On the trail of Donald Shoup

Want an in-depth look at what's wrong with American cities' approach to parking? The first place to go would be the 808-page revised edition of Donald Shoup's remarkably engaging book, The High Cost of Free Parking.

But if a lengthy book (even a witty one) is too much to contemplate, second choice surely would be the long article by Dave Gardetta that appeared in the December issue of Los Angeles Magazine.

In "Between the Lines," Gardetta tells how Shoup became interested in the peculiar economics of parking, how he developed into America's drollest and most devastating critic of misconceived parking policies, and much else besides.

The article begins with the tale of the $110 million, 2,118-car parking garage that was constructed beneath an icon of Los Angeles culture, Disney Hall. "The garage—designed to serve the public good—instantly made the Metro immaterial to concertgoers, placed several thousand cars on the road every week, and pumped a few hundred tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year," observes Gardetta. 

But let's listen to a quote from Shoup himself:

“L.A.,” says Shoup, “required 50 times more parking under Disney Hall than San Francisco would allow at their own hall.” ... “After a concert in San Francisco,” says Shoup, “the streets are full of people walking to their cars, eating in restaurants, stopping into bars and bookstores. In L.A.? The bar next door at Patina is a ghost town.” 

The article is packed with all sorts of information about parking meters, parking lots, parking garages, and, you might say, parking tragedies. It captures what used to be the lonely obsession of Shoup—except that the former chair of UCLA's Department of Urban Planning isn't so lonely any more. He has avid followers—"Shoupistas." 

For the record, Shoup was trained in economics at Yale, is 73, drives a 1994 Infiniti, "but," according to Gardetta, "for the last three decades has steered a 1975 Raleigh bike two miles uphill daily in fair weather" from his home to the wooded highlands of UCLA's north campus. 

For the rest of the story, you'll need to read Gardetta's 6,000-word article.