownership a cliff. Normalising not having a car (and a reliable bus service - like the kind you get by turning street parking spaces into bus lanes - helps with that) makes the ladder gentler. If people are late for work because they couldn't find a parking spot just as often as people are late because the bus was late or didn't show, maybe there will be fewer horror stories of people getting fired because their car broke and they couldn't afford to get it fixed.
Outside of maybe a couple urban areas like NYC, that's patently untrue in the United States. It would not surprise me if the poor frankly had more and older/rougher cars than their more wealthy counterparts.
It's not to make random consumer goods like parking free for all. If you do this, most of the goods will be used by people who are not poor, so it's very inefficient at helping you achieve your goal of helping poor people.
In addition, many poor people won't want the thing you are making free. In the case of parking that could be because they don't own a car, so this plan doesn't help a portion of the population you are trying to help. Even more inefficient!
When people think we should have free parking to help the poor, it's mostly just status quo bias at work. Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free. Parking isn't any different.
The topical book to recommend here is obviously The High Cost of Free Parking.
https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...
"Free for all" parking spaces allow you to trade your time (hunting a spot) for parking, the same way coupon-clipping trades time for a discount on food.
You can say "eliminate coupons, all food should be at market price", but coupons really are an effective way of helping people. They segment the market by being too time-consuming for wealthy people to bother with, and are a job for people who don't have a higher-paying one.
The closest option to truly free continues to exist and has always existed: walking
Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”
If you want to help poor people buy food, give them money to buy food.
Would argue for getting rid of SNAP and replacing it with a convoluted system where poor people could get free food but they had to spend hours hunting for just the right coupons to exchange? I would hope not. It might help the poor, but would be a really crappy way of doing so.
Free parking certainly might help the poor a teensy bit. But it's an incredibly bad way of doing so that comes with all kind of other bad side effects.
If helping the poor is our goal, that is not a good way of doing so. You're better off charging a market rate for parking and then taking that money and giving it to poor people.
Sounds almost exactly like the argument made here https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...
You've just described how rationing in Eastern Bloc countries worked.
What makes you think poor people have more free time than wealthy people?
Why does it seem as though some people believe there is an infinite supply of rich people?
Income disparity is so great that the cost of parking is irrelevant to the mythical army of rich people waiting off to the side for parking prices to come down.
I'm not even in the 99%, I'm in the 97% and I don't give a fuck about parking. I'm driving downtown to buy a $600 Barbour jacket from Orvis. I don't care about $20 for parking and I'm not coming downtown more often if parking is $0.
>Most people would never say that we should make bread free. Or that we should make milk free.
If you are poor milk and bread should 100% be free.
Support for SNAP (food stamps) routinely and consistently polls at >70%.
People who assert what you just did are in the extreme minority.
The former is bad, for all the reasons I described. The latter is good!
They would rather have the $100 in efficient redistribution rather than the government spend $100 so that they can benefit by $1.
The only place I'm aware of that bans new parking garages in the US is Manhattan, which has a general parking cap; but providing enough spaces for the actual car travel demand to Manhattan would necessitate leveling the whole island and then some, so the policy is there to get people to stop driving to a narrow, congested island.
If high cost is the issue, it seems like people are complaining about lack of parking but don't want it enough to pay the real, unsubsidized price. So why should everyone else pay for them?
That's exactly what it is. The normalization of "free" street parking does a lot of damage here.
Seems unreasonably high.
https://cityobservatory.org/the-price-of-parking/ - and this is from before the pandemic.
For a whole parking garage you need many large I-beams, tons of concrete, frequently elevators are added, etc. Not surprising builders opt out of including them when they can.
Autonomous vehicles will reduce the need to park. Eventually.
I have a friend who inherited three such lots in downtown ($$$) and he lives very comfortably off just that revenue because their old assessments totaled under a million so they never got reassessed (though the rules have become far less generous with Prop 19).
This has all been more-or-leas fine, with residential prices factoring in parking, and multi-tenant developments pulling in density via car stackers and the like. Oh, and a pretty functional transit system, of course.
