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Donald C. Shoup
The High Cost of Free Parking
America’s love affair with the automobile, and the toll it has taken on both the built and natural environments, has been well documented. Surprisingly, then, UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup’s meticulously researched book, The High Cost of Free Parking, is the first to treat in depth the subject of automobile parking, the state in which the “average car spends about 95 percent of its life.” It is a subject of great financial consequence: according to figures developed by University of California at Davis professor Mark Delucchi and updated by Shoup to account for inflation and the number of motor vehicles owned in the United States, in 2002 the subsidy for off-street parking alone was between $127 billion and $374 billion. This figure is roughly the same amount as our nation’s Medicare or national defense budgets—without including subsidies for the free on-street parking that exists on most urban streets.
While many American cities believe they suffer from a parking shortage, the real problem is that they have too much free parking. Over the last sixty-plus years, planning for parking has meant planning to provide parking without cost, and America has provided enough to satisfy 99 percent of all automobile trips to the home, office, or shopping. This superabundance has had costs well beyond municipal subsidies: parking lots mar the urban landscape, the high cost of providing parking makes developing affordable housing more difficult, and free parking skews transportation choices toward driving, thereby increasing congestion and pollution and encouraging sprawl. And because the cost of providing parking spaces is bundled into the cost of development, Shoup explains, this so-called “free” parking is actually paid for by everyone. Off-street parking, required by municipalities for nearly every land use, is expensive to provide. But rather than directly charge drivers who use the parking, developers absorb the costs of providing parking. The higher cost of development translates into higher rents in residential and office buildings and into higher retail costs in commercial buildings. Not everyone chooses to drive; yet we all subsidize drivers indirectly by paying higher costs passed on to us.
Our cities’ off-street parking requirements have resulted from deliberate and democratic decision-making processes based on traffic engineers’ projections of supply and demand (not from any conspiracy by auto manufacturers, a notion Shoup smartly dismisses). But as any student of economics will attest, demand increases as prices drop; hence parking requirements that are based on the demand for free parking invariably oversupply parking.
Shoup’s evaluation of off-street parking requirements, while detailed and insightful, is sometimes as laborious as the parking requirements themselves. And his examples too often focus on studies in his own backyard of Southern California. But his most important contribution, an unforgiving critique of the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ (ITE) Parking Generation, the “parking bible” used to set off-street parking requirements in most American cities, is carefully crafted and has broad application. Shoup recognizes what many others have failed to see: that planners’ blind application of Parking Generation’s questionable data has led to an unwavering commitment to provide excessive space to accommodate the automobile.
According to Shoup, ITE provides uncommonly precise parking demand estimates for a myriad of land uses based on very small sample sizes. Planners tend to follow these guidelines without any consideration of local context. They also take ITE data that reflects the maximum demand for free parking, and use it to set minimum parking requirements. The results are evident in the parking lots of most retail establishments. Parking spaces remain largely unoccupied save the busy hours during the holiday shopping season. In his discussion on how parking requirements are set, Shoup couldn’t be closer to the mark in concluding, “being roughly right is better than being precisely wrong.”
He recommends two relatively simple reforms to off-street parking requirements: in-lieu fees and parking demand reduction. In-lieu fees offer developers an option to pay a fee rather than provide parking spaces; cities can then use the fee revenue to provide public parking spaces that are shared by a variety of land uses. Parking demand reduction strategies are aimed at reducing the number of vehicles needing a parking space by reducing single-occupancy vehicle trips.
Shoup notes that the barrier to charging market prices for parking is not technological, but political. Nobody wants to pay to park, and parking is a very contentious issue at the neighborhood level. Local businesses fear that charging for parking will turn customers away, and residents generally believe that they are entitled to park for free in their neighborhoods. To overcome this political opposition and reduce demand for parking, Shoup proposes a system in which parking revenue is returned to the locations from which it is generated—via business improvement districts in commercial areas or “parking benefit districts” in residential neighborhoods. In commercial areas, businesses may be more likely to support charging for on-street parking if they can be guaranteed a portion of the revenue. These revenues could fund streetscape improvements or security enhancements to make their commercial district more attractive.
In residential neighborhoods, Shoup proposes a system in which residents could still park for free with a permit, but non-residents would have to pay for a permit to park on residential streets. The revenue generated from the sale of permits could fund sidewalk repairs or other improvements to residential neighborhoods. Residents are likely to support Shoup’s “parking benefit district” concept because the benefits are concentrated at the neighborhood level, while the costs are distributed widely to those who live outside the neighborhood.
Shoup examines driver behavior in response to free or under-priced on-street parking in a chapter titled California Cruising. Shoup and his assistants conducted a study of cruising, the all-too-familiar practice in urban areas of circling the block in search of a parking space, in the Westwood Village neighborhood near UCLA. They found that parking spaces are hard to come by when there is no incentive to give one up. He argues that curb parking is difficult in many cities because it is drastically under-priced (and most often free). If on-street parking spaces went for market prices, finding a parking spot would not be the game of chance that it is in many urban neighborhoods.
Skeptics wondering how Donald Shoup could write 700 pages on the subject of parking need not look further than Chapter 14 of The High Cost of Free Parking, where he quotes Richard Feynman, the American Nobel Prize-winning physicist: “Everything is interesting if you look at it deeply enough.” Shoup employs a methodical approach to document the destruction wrought on American cities by free parking and he pleads with planners and policymakers to rethink what many believe to be unassailable—the fundamental right to park their car for free wherever they go. In doing so, he provides a path for extending urban planning’s familiar mantra of “planning for people rather than cars” to the way we treat the automobile where it spends most of its life—parked.
AMERICAN PLANNING ASSOCIATION. 733 PP. $59.95, HARDCOVER.
This article appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
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