Title: The High Cost of Free Parking

Author: Donald Shoup

Completed: Apr 2025 (Full list of books)

Overview: This book has been on my To Read list for several years, but the 800+ pages was always a bit daunting. When I heard that the author passed away earlier this year, I decided that was as good a reason as any to dive in. Over the 800 pages, he makes the case that we need to change how we think about parking to improve our cities. He dives deep into every possible argument against his ideas and shows (with plenty of math) why those arguments are wrong. By the time I finished, I recognized that the only reason we still have free parking in large cities is because we’ve always had it. There’s lots of good information in here but the basic take away was the same three points he makes in the first two minutes of any interview he’s done. We should:

• Charge fair-market prices for curb parking
• Return the resulting revenue to neighborhoods to pay for public improvements
• Remove the requirements for off-street parking

Highlights:

• Thirty percent of households in San Francisco don’t own a car, and the city uses all the parking meter revenue to subsidize public transit. Many poor people ride buses that are mired in traffic congested by richer drivers who are cruising for underpriced curb parking.8 Drivers who don’t want to pay for parking often push poor people out in front of them like human shields, claiming that charging for parking will hurt the poor. Free curb parking limits the revenue available to pay for public services, and poor people are less able to replace public services with private purchases the way richer people can. The poorest people cannot afford cars, but they can benefit from public services—such as public transportation—that are financed by parking revenues.
• Thomas Paine wrote, “Time makes more converts than reason.”
• Suppose cities required all fast-food restaurants to include french fries with every hamburger. The fries would appear free, but they would have a high cost in money and health. Those who don’t eat the fries pay higher prices for their hamburgers but receive no benefit. Those who do eat the fries they wouldn’t have ordered separately are also worse off, because they eat unhealthy food they wouldn’t otherwise buy. Even those who would order the fries if they weren’t included free are no better off, because the price of a hamburger would increase to cover the cost of the fries. How are minimum parking requirements different?
• Many big cities in poor countries have such a high density of people that even a low rate of car ownership per household leads to a high density of cars. If these cities adopt performance prices for curb parking and use the revenue to pay for local public services, never before will so many poor people receive so much public benefit paid for by so few rich people.
• Off-street parking requirements collectivize the cost of parking because they allow everyone to park free at everyone else’s expense. When the cost of parking is hidden in the prices of other goods and services, no one can pay less for parking by using less of it. Bundling the cost of parking into higher prices for everything else skews travel choices toward cars and away from public transit, cycling, and walking.
• When California Polytechnic University, Pomona, planning professor Richard Willson surveyed planning officials in 138 cities about how they set parking requirements, their most frequent response to the question, Why does your city have minimum parking requirements? was the tautological answer, To have an adequate number of spaces.7 Adequate for what? The implicit answer is an adequate number of spaces to satisfy the demand for free parking.
• Planners define parking demand as the peak parking occupancy observed at a site, without taking into account the price that drivers pay for parking. Cities then require each land use to supply at least enough parking spaces to accommodate this peak demand, without considering how much the required spaces cost to construct. The maximum observed demand thus becomes the minimum required supply.
• most parking requirements amount to little more than a collective hunch. They are a perfect example of what Pietro Nivola termed “accidental urban policies” that have profound but commonly unrecognized effects on the design of cities.
• To deal with the uncertainty in predicting the demand for parking, some cities allow developers to provide fewer parking spaces if they set aside land that can later be converted to parking if demand is higher than expected. Palo Alto, California, for example allows reductions of up to 50 percent in parking requirements if the difference is made up through a landscaped reserve. Not one of these landscaped reserves has subsequently been converted to parking.
• Both transportation engineers and urban planners should also ponder this warning from Lewis Mumford: “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city.”
• the rule of thumb is that there must be one parking space for every worker, and as a result, office buildings must provide about 1.5 times as much space to park cars as there is office space for the drivers;
• Peak parking occupancy ranged from 28 to 61 percent of capacity and averaged only 47 percent of capacity even though 97 percent of all employees arrived by car.
• Some cities require bicycle racks to encourage cycling, but most planners and elected officials do not seem to recognize that parking requirements will likewise encourage driving.
• In 1937, Douglas Haskell observed in the Architectural Record, “Los Angeles appears to the casual view as a series of parking lots interspersed with buildings…. These parking lots are functionally as indispensable to the city as a car is to the citizen.”80 (The cars made the parking lots indispensable, and the parking lots, by spreading the city out, made the cars indispensable.)
