Donald ‘Pay for Your Goddamn Parking’ Shoup Has Died

Donald Shoup.
Photo: Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

If niche fame is your goal, Donald Shoup should be your model. The UCLA urban-planning professor, who died on February 6 at age 86, was not merely the top scholar in his field but its Elvis and its Lennon and its Jagger, all bundled into one tweed sport coat. The engineer turned economist wrote three books and countless articles about one topic; every subsequent piece of writing about that subject name-checks him; and upon his death, websites in his field referred to him as a giant and a hero. His Facebook fans’ page refers to its members as Shoupistas; some of them called him Shoup Dogg.

And that subject was … parking.

The Wall Street Journal called him a “parking rock star.” The California site LAist went with “parking god.” Shoup was an advocate, even a zealot, for the wider understanding of a straightforward fact: Free parking is not free. Someone is always paying for that occupied spot, whether the bill falls to a taxpaying neighbor, a local business, or sometimes, awfully, to a pedestrian who can’t be seen emerging in time from behind a parked car into oncoming traffic. Every street-side spot uses public land and takes up resources for its upkeep. If all those spots are full, drivers pay in various currencies, whether through time lost or money spent on fuel as they circle. Parking spaces in new buildings, required by a great many American cities (including, in many areas, New York), make matters worse rather than better because they decrease housing density and encourage car ownership. So did the construction of enormous downtown parking garages and lots that happened in cities in the 1970s as their leaders attempted to claw back shoppers from the suburbs and the malls. Many places demolished a lot of good urban neighborhoods to make room for car storage that now stand half-empty and gone to seed. Shoup’s simple plea was that the owner of a car, rather than everyone else, should bear its costs and that doing so (through meters, permits, or other means) would lead us toward the optimal balance of parking power: 85 percent of slots should be full at any given time.

His magnum opus — and I do mean magnum; it’s 764 pages long — The High Cost of Free Parking lays it all out. First published in 2005 and updated since, The High Cost of Free Parking is perhaps more often referenced than read for pure pleasure. Even so, virtually every one of its paragraphs contains a sensible and quotable aphorism. I just flopped my copy open at random and hit this on page 520: “One of the biggest potential advantages of paid parking is also its biggest weakness. Drivers don’t want to pay for curb parking precisely because its revenue potential is so high: the more parking costs, the more drivers don’t want to pay for it.” Which, of course, is the point of charging a fee: Make people bear the costs and will use the resource more judiciously than they otherwise might. Shoup is puckish, too, about the intense opinions this seemingly dull subject brings out in people: “Paying for parking seems like paying rent to an absentee landlord. Because everyone objects … and no one sees a direct benefit from the revenue, no one supports the idea of charging for curb parking.” The difference between his intense opinions and everyone else’s, of course, is that he had the data to back his up. He referred to his opponents’ rantings as “paid-parking derangement syndrome.”

The Shoupistas, including many younger planners who studied under Shoup or read his books, are everywhere now, some in positions of power. The dominant strain of urbanist thought these days is that having fewer cars on the streets, in favor of more pedestrians, bikes, and every other way of getting around, is healthier for cities. The easiest and cheapest way to get there is to charge them for parking and use the revenue to fix stuff. Sorry to say, Shoup won’t be here to see how congestion pricing (a highly parking-adjacent subject) plays out in New York City. But just this week, his ideas are in the news: Mark Levine, the borough president who wants to be mayor, was talking about requiring neighborhood parking permits in Manhattan north of the congestion zone. Shoup! There he is! And he’ll be with us as long as someone is needlessly circling the block.