[1] https://www.boston.gov/departments/environment/air-pollution...
Don't get me wrong - London public transport is fantastic. Extensive, frequent, convenient, and multi-modal. But the pricing is quite static so that people who use it for short inner-city journeys lose out a bit.
But also, we need to actually fund public transportation. In most states the amount of funding allocated toward non-car infrastructure amounts to a rounding error.
So what can be done?
Write to your representatives at your city, county, and state level. When your state's department of transportation issues surveys or maps for feedback make sure to give feedback! If there are other opportunities where your local leaders are engaging with the public just mention you'd like to see better transit and walking infrastructure to reduce cost for taxpayers and increase quality of life. Ask for a meeting. Ask for explanations. Ask questions and keep asking questions.
Same as when we built express highways and priced the tolls to demand - see the complaints about "Lexus lanes".
Capitalism is still the least-bad way of allocating a scarce resource, but of course those who get priced out will be unhappy.
SF public transportation is "good enough" that owning a car in SF is already a decision outside of pure transportation needs.
I lived in SoMA for 2+ years without a car using ZipCar occasionally to drive to SouthBay, which was cheaper than the car payment, insurance and the parking fee put together. Plus my commute was to Palo Alto which was neat because every Caltrain out of SF stopped in PA in the mornings, I used the bullets both ways every day.
Bicycles got me and my partner everywhere, faster and more conveniently (including in a bus or BART). We even went by to Napa on the ferry with bikes on it (once the Vine Trail cycle path connects all the way to Vallejo, I want to do it again - for now you can put your bike on a bus from Vallejo, no problem).
The Lyft would be used for the Costco runs or to lug things out of Tech Shop back home, when working on something bulkier.
Then I had a kid + moved to Mission bay which was still great for my Caltrain commute, but the kid changed the way I could just grab an Uber. There was no travelling light anymore.
I struggled to use a cab because we had to drag stroller car-seat everywhere we went with the kid and often even when didn't have the kid, because you'd pick them up on the way back.
The car was bought, even though it was a bad deal financially simply because it offered a fixed set of storage items we always had.
Even getting from location to location, the car was the slower option, it didn't make any sense except to serve as a home base for all things you needed to have with you.
They are massive sources of CO2 right now.
Even electric cars produce a lot of particulate matter from tires.
They crowd out housing and businesses when we require their needs be addressed first and foremost.
It's not so much a matter of a binary choice either for most people. You can use a car less and still have one for that occasional hiking trip or something.
Not surprisingly that you mentioned it, preaching and enforcing virtues - let’s get rid of the cars - upon others while enjoying the opposite vice yourself - driving a car - is at the core of the Christianity.
I feel like you are really running against the spirit of HN with this comment.
I think I overstated my case, its not as bad as I thought.
But it's not only that. Quality of life is precisely the kids being able to just cycle to school and sports with their friends, rather than being stuck on the back of an SUV in traffic for hours every day, being driven around by their parents.
I have lived in places where the former lifestyle is available and where the latter is mandated. There is NO QUESTION which one is better. That's why I'm working to campaign very hard for this to be a reality where I live in ~10 years time :)
large supermarkets (naturally can't be just in every small neighborhood) -> efficiency and lower costs. What is the point of local (thus small and high priced) store that a senior can walk to, yet can't afford to shop at?
Cars are expensive, the total domination of personal cars is only possible if you are a rich country. Much like gout.
For a local market to be economical it needs a catchment area containing enough customers.
Once customers start driving they prefer to drive a bit longer to go to a mega market or mall with good parking options, i.e. not a local market.
Local markets thus have a catchment area that is defined mostly by walking and biking.
(Not having a lot of parking can also help to make local markets more economical)
Some important conditions for local markets are then:
1. Zoning needs to allow the shop to be very close to residential areas, and with only few parking spaces.
2. Residential density needs to be high enough to have a large number of customers within walking or biking distance.
3. Walking and biking should be sufficiently safe and pleasant.
It is easy to see the why there are few local markets in suburban North America, but they are very common in urban places all over the world, as well as in thoughtfully designed and slightly denser suburbs in many countries.
