Remembering Donald Shoup: A Legacy of Curiosity, Credibility and Kindness
In this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, Chuck is joined by Victor Dover, a planner and urban designer. They discuss the work and legacy of Dr. Donald Shoup, an engineer and professor of urban planning who revolutionized the fields of urban planning and parking reform with his book “The High Cost of Free Parking.” They also talk about their own relationships with Dr. Shoup and how he impacted their work as an engineer and planner.
Then, keep listening for a rerun of an interview with Dr. Shoup that Chuck had in 2015.
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Chuck Marohn 0:09
Hey everybody this. Chuck Meron, welcome back to this strong towns podcast. I found out this last weekend that Donald Shoup, the great professor, author of the high cost of free parking, and just, you know, amazing person really passed away this past weekend. There's a lot of people paying tribute to him now, rightfully so, and I wanted to have a conversation with someone who knew him, who was inspired by him and had a lot of nice things to say about him. So I've invited Victor Dover from Dover Cole on Victor, I feel embarrassed. I don't like I don't know, as you've been on the podcast before, we should remedy that again, is this the first time? I don't know. I think it
Victor Dover 0:52
is. I'm one of your regular listeners in this, in the legions of your many loyal listeners.
Chuck Marohn 0:58
Well, well, I'm ashamed. We will have to do this again. You knew Donald Shoup. I wanted to start out with his seminal book, the high cost of free parking. I know this resonated with you. Can you just talk a little bit about what was it about that book that really broke through? Well,
Victor Dover 1:16
you know, the book was preceded by some papers, and the the various research papers were later kind of collated into the book and expanded out upon to become the book. So I first became aware of them, or that research that he was doing before the book came out. It was probably the mid 90s or so, while we were working in Fort Myers Beach, which is a tourist community in the news a lot with the hurricanes that landed there last year, we observed ourselves that this mixed use, walkable area that was the core of their of their community, not ironically, called Times Square. That's how they thought of it. They thought it was the Times Square of Fort Myers Beach seemed to match none of the expectations from the traffic engineering as usual and the incident transportation engineers parking manuals or zoning with regard to how much parking they actually seem to need for all the economic activity and population growth in season that they were experiencing. So we were digging into it a little bit. And my friend Bill spackowski, who you probably know from Fort Myers, said, Well, you need to read about this guy, Don Chu about it in California. And he sent me bad scans of bad Xeroxes, of Xeroxes of some of Don's earlier reports. And it was this great feeling of confirmation, we're not crazy. There's an actual person with a background in economics, and, you know, who's got a PhD and as a well regarded researcher, who's saying the same thing we've arrived at on our own. So I thought that was my first reaction to it. The high cost of free parking is a big fat book. It's not quite as fat as Bob Caro's book over here, but it's fat and and it's impressive because it's dense. You can go through it. A lot of people have commented that for such a technical topic, it's an easy thing to read. And some people I know have read it from cover to cover, from front to back. I've always used as a reference tool, kind of jumping to the part that I was most interested in. We would, of course, carry that book around and wave it. It's right behind me. Here it
Chuck Marohn 3:27
is. Yeah, there it is. I see it
Victor Dover 3:30
and show it. And I showed it to Phil Stoddard, who's also an academic, who's the mayor of City of South Miami. Phil's a biology professor at Florida International University, but he happened to also be the mayor of our little town here. And I showed him this book by this esteemed researcher, and I said, think we could just have that conversation one more time about fixing parking requirements. And Dr Stoddard inhaled that book. He started buying copies of it and passing it out to people and so on. And at that moment, I realized you could reach people that you can't reach, at least if they're willing to read, they're thinking rational. You can reach people that are hard to read with our usual pretty pictures and waving of arms and slide shows of other places that seem to have these characteristics and that it became the same sort of tool for many other colleagues. I
Chuck Marohn 4:22
remember going through the book myself, and just in a way, the most genius people describe the most obvious things that once they describe them, they are devastatingly obvious. Like I'm I am embarrassed. I did not see these things before. It took a genius to point them out, I felt like the when he would have chart after chart after chart showing the like insanity of how these things were put together. It made me feel shame, because I know as an engineer, I hadn't put together parking charts, but I put together other charts that were of that caliber of. Of lacking seriousness, because that's what you do as a technical professional. What? What do you think the legacy of not just the book, but like his work, is in terms of shaping the conversation that that we have today, not just about parking, but about cities in general.
