Main ideas from Donald Shoup’s “The High Cost of Free Parking”
September 14th, 2007,A few months ago I learned about the book The High Cost of Free Parking, by UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup. The book was published by the American Planning Association in 2005. Shoup’s ideas seem to be slowly percolating into the national and global consciousness, as evidenced by recent coverage of them on NPR, in Time magazine, and elsewhere.
I recently checked the book out from a local college library and my wife and I read it - or I should say my remarkable wife read it while I read parts of it. It’s an extremely well-researched book, quite scholarly and somewhat repetitive, but readable nonetheless. This is an important book that will likely have a lasting impact on our planet.
My wife and I made the following list of main ideas from the book in order to make them more accessible:
Minimum off-street parking requirements have fostered sprawl and skewed transportation choices toward automobiles and have made urban areas less pedestrian-friendly.
The cost of parking has been hidden in the prices for other goods and services.
Free parking (or below-market-price parking) increases traffic because people drive more and spend more time cruising looking for parking spots.
Dont have off-street parking requirements. Let the market decide how much parking to provide.
In congested areas where parking is tight, charge for parking and let market forces work. This frees up parking spots for the people who value them most, reduces cruising traffic, and generates revenue for a neighborhood or city. “You can’t manage parking if you can’t charge for it,” Shoup says in the Time article. Shoup recommends a price that will leave about 15 percent of parking spaces open and 85 percent of them occupied.
Create Parking Benefit Districts with market-priced curbside parking. Revenue will go to improvements in that district or neighborhood, which will help to overcome political opposition to charging for parking.
The barriers to implementing these changes are political rather than technological.
The first chapter of the book is available online.
September 14th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Do these ideas apply to the small town of Northfield, Minnesota, where I live? I would generally conclude that if more than 85 percent of the parking spots on a street or a public parking lot are full, then we should charge for them.
Maybe we should get an expert in here and advise us on this.