The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup

That's awesome! And, given current prices, a great opportunity for someone to own a home they otherwise might not have been able to.

Here's an article about some of the other things happening: https://www.sightline.org/2023/06/30/parking-mandates-are-va...

Does Portland have good public transport?

The solution, as Donald Shoup advocated, is to raise (or in some cases, lower, and in general, have it be dynamic) parking rates to market-clearing prices for parking spots such that there are is always one (but not too much more) free spot available on the block.

Shoup wrote a LOT about how charging too little for parking leads to everyone using it, which makes parking worse for everyone involved. San Francisco charges about $50c a day for residential street parking in areas that have a parking permit zone - which is decided on a block by block basis. Most street parking in SF is completely free.

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.

There are no good solutions for existing neighborhoods with street parking. In new or completely redeveloped neighborhoods, you can make the streets narrower, the lots larger, and the property owners responsible for parking. But street parking in existing neighborhoods doesn't scale. If the neighborhood is getting more dense with gradual redevelopment, every solution to street parking is going to feel unfair to one group or another.

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.

The only solution to traffic is viable alternatives to driving. Not more parking, not more lanes, not more parking lots, nor more highways, not wider roads. It's viable alternatives to driving.

Donald’s book The High Cost of Free Parking is about this! Really great read, highly recommended.

Rest in peace.

You should actually read Donald's book this is very well covered.

I wonder if Waymo will get big enough in San Francisco to affect this.

So you make the street parking paid.

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.

Malls usually have huge, empty parking lots, so it sounds like it's a win:

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.

Funny how you consider less parking to be outsourcing, but you wouldn't consider free parking to be subsidizing. Curious.

People are the "big rocks" in cities. Housing and businesses for people is more important than storing automobiles.

If there's not enough free street parking, charge more. That's part of what Shoup talked about.

Portland's problem is that they aren't charging enough (or at all) for curb parking.

If a city offers land for free, what incentive is there to pay for building parking on your property?

Free is always going to outcompete non-free. The answer is to get rid of free on street parking.

If only there were other ways to get around in high-density areas that didn't necessitate a private vehicle. Could we all brainstorm some ideas?

Oregon has a severe housing shortage:

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/01/28/oregon-needs-to-build...

That is the root cause of homelessness:

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/everything-you-think-you-know-...

This video also does a good job of explaining it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQW4W1_SJmc

Eliminating costly parking regulations are quite helpful for building the kinds of housing that will help people get out of homelessness.

> Homelessness is through the roof

Allocating space for car parking does not help address homelessness. In fact, it hurts it a lot.

Prices going up is a clear market signal of desirability.

The solution isn't to reduce the demand for parking.

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.

The substack was for me to scratch an itch. It's so I can write then link to what I've written when talking with others.

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.

I was in the V.I for almost 10 years. They have the safari system set up but it only runs on the tourist routes. So you're out of luck unless you lived on one of the two main routes that had the safaris.

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.

I think there's some kind of filter bubble effect going on. And a little classism. People who use public transit like it and think everyone likes it, and people who never use it hate it and think everyone hates it. My ex-boss never used public transit despite living right next to a train stop, because he was rich and trains are for poor people. He probably didn't know that's how I got to the office Christmas party (in that area).

I don't disagree with much in the article, but I disagree with the implication that parking requirements are, or ever were, designed to meet the needs of businesses and business owners. They aren't. They're driven by voters who want businesses to have more parking than business owners would pay for, given the choice.

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.

To a cheesy jingle tune: public services paid by taxes aren't handouts.

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.

I agree with you, but just to play devils advocate: use the property you are permitted to use and build parking on your own property. If you can't fit a garage or parking space on your land, you didn't think through the purchase for your needs.

Correct you only own your house, not the street. If you want to own the street too, a gated community is where you want to live.

People parking on the public street in front of your house has nothing to do with the enjoyment of it. If you personally find it abhorrent, move outside the city to somewhere with fewer people.

Exactly, we paid for our house, the sidewalk in front of it, and the street beyond that sidewalk! And our enjoyment will be ruined by... seeing people on our street who don't live here!

That's the part I don't understand at all, and I've had people try to explain it to me in person. The anger, anxiety, and affrontedness of seeing somebody parked at the curb in front of one's house... the neighborhood ruined... I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voice, but can you explain it? For context, people frequently park on our street because of the proximity of a couple of commercial streets a few minutes' walk away, and we get completely parked up for events at a church down the block. The worst thing that has ever happened as a result is that our dogs have woken us up barking at someone retrieving their car. I blame that on our dogs, but I guess I could blame the people instead?

Do you own the street outside your house and the street outside your neighbor's houses?

If I go into a city I try not to drive/use Uber.

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.

What is crazy about socal is that it's also price insensitive to that sort of behavioral shifting one might expect from more expensive parking. These days, good luck parking around weho without just throwing your hands in the air and paying a valet $40 thanks to the byzantine web of local permit zones that has emerged in recent years, mostly in mid city and the west side for now. It hasn't lessened the amount of people going down santa monica blvd or anything, and people certainly aren't taking a bus to a $40 plate dinner. Just hurts the subset of people who have to get out there for whatever reason and can't easily stomach a valet hit in stride.

I've lived in places where I wouldn't be able to park if I drove home late at night. In that case, I wouldn't drive to events where I would arrive home late at night. And since public transportation tends to be poor late at night, that would mean either I'd carpool or not go.

Yeah, lots of people underestimate that part of the trip. Google says the trip takes 5 minutes, so in the heads of many that means it's 5 minutes total. But door to door it's probably the double.

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.

My wife would do that to avoid having our baby sit in a freezing cold shopping cart for a long time while she wheeled him into the store. He’s 25 lbs now and he will be getting heavier so it’s not easy to just carry him anymore. She usually parks next to cart corrals to grab a cart right as she gets out of the car.

I don’t agree with your edit.

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.

If you parked 15 minutes away, and they circled for 15 minutes, they came out ahead - because they would have a short walk back to their car, you'd have a 15 minute one.

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.

And this is why so many Americans are obese with mobility problems. Instead of walking an extra quarter mile, they'll circle the block for an hour.

This gets pushed to a ridiculous degree at costco. They actually cause congestion waiting three deep in the rows for one spot to open up. Meanwhile I will skirt around them, park immediately in the ample available parking around the back where the employees take their smoke breaks, and walk right into the store probably while they still wait and stew.

If you spend any time driving in a vacation to Spain, something went wrong.

I spend 6 weeks there last summer. I never drove, and our only cab was to the airport

That holds for shopping and recreational areas.

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.