Victor Dover 5:19
So that's the thing is that Don cracked through the insanity of the parking standards, both in the poor way the standards were created, how the research was done to create that, the sort of mindless way they were adopted all over the country by an infinite number of jurisdictions. But he did something else. He said, Well, if we if parking, as it turns out, has such a poor foundation in the policies, maybe some of these other things have a poor foundation, and we should question them too. And so I think his his legacy is much bigger than Park, because he taught us that if something doesn't seem right, and it might be worth digging into it, because it might just turn out to be wrong, and even if it's accepted wisdom, like almost the inversion and clothes sort of situation. And you know, in the years since Don came out with that revelation about parking, we've also seen other researchers tell often repeated stories, but in new ways, like in the book The color of law, which kind of exposed the weaponization of zoning as a tool for exclusion and racism. And so these kinds of things are worth questioning, like particularly zoning and comprehensive plan, goals, objectives and policies and so on. These are not handed down by the Almighty as eternal truths. They were. They're creatures of humankind, and they can be altered. And so let's talk about what's wrong just for a second, so that people might not know this about what's wrong with parking the way it's generally practiced. In order to create the ITE parking Generation Standards, which even the ITE has itself distanced itself from a bit in recent years, ite presidents writing new intros to their books, saying, This is just one tool. Don't take this as gospel, for example. I think tells you everything you know. They would look for a given land use and then try to find examples of it that were as isolated as possible so as not to imply any mixed data or, you know, contaminated data. So if they wanted to give you a parking generation rate for retail store, for example, they would look for a large quantity of retail that was sitting as by itself as possible, out in the middle of a corn field or a cow pasture, and as big as possible, like the target. Well, so the target in a cow pasture with nothing else around, cited and built with the assumption that all trips to and from it must be made by automobile, and then they would go there on the busiest day of the year. This is they'd be the researchers who would look for these examples and measure how many cars were in the parking lots, and compare that to the number of square feet, and spit back out a ratio of the required number of parking spaces per square feet of retail store. And when you go back, and this is what Don revealed in this book, and look at the actual examples that were researched to create that manual. Sometimes they only had one or two examples. I
Chuck Marohn 8:24
remember one chart an example in Texas. It was just a dot
Victor Dover 8:29
Exactly. So you got an example in Massachusetts that doesn't, isn't relevant at all for for Atlanta and and, yeah, that would be the only example. And so these national standards were created essentially by asphalt mongers. For asphalt mongers, just like the programs that measure level of service and traffic congestion, it's very similar. Actually, the tools are designed to spit out an answer, which is you need bigger, more and bigger parking lots, and you need wider and faster roads in order to deal with the fact that the computer models or the standards manuals said you do this, the computer may be doing basically, and I think Don's zeroed in on parking as a very specific topic. And it can kind of be me and several others of us to it. I was always thinking, I need to write a book about parking, damn it. Because, you know, I didn't get to it before he did. His book is so good. We don't need to do to do it now. But I think others, Patrick siegman and others have have, we're already looking at this topic. When Don's book came out, it was like a eureka moment. And so, you know, in the years after local government started citing that manual, the parking generation manual, just like they were citing the the trip generation manual over at the DMT, you know, people began to realize there was something wrong. Like, for example, mixed use places seem to have a. Inherent ability to share parking spaces. And in the most elementary examples, an office building sitting next to a church. As those two uses have demand for parking different times a day, right for different days the week. And so it was thought, Well, maybe you could share their parking spaces. Years and years ago, Martin Ashman associates, which is been succeeded by with several firms that acquired each other since then, did research for the Urban Land Institute and created something called the ULI shared parking analysis. What that essentially means is, if you're building a mixed use, walkable place, don't use the it trip generation manual, or what's in the zoning as a given, because you can put all this information into a big computer spreadsheet and it will spit out a factor by which that number in the book other book is wrong, and I'll tell you, you can discount it 35% or what I mean. And it's a cumbersome thing to do. So in our early codes, we would write shared parking is permitted use the ULI shared parking analysis in lieu of standard things. And even that was coming back with such conservative answers like that, really nothing like our Fort Myers Beach, real world example that