• The presence of the parking lot in front of the building, in addition to damaging the pedestrian quality of the street, gives the signal that the store is oriented less toward its local neighbors than toward strangers driving by.
• By comparing planning for parking to ancient astronomy, I am criticizing parking requirements, not urban planners. The early astronomers were diligent scientists, but they made a mistake in thinking that the universe revolves around the earth. Similarly, most urban planners are dedicated public servants, but they make a mistake in thinking that cities revolve around parking.
• By comparing planning for parking to ancient astronomy, I am criticizing parking requirements, not urban planners. The early astronomers were diligent scientists, but they made a mistake in thinking that the universe revolves around the earth. Similarly, most urban planners are dedicated public servants, but they make a mistake in thinking that cities revolve around parking. One big difference does separate the two professions: the astronomers’ flawed theory did not harm anyone, but flawed parking requirements harm everyone. Parking requirements began as a solution but have become a problem.
• No great city is known for its abundant parking supply.
• Because a one-car garage for a single-family house requires a curb cut that reduces the on-street parking supply by almost one space, the off-street parking requirement does little to increase the total supply; instead, it vacates the on-street space to provide access to the off-street space; that is, the off-street requirement converts public curb parking spaces into private off-street spaces.
• To show the bias inherent in American parking requirements, consider an alternative approach. In Tokyo, residents must present proof that they own or have leased an off-street parking space before they can register an automobile. The parking requirement is thus linked to car ownership, not to housing ownership. Cars obviously need somewhere to park, but we should place the cost where it logically belongs—on car owners.
• drivers paid only $3 billion a year for parking in 1990–1991, the subsidy for off-street parking was between $76 billion and $223 billion a year. Because the U.S. gross domestic product was $6 trillion in 1991, the subsidy for off-street parking amounted to between 1.2 percent and 3.7 percent of the nation’s economic output.
• suppose there is one parking space per car at home and only two elsewhere (at work, school, supermarkets, and so on), or only three parking spaces per vehicle.14 Suppose we also make the conservative assumption that the average land and capital cost per parking space is only $4,000, an extremely low value given the evidence cited and calculated in Chapter 6. Given these two conservative assumptions, the value of the parking available per car is $12,000 (3 spaces per car x $4,000 per space), or more than twice the average value of a car ($5,507). If so, the total parking supply is worth more than twice the value of the total vehicle stock.
• The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar, in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle, is actually the right to destroy the city. —LEWIS MUMFORD
• They also estimated that the search for curb parking created about 8 percent of the total vehicle-miles traveled in the Midtown, West Side area.
• It is no doubt ironic that the motorcar, superstar of the capitalist system, expects to live rent-free. —WOLFGANG ZUCKERMAN
• Free curb parking initiates the process of planning for free off-street parking. If curb parking is free, and developers do not supply enough off-street spaces to satisfy the demand for free parking, neighbors will complain about parking spillover (real, anticipated, or only imagined). These complaints lead urban planners and elected officials to increase the off-street parking requirements until the spillover problems are resolved. Rather than charge the right price for on-street parking, cities attempt to require the right quantity of off-street parking.
• Everything is interesting if you look at it deeply enough. —RICHARD FEYNMAN
• free parking, which was originally intended to help cities but is now seen as an inalienable right around which we plan our cities at the expense of everything else. Because motorists don’t pay for parking, society at large must pay for it in other ways—traffic congestion, air pollution, energy consumption, degraded design, urban sprawl, and the high opportunity costs for land. Every place we have to put a car is a place we could have put something else. When it comes to parking, we’ve forgotten land is not free.
• Parking will always be free where land is plentiful and cheap, but it is a grave mistake to think parking should be free everywhere.
• In 2002, the total subsidy for off-street parking was somewhere between $127 billion and $374 billion a year. If we also count the subsidy for free and underpriced curb parking, the total subsidy for parking would be far higher. In the same year, the federal government spent only $231 billion for Medicare and $349 billion for national defense. Do we really want to spend as much to subsidize parking as we spend for Medicare or national defense? Because parking costs so much and motorists pay so little for it, the hidden subsidy is truly gigantic.
• These three reforms—charge fair-market prices for curb parking, return the resulting revenue to neighborhoods to pay for public improvements, and remove the requirements for off-street parking—will align our individual incentives with our common interests, so that private choices will produce public benefits.