Free Parking Makes Me Wanna Shoup
It's #BlackFridayParking week again here at Strong Towns, and that means this week on the site we're spotlighting the harm done to our cities by excessive parking—and specifically, by mandatory parking minimums, which require private land owners to provide parking often far in excess of reasonable demand.
It’s never more obvious that our big-box stores and shopping malls have too many parking spaces than when you visit them on the busiest shopping day of the year, the day after Thanksgiving, and they’re still nowhere near full. That’s why we started #BlackFridayParking in 2013 to shine a light on these harmful and wasteful regulations. So grab your camera on Friday and head out to your nearest empty or half-full retail parking lot, and share your findings on social media with the hashtag #BlackFridayParking!
More cities than ever are revisiting parking minimums and reducing or abolishing them. It's no exaggeration to say this represents a sea change in the city planning profession, which only a couple decades ago still largely believed (or at least acted as though) that parking was always good and more parking was always better. And one person, more than anyone else, is responsible for this paradigm shift: UCLA economist Donald Shoup.
Shoup's 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking is the bible of parking policy. Exhaustively researched, it makes the case that free parking is one of the largest forms of government subsidy Americans receive, if not the largest—and yet this subsidy is almost invisible. While people assume parking is a function of the free market meeting consumer demand, the reality is that our glut of no-cost storage space for our cars is a heavily engineered and artificial outcome, thanks to rules like parking minimums and land-use codes that require automobile-centric development.
In 2002, Shoup pegged the annual subsidy for free parking at between $127 billion and $374 billion, or between 1.2 percent and 3.6 percent of the gross domestic product.) Shoup’s work has provided a generation of planners and public officials with the evidence they need to make a strong case for restoring sanity to our parking policies.
Donald Shoup has been a friend to Strong Towns over the years, and so we're taking the occasion this week to spotlight his brilliant work.
Listen to Donald Shoup on the Strong Towns Podcast in 2015
You can read a transcript here.
Learn to Do the Shoup Test in Your Neighborhood
The Shoup Test is a simple rule of thumb for determining what the market price of parking ought to be in your neighborhood. The answer is whatever price makes it so that there's just one space open on each block, on each side of the street, at any given time.
If we set the price to pass the Shoup Test, we make it so people won't cruise around the block looking for parking. If the price is right, it serves to calibrate demand so that people can find the space they need quickly, and those who are willing to walk a bit farther, carpool, bike, or take public transit are incentivized to do so. In addition, more convenient spaces (for example, right on the curb on a busy block of Main Street) will be priced higher than less convenient ones (for example, a couple blocks away on a side street) to reflect their higher demand, which will make them turn over more frequently. This is good for local businesses, who want those parking spaces to be available to their customers, not hogged all day by a single vehicle.
Here’s Shoup on the startling costs of cruising:
A study of cruising in one 15-block business district in Los Angeles found that, over the course of a year, the search for underpriced curb parking created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel—equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gasoline and produces 730 tons of carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in throughout the United States.
Watch Shoup Explain the Three Elements of a Better Parking Policy
Reason.tv has a great 6-minute video interview with him.
What are these three elements?
Charge the right price for curb spaces—make it so a given block passes the Shoup Test.
Put the revenues into a Parking Benefit District to fund neighborhood projects. This ensures that everyone's interests are aligned—neighbors benefit from the city charging a fair market price for parking in their neighborhood.
Eliminate off-street parking minimums.
Read About a City That Has Embraced All Three of Shoup’s Reforms
Yup, we’re talking about Portland, Oregon. Although there’s (always) room for improvement, Portland has long been a national leader in parking policy reform. In 2018, we wrote a bit about what they’re doing right in the City of Roses, and why it’s so important.
Shoup, Baby
Donald Shoup’s brilliance has always been in his ability to expose the insanity of things we grow up taking for granted. Consider this excerpt from an older Streetsblog article, about how businesses treat free parking as a "bundled" amenity, and we're paying for those parking spaces through higher prices for nearly all goods and services:
Swimming pools and exercise rooms as examples of bundled services at hotels, but cities do not require hotels to provide swimming pools and exercise rooms. Suppose, however, cities did require all hotels to provide swimming pools and exercise rooms, perhaps as a part of a public health campaign. Cities could require all these swimming pools and exercise rooms to be of at least a minimum size related to the number of rooms or gross floor area in a hotel. For example, cities could require every hotel to provide a swimming pool with at least 2,500 gallons of water per guest room. If cities did have minimum pool requirements, I expect that almost all hotels would bundle the use of the pools into the room rents. Would you then say that all these swimming pools are the result of free choices made in a free market? Would you say the market had demonstrated that hotel guests like to swim? Would you say the minimum pool requirements do not subsidize swimmers at the expense of nonswimmers? ….
Every person plays many different roles in life — tenant, homeowner, worker, consumer, investor, and motorist. With bundled parking, we pay for parking in all these roles except, usually, as motorists. Because we pay for parking indirectly, its cost does not deter us from driving.
If cities require an ample supply of parking spaces for every building, this saves everyone the trouble of thinking about parking — or its cost. Parking appears free because its cost is widely dispersed in slightly higher prices for everything else. Because we buy and use cars without thinking about the cost of parking, we congest traffic, waste fuel, and pollute the air more than we would if we each paid for our own parking. Everyone parks free at everyone else’s expense.
The issue is not simply whether parking is subsidized. Even without minimum parking requirements some firms would choose to offer free parking, just as some hotels offer swimming pools and some coffee shops offer wi-fi. The real issue is whether the government should mandate the parking supply.
Ready to work for a saner parking policy, for more walkable and financially resilient cities?
Find out more here about how you can get involved in the campaign to end parking minimums.