we started to question that to and later we would write, the parking solution must be explained in a rationale by a competent professional that is deemed acceptable to the plan efficiently. So it was that's a little bit like, let's make a deal. And I was, I was never happy with that, either. What did we eventually arrive at after reading all Don's research, eliminate minimum parking requirements. They make no sense. They work against every good outcome. They're not needed, and they in general, will cause us to push land uses farther apart and pave more of the world than is necessary. So if you can question that bedrock, foundational thing, you can question all of it like, do we need to really separate land uses? Do we really need to regulate by the number of square feet the minimum housing standard, which is essentially a vestige of Jim Crow, and it occurs in all kinds of zoning documents. There's a lot of stuff that we can deregulate,
Chuck Marohn 12:11
and I want to put him in the historical context too, because it feels like this idea that the emperor has no clothes, right? Like you have these code books, and oh my gosh, they look technical and scientific. And all of a sudden, here's this guy with tons of credibility, a lot of charisma, very I feel like the thing that was the most devastatingly powerful about him is that he did not come across as an advocate. He came across as like a shrewd I'm a professor. I'm looking at the numbers. Here's what I've concluded, if the emperor has no clothes, to me this, this cracked the code on many things, but it did it at a time when, in particular, the new urbanism, which is where I met you, the new urbanism, was kind of at this point where, all right, we're out on the ground. We're doing this stuff, we've convinced ourselves. But do we have credibility with the broader world? How did Donald Shoup Elevate, I think, the whole conversation of city building simultaneously? Well, I
Victor Dover 13:15
wrote last week, in my little note to company his obit, I wrote that he added a sheen of professional respectability to the new urbanists that we had that had alluded us prior to that time. I think that's true, but he did it two ways. One is, he knew his stuff. He can actually point to the research. Could pull out the piles of papers, show you the charts and graphs and and it just withstands scrutiny. So it was very solid. And so as a result, he didn't need to pump it up or exaggerate it or be flamboyant about it. He was so this is the other side. He was modest. Don was an approachable person who was just a regular person. And you know, one of the things that I noticed about him and others have noticed as well, is that he was curious about you. He was in a conversation with him as professionals, or he was talking with one of his students. He was always asking the other researcher, the other practitioner, the student, the other person, the regulator, about their work, about what they were curious about. And I think that's a great model for leadership, because he didn't start with, look at me, and I have a big fat book, and I'm, you know, I'm increasingly famous with every passing moment. Because that's certainly true with Don he became a superstar. He never lost that humility and interest in other people, and I think that may be just as important. He preceded myself and Joe Cole as recipient of the seaside prize. And I didn't know that. I didn't get to go to Don's seaside Prize award ceremony, but I did watch the. His commentary. You know, when he addressed the audience, he had made a beautiful speech, and it was and the line that really stuck with me was along the lines of, I'm paraphrasing, if you really care about something, and you think you're right about that, and you think you could help the world by pursuing it, then pursue it. It was a, just a really nice life lesson here, just a couple of years before he passed away, saying to the world, My gift to You is a parking my gift to you is you should be inquisitive, and you should keep investigating that thing that seems to you like the emperor has no clothes. In the story, in the fairy tale about the Emperor having no clothes, it's a little child that is willing to point it out, because they're not trained by society and school politeness or whatever it is to
Chuck Marohn 15:55
they're not constrained disguise. Those are and, yeah, yeah,
Victor Dover 16:00
they just, they'll just blurt it out, because the truth is the truth and and so that humility, it Don's, and that inquisitive nature is is kind of like that he was, I think he was also persuaded, persuasive, partly because he was so non threatening. I mean, you could just have a conversation with a guy. I watched him, who worked together on a little effort in Fairfax County, Virginia, and I watched him address the questions that were coming from elected officials and planning commissioners staffers. Fairfax is a big jurisdiction, but it's a suburban one edge city. You may know Tyson's Corner, that area that's Fairfax County, and even that as a result of Don's easy to easy to hear way. Making progress. They're making progress on diminishing those minimum parking requirements. He also, he said, more than just get rid of parking. He said, manage parking like you mean it like it's a deliberate thing. Dynamic Pricing parking benefit districts. If you're going to collect money in order to get in order to shape behaviors around parking, then you should use that money for the benefit of the neighborhood which is being collected those there's all that in there too.