Rest in peace.
Raise prices even slightly, and people's behaviors will adjust accordingly. I have a friend who street parked two cars until he moved to a different neighborhood and had to start paying for permits. Now he just keeps his commuter and leaves his overlander in the suburbs.
I guess the solution would be to make these spots 2/4 hr parking, instead of permanent overnight parking for all. Or remove parking all together and make it easy to build private parking lots.
SF's lack of grade separated transport outside the narrow BART corridor also makes it hard to convince people out of driving. Buses and trams aren't acceptable alternatives for a city as rich and dynamic as SF.
You could issue street parking permits to the residents of the old properties but not of the new ones. Or you could adjust the prices of the permits to achieve the desired occupancy rate. Or you could keep parking free, fine improperly parked cars, and let the residents decide for themselves if the car is worth the inconvenience of finding parking.
London does this and it works well. New buildings have to be zero parking, there's some grumbling but residents of a new apartment block don't feel so bad when they lose something they never had - they know from the day they move in that they won't have parking, so if that's going to screw them over then they don't move there in the first place. And then you gradually reclaim the parking spaces as the area is developed.
I mean, it is portland, and they will do it wrong no matter what, but still; if you expect the people we've been mass producing to handle this well going forward, I've got bad news for you.
If there's not enough free street parking, charge more. That's part of what Shoup talked about.
Free is always going to outcompete non-free. The answer is to get rid of free on street parking.
Here's an article about some of the other things happening: https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-va...
But on the other end, there's still street parking, and it's plentiful. I'd say Portland is a good 1-car city, if you're a family. Lot's of stuff is one bus away, but you definitely get into situations where some appointment is 1:30 away by bus, 20 minutes by car, so it's nice to have options. If I was a bachelor, I'd be fine with no car, and using a bike or cab when needed.
Also HN on USian real estate / urban development: everyone prefers this district developed two hundred years ago, because it was not fine.
I'm working on solving the problem because my life is actively being ruined by mismanaged parking.
I think low enough of my own skills and capacities, and yet.
Unfortunately 'parking' is just a component of a larger mobility network that, in America, is mismanaged to better accomplish ethnic cleansing. I wish I were kidding, I wish I were wrong.
A book has been written titled: 'the slaughter of cities: urban renewal as ethnic cleansing'
It sorta ruined my ability to function as peacefully as before in segments of society common in the greater united states.
Edit: the 2nd of Donald shoup's 3 part fix was 'spend all collected money on the curb where it's collected'.
This piece, mixed with the proper clearing price for maintaining a 10% availability of parking spaces means parking could possibly provide for really substantial and beautiful upgrades to the area.
Feels like lots of times the conversation forgets that beautiful things will be added if parking gets managed rightly.
While I do see the irony, I think one of the differences is that nobody needs AWS, but a lot of poor or lower-middle-class people in America have no realistic choice but to drive to places. I'm not against paid parking, but like you said, there is something funny (and sad) about the solution effectively being "reduce demand for parking, unless you're rich enough to not care".
It's to dynamically price the parking high enough that there is always ten percent of the parking available.
When there is less or no demand, the price would fall.
Just like AWS services that guarantee certain availability all the time. Sometimes the moment by moment utilization cost can go quite high to accommodate, and it's not to make aws rich, it's to mediate the demand.
Shoup's parking fix would benefit the regular person far more directly than AWS does.
Perhaps a plumber making an urgent visit, using a company credit card. What a perfect use case to spend a lot of money on expensive parking.
In the greater United States, of the people comprising the bottom 30% of income earners, only 10% of them have a car.
Requiring or supporting any sort of car infrastructure is dramatically regressive to them.
Read shoup's book! He shows that not only is it not regressive to implement policies like this, but it is in fact regressive and harmful to the poor people to not have policies like this in place.
For context, I recently started https://urbanismnow.substack.com/ to bring you the best ideas from around the world to inspire action where you (c)are. It's been about a month and it's more work than expected but I think the opportunity to bring people together is pretty high.
