Of all the levels of the dismal science, his was the lowliest of all. At the very mention of the words “traffic” or “parking”, academics sniffed. What could be more trivial or uninteresting than jams on the freeway, or seas of near-identical cars in a Walmart lot? Merrily, Donald Shoup shook them off. It was true; he was a bottom-feeder, moving through the sludgy water everybody else ignored. But first, he had it all to himself, and second, there was really good food down there.
There was fame, too. Over the 41 years he spent as associate and then full professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, his students and fans outside made quite a cult of him. They called him “Shoupdogg”, a rapper name he gladly grabbed for his website, and themselves “Shoupistas”. He was “Yoda”, too, a guru who trained jedi for 800 years: by chance the very number of pages in his most famous book, “The High Cost of Free Parking” (2005). He lacked Yoda’s pointy ears, but made up for them with a full beard and the tweedy outfits in which he cycled to campus on an old-fashioned sit-up bike.
He was no pushover, however. The sparkly blue eyes soon got steely, because traffic policy was far from unimportant. How to cope with cars was the biggest issue cities faced, not only in America but worldwide. The most valuable asset cities had was land, and cars took up too much of it. They did not merely congest and pollute the inner streets; motor vehicles had made cities sprawl ever outwards, creating oceans of unproductive asphalt wherever people gathered to shop, learn, work or have fun.
In America in the mid-20th century most city councils, meaning well, had brought in parking minimums. The number was calculated, originally, from haphazard surveys by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and later on even more randomly by cities just copying each other. For every 300 square feet (28 square metres) of retail or commercial space, there had to be one parking space. For a hospital, one space for every two beds. For a church, one for every five seats in a pew. For a bowling alley, seven per lane. (Car-sharing not even imagined!) Minimums were decreed for bingo parlours, slaughterhouses, junkyards and tennis courts until, in Los Angeles County for one, 14% of the land area was given over to parking. Such schemes, Professor Shoup thought, were clearly a product of the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain, and they well deserved one of the best of his large collection of puns: “Aparkalypse Now!”
The brains of motorists, though, frustrated him just as much. They now saw free parking as an entitlement, even a human right. But it was not a right, he reminded them, and it was not free, except for the person driving. In all other aspects of their lives, “free” parking imposed a cost—first on developers and businesses, then on everyone else. “Free parking” pushed up user fees, rents and prices in the places that offered it, including for the poor, who might well not have cars. It was hugely unfair. Besides, as a keen Georgist—a disciple of Henry George, who had advocated a land tax in the 19th century—Professor Shoup believed that land should be taxed to ensure it was put to its best use. What he himself wanted to see, instead of unneeded lots, were more affordable houses for the poor and more public gardens. He was out to save the world, one space at a time.
So the first task was to banish parking minimums. His idea caught on: they vanished from 35 American cities, including Austin, Raleigh and Seattle. Mexico City abandoned them, too. His attention then turned to another realm of free parking, curb space. Other people’s research had shown that in any line of slowly moving traffic, at least 8% of drivers (rising to 74% in some places) were simply circling, and polluting, in hopes of finding a spot. In his own 15-block neighbourhood of Westwood Village, next to UCLA, it usually took no more than three minutes to nab a free space; but if everyone in the village did this over a year it would add up to about 1m vehicle miles, or four trips to the moon.
His answer was parking meters: smart ones, varying their charges according to the peaks and valleys of the working day and week. They would charge the lowest price possible to achieve a vacancy rate on any street of 15% (or an occupancy rate of 85%) at all times: about two curb spaces per block. Drivers would then feel sure they could find a space, but they would have to pay more the closer they got to a popular destination. He called this the Goldilocks effect. Charges were not set too high, nor too low; there were neither too many spaces, nor too few. Just enough.
The realist in him knew this would be tricky to achieve. He admitted that outside factors might turn the regular peaks and troughs on his graph paper into something more like kittens fighting under a blanket. However, he persevered. The great virtue of parking meters was that they brought money into city coffers. He kept before him the shining model of Pasadena, once a dump of shuttered shops, now transformed by meters into a vibrant city again. If that money simply went into the general fund, people might not properly see the effect of it. So he proposed Parking Benefit Districts, in which money from local meters would go specifically to local public services: graffiti removal, plantings, street repairs. Meters would be loved then, and cities transformed.
His ideas, in summary, were to put cars in their place. And that place was not necessarily the garage, either. Many suburb-dwellers with garages used them for all manner of bulky and unsightly household stuff, from ladders to paint to home-brewing kits, but not the car. That sat in the driveway, and Professor Shoup thought that was where it should belong. Garages could then become micro-apartments for people without cars, who would ride by e-scooter, bike or bus towards a new urban world. And he, smiling broadly, would lead the way. ■