Chuck Marohn 17:19
I hadn't met him until recently, but years ago. And I mean, this was Chuck Marone. Was nobody running this small little blog in the middle of nowhere. And I sent him an email, and I said, Hey, would you be willing to come on my podcast and talk about parking? And I just assumed this is a huge figure of a man. There's no way. Not only did he come on, but he had taken the time to know who I was, what I was talking about. He knew all about strong towns. He was compliment. He went out of his way needlessly, to be kind complimentary. It was, it was one of those moments that, you know, in a young person's life when you're kind of going along and someone looks down and is like, yeah, you're doing great. Like, keep going. It was one of those moments that I will, I will never forget. It was like, Okay, if this giant of a man is saying, like, what you're doing is worthy, like, Okay, I better. I better kick it down. I better take this seriously. How did you see him encourage others? Because I do feel like I saw this from him multiple times. Then after my first interaction,
Victor Dover 18:37
Don was probably well into his 60s before he was a well known national figure. So he, while he taught decades worth of students, and he did a lot of research so on, he essentially toiled in obscurity on a national level for the vast majority of his career, and then a kind of late in life, or as he was, you know, moving toward next chapters, he had the breakthrough. And it wasn't just that he was discovered and he got famous. I mean, that he that it all kind of came together for him, what he was learning from the research that he had done and and, but I think because he did this work without a lot of, you know, reinforcement from others and support or any kind of fanfare, yeah, yeah, any kind of Fanfare for so long that when he met, when he met people who were, you know, trying to bring forward something new on their own, he could relate to that. And he would, and this was really encouraging to myself to Bill spackowski, to a lot of other people, including the founders of the parking reform network and that ever growing cadre we call the shoe pistas, who was which is basically his many followers on Facebook. Yeah. I think a lot of a lot of people learned Don's story and realize, you know, hey, maybe it's not. I haven't made a mistake by doggedly persisting on this thing that seemed important to me when I was in my 20s, in my 30s, hoping that someday others would also get it. And for me, I mentioned something very personal. In 1992 we did a plan for our own town, downtown, South Miami Plan, and a lot of good things came out of that. But this was done right after Hurricane Andrew, so the you know, we lost a lot of roofs, and everybody was kind of on the road, so we had a lot of boarded up storefronts, and it wasn't clear like what was going to happen to our region or happen to our little Main Street in our little town. So we worked up a new plan with a lot of public participation. We worked up a new code, and we got that early form based code installed, and at the time, I recommended to the elected officials to delete minimum parking requirements in the downtown. I said, you know, if this makes this place, we got a metro rail station, why do we need this? It doesn't do anything but, but cut down on the creative ways people can use their property to achieve all our objectives, like getting housing and and, you know, abundant happiness. So they looked at me like I had just said I saw a UFO, and that was the, that was the expression on their faces, get rid of minimum parking requirements. Eventually they were persuaded to dial them down. But they had a complicated formula, kind of like you all eyes, shared parking analysis, and that was the best we could do that day. And in 2015 was a long time later. Right in 2015 after reading Don troops book the city commissioners with Mayor Stoddard, leadership repealed the minimum parking requirements in downtown. So a 1992 idea that basically died on the vine, or so I thought, right, right came roaring back years later, yeah, because Don shoot put that tool in front of the decision makers. So that was very confirming, because we also felt like some of what we were doing in the early days, before New Urbanism had a name, was, you know, falling on deaf ears and not it might never take root. And even after the New Urbanism got a name, we kind of wondered, will it ever make more, make enough of a difference? So yeah, of course, then New Urbanism got noticed, but it can take a while. So I guess the lesson is, if you suggest an idea in 1992 don't give up on it, because it might just come back and 20 plus years later, how do
Chuck Marohn 22:50
you how do you think Don would want us all to continue his work today? Because I feel like it's, it's more than parking but I I feel like there is a exclamation point on i i love boating him, and I feel like the words just roll off the tongue because he described his approach to parking so beautifully. What do you think he would he would say to all of us doing this work?