I hang out with a lot more city planning and city engineering ppl than some, and it stirs up so many thoughts.
I've got more coming soon on the substack. Specifically about a totally new thing called 'coning'.
Gonna be good.
I long ago committed to never committing to a publishing schedule. I wrote when it's easy, often enough it is.
I like your stuff!
An under appreciated part of cities in America is how much some ppl in America hated others, and how widely shared that belief was.
That hate lives in today in a dozen ways that cannot be seen if one is committed to believing that this kind of hate was done by backwards, old fashioned people.
Yet, nearly every native Portlander I met thought I was crazy for relying on public transit. Many looked down on those who used it.
I had moved from the Caribbean, where public transportation was nonexistent, and traffic and parking were a constant nightmare. To me, Portland’s transit system felt like a game-changer—but locals didn’t seem to see it that way.
I never knew where my neighbors worked, but I never saw them walking to or parking at the MAX station. None of my coworkers used it either.
For me, though, it was invaluable especially when I wanted to go out for a few drinks. And since it only ran until 10 or 11, it was the perfect excuse for not staying out too late.
Not Just Bikes did a great rant on the carbrain of The Bahamas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdz6FeQLuHQ
When the ports were full of cruise ships, you could expect to spend 45+ minutes getting from Charlotte Amalie to Red Hook. Sometimes I spent an hour going from Charlotte Amalie to Havensight. That was only a distance of about 2 miles.
The V.I is extremely corrupt and the taxi unions there have a great deal of influence. That's why the public transportation never improved while I lived there.
In particular...the book shows how supply and demand still affects behavior, even when we don't culturally like to believe that it does.
If you have a say in the parking decisions in your city...please read the book. And if not, try to set the parking cost so there is, on average, one free space per block. Your city will be a better place if you do!
Thanks professor Shoup...rest in peace.
This isn't entirely true. In cities where parking requirements are eliminated, many new businesses move into locations that would have previously been illegal, showing that many commercial tenants view parking requirements as excessive.
In my city, judging by public comment, support for parking requirements comes not from business owners or developers but from voters who fear a lack of parking at the businesses they frequent and who fear that parking for nearby businesses or apartment buildings will overflow into their neighborhood (the horror.)
IOW they want a handout from the city (free parking) to support their lifestyles.
I don't know why this has caught on so strongly online that like water and gas hookups, electric, roads, and trash/yard waste pickups to single-family homes aren't supporting a specific lifestyle but public parking? Those evil suburbanites ruining everything. My hometown Columbus and the policy of mandatory parking is still working out great. New developments are building more parking than required of them and they're the hip trendy areas. The only places in the city where it's an issue is in and around "The Short North" where you can't fit any more parking and they moved to an app based pay system everyone hates. Whenever I'm home and want to go out with friends it's much easier to hit up Bridge Park or Franklinton because they have massive garages.
Forcing private businesses to have parking, even if they make a business decision to not have it, is a tax on those businesses. And on all the businesses that would have been viable without that tax.
I have no issue with paid public parking. It needs to exist.
Or if we love free public services so much, we can talk about why public transport isn't free.
I think public transport should be free, keeping on the Columbus track I have no idea why COTA even bothers to charge. They instituted a monthly price-cap that's at most $62/mo and (or at most $31 plus 50% reduction on the per-fare cost if you're broke). And while not an insignificant amount of money to the riders it's bottom-of-the-bag chip dust to COTA itself. Oh no, more people might use the nearly empty busses, the horror.
The point of charging for parking is not just to collect funds, it's to make sure parking is available.
That's the entire point though. The parking requirements are excessive. The businesses do know better. You're agreeing with the article.
It's an important distinction because of the way arguments over parking play out. If parking requirements are engineered to match the needs of businesses and business owners, then as the article states, they aren't "needed," but also it can be argued that there's little harm in mandating what conscientious business owners do anyway, and preventing outliers from causing problems.
