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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

> The High Cost of Free Parking

convince me that 800 pages is worth it (reviews so far haven't).

Try the lead essay from Cato Unbound and see what you think. [0] There are a few more good short Shoup pieces linked at the bottom of that page.

I have some personal experience here. I have done training and volunteered as a community organizer and worked with my city council and planning department. I have organized neighborhood groups involved in planning. I have studied urban planning and urban form. Nothing helped me to understand American cities and why they work the way they do more than Dr. Shoup's work in the 1990s that is collected in The High Cost Of Free Parking.

Some of it is gritty and technical econometric research, but a lot of it is creative and insightful. It's not a single narrative, but a fun book to dip into in various places from time to time if you care about how cities work and how urban life can be made better for people.

This short 1997 paper introduced me to Dr. Shoup's work (I read it in 1998) and was like a shining blaze of insight for many readers like me when it first appeared. [1] One key insight is that free parking required by law costs the USA about three times as much as all the money drivers spend on cars and gas plus public subsidies for roads and highways. When you read it, you start to see that parking policy drives urban form much more than zoning or free markets or highway and transit construction or public preferences or anything else at all. A lot of the book is like that.

[0]http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/april-2011/there-aint-no-...

[1 pdf] http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

Thanks, I'll check that. While I got interested in urban design recently, TBH I fail to grasp all of the anti-automotive concepts that seem to get in fashion recently. Especially when I live in a place where I witness how it may go wrong. On a related note, tomorrow I'm going to "Brasilia, a day in February" as part of a doc festival we have going on around here, if you've studied urban planning you've probably heard a lot about this city, so just dropping in this title here in case you're interested (not that well known as, say, Urbanized and such).

Most of the anti-automotive concepts are rooted in the incompatibility of traditional cities and walkable urbanism with accommodating comfortable motoring. Unless you have infinite resources to build highways and parking deep underground, one or the other has to go.

Brasilia is famous for being extensively and carefully planned according to a mistaken theory that favored motor navigation over pedestrians and uniformity over creativity. I'd be fascinated someday to see what the benefits and drawbacks of that combination would be on the ground. I hope you enjoy it.

From what I've heard from people who have been there (obviously subjective), is that although it has Niemeyer's eye candies, the overal feeling of the whole place to a newcommer is that it's creepy.

I don't understand this sentiment. You can read as much of any book as you want. I seldom finish books that I start, my finish rate is under 25%. You can get the big picture from about the first 20% of most books, and decide whether you want the in depth followup. If I don't buy the premise, or I'm mostly convinced by the argument and don't care for the details, or just have better things to do with my time, I'll stop reading.

Adopting this approach is very freeing. I don't fear the booklist. I just start stuff, and freely give up on a whim. I can say that at least the first 50 pages of the High Cost of Free Parking is great. Then I got caught up in something else.

They're not worth it. You should spend the time that it would take you to read this book doing some high yield activity instead, like trading stocks or growth hacking your startup. Anything less than that just isn't worth the trouble.

I don't give a shit about the things you mentioned and I read books and long forms every day, so get off your high horse.

Your sarcasm implies that he doesn't want to put effort into reading what appears to be a bad book because it doesn't have a return, which is a crappy assumption.

People have a limited amount of time, and there are far more good books than any one person could read, let alone bad books.

At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book".

And... it's a book, dude. You can check it out from the library or buy it used for ten bucks and stop reading it if you don't like it; that's not going to ruin your life. If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)

>At least one person who is not the author seems to have liked this book, so I challenge the assumption that it "appears to be a bad book".

Do you know why user reviews exist?

>If you have enough time to reply to my dumb comments on HN, you must certainly have the time to start reading the book for 30 minutes and decide if it's worth continuing or not :)

That would be valid if it were me considering reading the book and if it took me 30 minutes to reply to the comment.

Instead, you could read the 21 page paper with the same title and by the same author.

http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

I read most of it, and I can say with mild confidence that it's probably not worth your time. A few years after reading it, I remember the thesis of the book but not much more.

This is a decent, short overview of Shoup's ideas. http://www.lamag.com/features/2011/12/01/between-the-lines

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