Victor Dover 23:17
You said it in your question. How do you think he would like this to continue his work. The truth is that the work of applying his findings as is well underway, but we have lots to do. I think something like 1200 jurisdictions have greatly reduced or eliminated their minimum parking requirements in just the last few years. I think the best way to honor Don's legacy is to just keep doing that. Just get more of that done. And there are locations where they just are never gonna, or they say they're never gonna want to eliminate minimum parking requirements, and all they're willing to do is pick an area in which there they will dial them down from the utterly auto centric, conservative numbers that are in their existing zone. I'd say take it, you know, grab that and run with it, because if Don Shoup is right, they will learn that the world didn't come to an end. And I look out at the at the transit oriented development being built in many rapidly growing places, like like ours, like greater greater Miami, and I see something that makes me think of Don if you stand on the Metro Rail platform at, say, Brickell station, and you look off from five stories up in the air at the surrounding buildings that have sprouted up. This is the densest residential neighborhood south of Manhattan, so it there's a lot of people there, right? But the towers sit on top of parking podiums, and so up at the Fifth Level, you're only about halfway up these giant cubes of parking, and that are, you know, all around you when you're. Looking at the platform, and you realize that our transit oriented development is still parking oriented development, and that isn't necessarily just because of the regulations. It's because of bad habits and and assumptions about the market. And so we have to take what Don taught us and expand its relevance, not just to the regulators and elected officials, but to the banks and to developers and to the real estate brokers and to the customers, so we can actually have transit oriented developments that are just parking oriented development. Yeah, those would be good ways to honor Don's legacy,
Chuck Marohn 25:41
Victor Dover, thank you for taking the time. Nice to talk to you. We will do this again, and for all the listeners, I'm going to now replay. It was a it was a short interview, but I think it was from 2015 a little interview that I did with Donald. Shoot back one of our earliest Black Friday parkings. So enjoy. Hey,
Chuck Marohn 26:16
everybody this chuck Morone. He is a professor of urban planning at UCLA, the author of the book The high cost of free parking, I've got on the podcast today. Special guest Donald Shupe, Professor Shoup, welcome to the podcast. Well, thanks for the invitation. I'd like to ask you to give us some of the ways that free parking has a high cost.
Donald Shoup 26:38
Well, everybody wants to park free, including me and probably you. But the problem is that when we park free, the cost doesn't go away. The cost is still there of a parking structure or in a parking lot. If the driver doesn't pay for it, somebody else pays for it. That somebody ends up being everybody, even people who are too poor to own a car. So I'm not against free parking. What I do criticize are parking subsidies. A parking subsidy is a fossil fuel subsidy. It's a subsidy for people who use gasoline to get to the parking space and even even the parking spaces, if they're asphalt, they're made out of fossil fuels. I don't tell people that I oppose free parking, but I certainly do think that parking subsidies have a high cost. The one person who did try to estimate the the difference between the cost of just off street parking and what the drivers pay, found that the subsidy for off street parking is about between one and 4% of the gross national income. So that's about what we pay for Medicare. So I think that it's a huge amount of money that we spend for the parking subsidies that probably go to the wrong people. And the further problem is that if you parking a subsidized more people will drive rather than walk or bike or ride public transit or car pool. So it's not just that there's a lot of money spent on it, but it causes us to travel in the wrong way, or even too much. So I think the world would be a lot better off if you paid for your parking and I paid for mine.