The article does that in its own way by attacking the research behind parking requirements, but it fails to take the next step and point out the obvious: the research would be a lot more solid if anyone believed that it mattered. Even if it started out weak by necessity, it would have been improved and updated over the decades if anybody cared. But there's literally no connection and nobody who cares about a connection.
And even then it's only the vocal minority. Nobody who doesn't have an axe to grind shows up to the zoning committee meeting on such an item.
A huge amount of specific policy winds up being driven by Karens and NIMBYs who will vote for anything that drives up cost because it tends to drive out everything that isn't Startbucks or similar.
You'll have some policy and the number everyone thinks is fine is X but the Karens get to screeching and the number goes up to 12 because the people who were ok with 8 are also ok with Y but the Karens wouldn't settle for less.
I ran the math and the lease on a 7-series at the time was nearly $1.50/hour!
On the other side of that doing driving gigs (delivery) I avoid driving in a city because can't find a place to park/don't want to get towed.
One of the problems with filling them in? Burdensome parking regulations. Super-absurd, given that the public transport in Ostrava is considered one of the Czechia's best, and Czechia has, globally taken, very good public transport overall.
In December 2024, parking regulations were significantly drawn down (to 16 per cent of the original), and there is hope that developers will finally start to build in the gaps. There are already some projects on paper.
Maybe it's just me, but this doesn't sound realistic at all. If there is a place where I would spend eight minutes looking for parking, I would rather not go. And that's average, meaning some people spending twice as much? 16 minutes to look for parking? Who would do that?
EDIT: An even better comparison is the number of people who will sit in a parking lot waiting for someone to vacate a spot rather than parking in plentiful available spots another 50-100 meters away
In my area it’s freezing cold most of the year. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to wait a minute or two for a spot instead of literally walking an extra two football fields in harsh weather. Increased fall risk, etc.
People with legitimate handicaps are the minority of cases (and are eligible for handicap placards entitling them to spaces closer to the entrance), and winter is a strawman. The majority are fully mobile people on summer days in a Walmart or Costco parking lot waiting minutes in a car to save fewer minutes on foot.
I grew up in the midwest when it snowed every winter and the number of times there was actually enough ice on the ground to be significantly more risky walking than on the dryest summer day was at most a few times a year. The areas that get snow know how to plan for snow and ice - especially businesses who don't want to get sued by litigious people.
Sometimes people are in a rush or have somewhere to be. It’s okay to not walk everywhere. You might cal it lazy, I might cal it efficient.
The cardiovascular health of Americans strongly suggests this is not true.
[0] which I acknowledge I'm lucky to have
That said, the inclusion of such BS doesn't really affect the overall point of the article.
I spend 6 weeks there last summer. I never drove, and our only cab was to the airport
What happens when that place is your own home?
Do you routinely cancel necessary appointments or meetings with friends because you cannot find parking?
Eight minutes sounds excessive, but I don't think it's as uncommon as people think. Sitting at a traffic light or circling a single city block can take five minutes. There are paid parking structures which take ten minutes to enter, find a space, park, and then exit the structure.
I virtually always have a more convenient parking spot than the best car parking spot, and it's always available, always free, bc my scooter takes 6 square feet to park, or less, and is freakishly maneuverable.
Ppl think it's a strange choice, but I think that sentiment says more about them than me.
I have a mall 10 minutes biking away. "Why bike when it's only a 5 minute drive?", well, because I've locked my bike at the entrance while you're still circling for parking, and then you have a walk to get inside. And my biking is consistent, but driving at the wrong time suddenly takes 20 minutes home due to rush.
I lived in a neighborhood ~5 years ago where I didn't have a dedicated parking space. I generally had to park a 10-15 minute walk away from where I lived. Many people would rather just circle for 15 minutes instead.
People like convenience, they don't like being reminded they often have to pay for it.
For example, people are willing to pay more for a dedicated parking space than they are to pay per use - even if they're basically the same.
If you drop parking lot requirements you need to provide people with access to a mode of transportation.
In residential areas it does not work so well.
The backbone of society is provided by moderately paid people: Health workers, construction workers, police officers, factory workers.
