Planners Book Club — August 2007

The High Cost of Free Parking

The High Cost of Free Parking was the August 2007 selection of Planners Book Club.

Donald Shoup caused a sensation with his APA Planners Press book, The High Cost of Free Parking. Not only did his no-holds-barred treatise on the way parking should be get professional planners talking, but it also sparked discussion of parking principles in the mainstream media. The book was written about in The New York Times, USA Today, and numerous other publications.

Free parking, Shoup argues, has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion, but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people, and why American motor vehicles now consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production.

This month, discuss this iconoclast's ideas with co-workers as part of APA's Planners Book Club.

These questions from the author will get your discussion started.

Chapters 2 and 3 argue that planners in most cities define parking demand as the peak parking occupancy observed at suburban sites with ample free parking and no public transit. Planners then require every new building to supply at least enough parking spaces to satisfy this peak demand, without considering how much these spaces cost. The maximum observed demand for free parking thus becomes the minimum required parking supply. How does your city set its minimum parking requirements?

Chapter 5 argues that off-street parking requirements in zoning ordinances subsidize cars, distort transportation choices, warp urban form, increase housing costs, burden low-income households, debase urban design, damage the economy, and degrade the environment. Do you see any of these effects in your city?

Chapter 12 argues that curb parking can be both well-used and readily available. To achieve this result, I recommend that cities adjust their meter rates to ensure an 85 percent occupancy rate for curb parking. The 85 percent occupancy rate means that the curb spaces will be well-used, and the 15 percent vacancy rate means that a few spaces will be readily available for everyone who wants to visit a store, restaurant, or other business on the street. How does your city set the meter rates for curb parking?

A surprising amount of urban traffic isn't caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather it is caused by people who have already arrived. Streets are clogged, in part, by people who have gotten where they want to be and are cruising around looking for a free place to park. Chapter 14 estimates that cruising for underpriced curb parking in Westwood Village, a 15-block business district in Los Angeles, generates almost a million vehicle miles of excess travel a year, and thus produces 730 tons of CO2 emissions a year. Are there parts of your city where underpriced curb parking generates a substantial amount of cruising?

Chapters 16-19 propose a new way to solve the parking problem. Charging the right price for curb parking will achieve an 85 percent occupancy rate, and spending the resulting meter revenue to improve public services in the metered neighborhoods will make this pricing policy politically popular. In the book, I use case studies in Pasadena and San Diego to show how this policy has worked. Several other cities have adopted this right-pricing-with-revenue-return policy or are considering it. Could parts of your city benefit from right-priced curb parking and added public services?

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