Chuck Marohn 28:31
Why is it so important to get the price right? You know, you advocate for metering parking and charging for parking. Why is that such an important response to get the amount of parking right. Surveys
Donald Shoup 28:44
show that 99% of all automobile trips end up at a free parking space. It doesn't seem like this to most of us, especially if you live work at a university where people pay for parking, or in some parts of downtowns, but throughout the United States, most people expect to park free at the end of a trip, and that and that means that that we're trying to manage the transportation without the use of prices. We're trying to manage the whole parking supply without using prices. And there's no other part of the economy that we do that with that you couldn't imagine imagining a gasoline supply without charging for gasoline or the food supply or the housing supply or anything else. We have expensive housing for people and free parking for cars. So I think we have our priorities the wrong way around. The right way around would be to allow the price system to show drivers how much parking spaces cost. That is, if they park at a very expensive underground garage, the parking would be expensive. If they're out in a suburb and they park in on the street where there's nobody else parked there, the parking would be free. So. I think we would allow prices to influence also supply and the demand for parking. Because the parking is free, we've had to mismanage a lot of the rest of our society to prevent parking shortages. All new buildings have to become well supplied with parking. The parking requirements or are everywhere for everything, you know, you can't build a restaurant without 10 parking spaces per 1000 square feet, for example, which means the parking lot is seven times the size of the restaurant. It isn't just that the parking is free of the problem is what we have to do in response to all that free parking to make the system work at all. Because if we if we had free parking without all street parking requirements, then all the street parking would be congested. And of course, as you know, most curb parking is free in Manhattan, most of the curb parking is free. Prices are really essential for managing an economy. Except the Soviet Union, they tried to do without them. That didn't
Chuck Marohn 31:03
work out real well, right? What happens to a city? What have you seen happen when a city gets rid of their parking minimums and starts to put a real price on parking? What are some of the transformations that take place? Well, there
Donald Shoup 31:18
haven't been many American cities that have done this, a few have done it in their downtowns that they eliminate off street parking requirements or even put a cap on the amount of parking. Say that they limit the amount of parking a new building could have, and places like New York and Chicago and San Francisco have parking caps rather than minimum parking requirements in their downtowns, and places like LA and Houston and Phoenix and Detroit have minimum parking requirements. And I think we could see pretty easily where would you want to visit, what city would you like to be a tourist in, in the downtown right, say, for a commerce hall or concert hall, either one in downtown. We can look at the difference between San Francisco and LA. La has minimum parking requirements and San Francisco has parking caps, and La requires for a concert hall 50 times more parking than San Francisco allows as the maximum. So somebody's got to be wrong. And I think if you look at Downtown LA or downtown San Francisco, you say that LA has got a wrong right. So if you your question was, well, what happens when cities change their policies? I think that more cities are beginning to think that these minimum parking farms do a lot of harm. They raise the cost of housing, because the housing has to come with parking. They distort urban design. The village have to be built with a lot of parking inside them, on a podium or in the parking lot. They help pollute the air, because of all the cars coming to the parking spaces, they congest traffic. They increase fuel consumption, and now we have to worry about the increased carbon emissions, because there's a lot of carbon comes out of the cars on their way to the parking spaces. So I, you know, I've made these arguments in my book The high cost of free parking, and in other places, you know, I'm an urban planner, and I write, I go to planning conferences, and I've made these accusations, let's put it that way roundly, condemn the way cities are planned now, and I have never heard an urban planner saying that no minimum barking. Farms do not increase the cost of housing. They do not increase the cost of everything else. They do not increase traffic conditions, they do not increase air pollution, they do not increase carbon emissions. It's just silence. You know, I'm happy to debate anybody who wants to defend the way we do it, most of our planning for parking in the United States. But I think