Celebrating Shoup’s parking legacy

Essay collection explores renowned academic’s thinking on managing cars in cities

There is a strong case for stating that Professor Donald Shoup was the person who put the seemingly mundane subject of parking on the academic map.

For over 50 years Shoup encouraged policy-makers and city planners in North America, and then internationally, to rethink the relationships between parking and the built environment, traffic congestion, energy consumption, and local economic development.

Through landmark books such as 2005’s The High Cost of Free Parking, lectures, podcasts and many conference appearances, the Distinguished Research Professor of Urban Planning at California’s UCLA, reshaped parking policy, impacting urban development, affordability and sustainability. 

Shoup proposed three main approaches to parking policy and provision:

• Remove off-street parking requirements
• Use market prices to manage on-street parking
• Spend the parking meter revenue to fund added public services on metered blocks. 

Shoup argued these reforms can align individual incentives with collective objectives and produce enormous benefits at low or no cost. All these benefits will result from subsidising people, not parking. He suggested shifting the cost of parking to the parkers will make cities more expensive for cars and more liveable for people.

A year since his passing at the age of 86, Shoup’s legacy is celebrated by a cast of city planners, economists, journalists and parking professionals in a new collection of essays.

The Shoup Doctrine explores Shoup’s contributions to research, practice and education. The authors discuss Shoup’s urban planning theories, particularly his ideas on market-based parking management, removing parking mandates, and using parking revenue for public services that create more liveable and equitable cities. 

The collection is edited by a former student of Shoup, Daniel Baldwin Hess, Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Baldwin Hess’s own research addresses interactions between housing, transportation and land use. He hopes the book will be of interest to urban planners, developers, elected officials, students, and citizen advocates who are passionate about reducing automobile dependency and creating more sustainable and vital cities.

The Shoup Doctrine: Essays Celebrating Donald Shoup and Parking Reforms (Routledge)