Parking reform gathers speed, especially in the West

In 2005, Donald Shoup won wide attention with The High Cost of Free Parking, 752 pages presenting the most important rethinking of North American parking policies in many years. Now the UCLA planning professor has followed up with a new edition that contains all the material in the original book, plus 56 pages telling how cities and towns have begun putting his ideas into practice.

In the first edition, Shoup argued that conventional approaches to parking have produced too many parking lots and generated too much traffic congestion, undermining the appeal of urban centers. He urged cities to adopt a different method: adjust the price of on-street parking continually so that the price accurately reflects demand.

In the new sections of the $34.95 paperback edition (from the American Planning Association’s Planners Press), Shoup explores how communities are implementing his three principal prescriptions:

• Set the right price for curb parking.
• Use some of the parking revenue to pay for public services in the areas where the money is collected.
• Remove minimum parking requirements. 

Curbside parking rates

Many of the municipalities carrying out Shoup’s ideas are on the West Coast. He

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