Free Parking Isn't Really Free
One of APA's most popular and influential titles is finally in paperback, with a new preface and afterword by the author.
New York Press called the original hardcover "beach reading."
Free parking isn't really free. In fact, the average parking space costs more than the average car. Initially developers pay for the required parking, but soon tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the cost of parking has diffused throughout the economy.
When we shop, eat in a restaurant, or see a movie, we pay for parking indirectly because its cost is included in the price of everything from hamburgers to housing. The total subsidy for parking is staggering, about the size of Medicare or national defense budgets. But free parking has other costs: It distorts transportation choices, warps urban form, and degrades the environment.
Often off-street parking requirements don't make sense. A gas station must have 1.5 parking spaces per fuel nozzle. A mausoleum must have 10 parking spaces per maximum number of interments in a one-hour period.
Shoup proposes three things:
- Remove zoning requirements for off-street parking
- Charge fair market prices for curb parking
- Use revenue from curb parking to pay for public improvements in the neighborhoods that generate it.
Shoup unravels current parking policies and proposes sensible, fair alternatives that will free us from the high cost of free parking.
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Reviews and Endorsements
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"Donald Shop is like Jane Jacobs. He starts by exposing the blind spot of a generation and then marshals a new generation of urbanists to make things right. Now that The High Cost of Free Parking is in paperback, I look forward to replacing all the dog-eared copies that have gone missing from our office library."
Paul Steely White, Executive Director, Transportation Alternatives
"This book should be required reading for anyone who cares about this nation's cities. Shoup helps us understand how we can use the billions we are spending to store motor vehicles in ways that can solve our parking problems and build healthy communities."
Michael S. Dukakis, Former Governor of Massachusetts
"A landmark in the annals of urban planning. This important book deserves a prominent spot on any planner's bookshelf. It's brilliant."
Robert Cervero, Professor of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley
"Urban planners and economists should be embarrassed about how little they thought we have given to off-street parking requirements. Shoup shows how parking standards have fundamentally shaped our built environment, usually for the worse."
José A. Gómez-Ibàñez, Derek C. Bok Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, Harvard University.
"This is an extraordinary book. An appropriate descriptive subtitle would be 'Everything you really wanted to know about parking but were afraid to ask!"
Journal of Urban Design
"Parking rock star"
Wall Street Journal
"[Shoup] provides a wealth of resources, information, and ammunition for those seeking to change parking regulation, planning, and design paradigms."
Journal of Planning Literature
Other Titles
This report explains how employers who offer their employees the option to cash out their parking subsidies can discourage solo driving and its attendant social, environmental, and infrastructure costs.
Meet the Author