We must enable these people to get to work. The solution so far was: enable them to own a car.
We can choose to let the market handle that: people probably will negotiate for higher salaries if cost of living goes up, higher salaries will drive prices and the spiral continues.
Parking can exist just fine. The only ask is that the person parking their car pays for it (instead of everyone else paying).
> San Francisco formally adopted demand-based pricing for curb parking in 2017.
> The result was a rare win for San Francisco governance: We know from pilot areas that implementing demand-based pricing reduced congestion and parking citations while speeding up transit and increasing overall sales tax revenue. The program is now widely regarded as a model for parking management.
The SFpark program was by all accounts a huge success, and the areas where it was implemented feel a lot better off - you can actually find parking when you need it, and traffic isn't as bad there. I would love to see it put in place in the Sunset and Richmond - those areas are almost entirely free parking, and have the worst parking in the city.
* https://parkingreform.org/donald-shoup/
* https://cal.streetsblog.org/2025/02/08/streetsblog-mourns-th...
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43004881
His book:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Cost_of_Free_Parking
* EconTalk podcast episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sgmw3jQcyc
The councils then complain that their high street is dying.
My village is just about to introduce paid parking and I don't predict it'll lead to empty car parks. It just means those who don't want to pay will park further out and walk. Plenty of people willing to pay. Similar story all over the UK
People like to blame car parking on the death of the high street but to me it seems online shopping, rents and business rates are far more contributors to it
Kinda funny how the council is behaving like a medieval lord raising taxes but without the ability to tie people to the land it doesn't work all that well.
Cars don't visit shops, people do. From the amount of visitors a store in a street sees, vanishingly little of them comes from the few parking spots outside. Metro, buses, cycling however brings loads.
Personally I avoid the shopping streets with car traffic. Feels hostile and noisy. I go to the shops in pedestrian areas.
In other places, people who use transit or bike around on average might be much higher income and could support different sort of businesses.
However...
I'm skeptical of demand-based parking pricing after a local entertainment company started using it. $5-$100 for parking depending on how close the lot is to the venue moderated by big TV screens on each lot.
Proper demand measurement requires data and insight. Closeness to venue is a reasonable proxy for demand. But what if we could price the lot based on who's playing at the venue? An artist with wealthier clientele requires it's patrons pay more for parking? What if it could use your personal music tastes to upcharge? Or perhaps you used the cheap $5 lot for a different destination, should there be an upcharge then? The end game of demand-based parking, or any demand-based pricing results in more data extraction, for better insights, to extract exactly the highest amount of money each person is willing to pay. It gives power to those with the best data and puts more effort (labor/money) into figuring out better ways to get that data.
So what's wrong with this? I think most people would opt for the $5. If that's the case, that's where people would park. As incentivized by the parking structure. I don't see a problem. The lot operator can change their algorithm, and parking consumers will respond according to their value curve.
> Indeed, Shoup worked hard to make his ideas palatable across the political spectrum. Are you a conservative? People should pay for the services they consume. Are you a progressive? All this unnecessary driving can’t be good for the environment. Are you a libertarian? Clearly, the solution to scarcity is prices and markets. Are you a socialist? Let’s stop privatizing the public realm by turning it into a free parking lot. As a result, the typical shoupista gathering is an oasis of peaceful coexistence.
Mocking this doesn't make sense. Ten nuns can fit into one van which takes up one parking spot. The van has to go somewhere.
And gyms are unlikely to make deeper pools, but longer/wider ones, which would support more customers.
And when the regulations were written down, you'd only need one nunnery in development or existing or foreseen to make the exception appear.
No.
In this case we are talking cars. They are expensive items and there are many incentives not to have more than you need.
I get annoyed at mindless application of Econ 101 nostrums.
His basic idea is correct, especially as density in cities gets higher, but it is not because of the "tragedy of the commons"
The total cost of ownership of a car includes the cost to operate it, including parking if that costs anything. If the parking cost component is "artificially" reduced or eliminated, the rest of the argument states.