younger people are coming around to agree with me, planning students, and they understand that their planning education, the professors never have any instructions on how to set a parking requirement for a nail salon or a food store or animal grooming studio or anything else any of the hundreds of uses for which we have been with bargaining requirements. They have no instructions on how to do that because their professors don't know anything about it. All they learn as planning students is that minimum parking requirements get in the way of everything they want to do, like have affordable housing or transit oriented development or something like that. So I think as these younger people come into positions of influence, maybe they'll say, Well, look what London Did they say. Getting back to your question, what happens when we switch from minimums to maximums? London, like some other cities, converted from parking minimums to parking maximums, and the parking maximums were lower than the. Previous minimums. But when people looked at the results, they found that very few people ever built up to the maximum. But previously, almost everybody built at the minimum, and now, when they produced a had a new maximum and no minimums. The average parking supply the new development was half of the previous minimum. They didn't build up to the due maximum, but they built about half of the previous minimum, implying that the previous minimum was doubling the amount of parking. So I'm not against parking. I think that developments obviously should provide some parking for people who are willing to pay for it. But I think because we all want to park free, we've engineered a world, or planned a world, where almost everybody can park free. The most housing comes with parking bundled into the into the rent or into the purchase price. And it seems free you can park, seem like free anyway. Have to have the parking. And wherever you go, they have to have parking. So I think we have a sort of a Nirvana, Fools Paradise, where everybody parks free and everybody else's expense, you know, I think that's a mistake we've made. It is a fool's paradise. Everybody parks free and everybody else's expense. And we think it's a good idea, and we ought to plan our cities for that purpose.
Chuck Marohn 36:25
I do see sometimes politicians who hear your message and say, Yeah, this is what we should do, and we should do this because we also have these big budget shortfalls. And wouldn't this be a great way to raise revenue? There's some pitfalls there in terms of making this,
Donald Shoup 36:43
yeah, can you talk a little bit about that? How do you mean raise revenue? Okay,
Chuck Marohn 36:47
I'll give you a concrete example here in St Paul. I'm from Minnesota, and in Saint Paul right now, they've got some budget shortfalls, and one of the ways they're looking to solve the budget shortfall is we're going to increase the cost of parking. And, hey, we should do this anyway, because Professor Shoup says we should, and it makes a lot of sense, but I've heard you say there's some problems with doing that. There's some problems with using this as a budget fixing tool, right?
Donald Shoup 37:17
Yes, well, St Paul only got half of the message, and I think you should every city should charge the right price for current parking. Who could object to charging the right price? And by my right price, I mean the lowest price the city can charge and still leave one or two open spaces on every block, on both sides of the block, so wherever you go, you can see just what you want, and open space waiting for you. So nobody could say there's shortage of parking. And then cities that have done this, like LA and San Francisco, when they're downtowns, more prices went down than up, because you have to charge a different price at different times of the day, that if you have the same price all day long, it's also too high in the morning and too low in the afternoon. So when they began setting prices by not by a political judgment, but by looking at the data, it turned out that more prices went down because most parking was overpriced in the morning, so coffee shops or restaurants were losing business, or any store that was open in the morning was losing business. Now, St Paul wanted to put in parking me, just partly because there was a parking shortage as a Grand Avenue,
Chuck Marohn 38:30
yeah, Grand Avenue, yep. That is, yeah, that that's
Donald Shoup 38:33
right. I think they made a big mistake by saying we were doing it because the city needs the money. They actually counted the money in the next year's budget. So clearly they were taking money out of the neighborhood and spending it every place else. I don't think that's fair. What has been politically successful is if you went to Grand Avenue and said, We'll offer you these parking meters, but all of the meter revenue will go to pay your repair your sidewalks or to plow snow or to plant street trees or put in historic street lights and street furniture, or have added police protection, or whatever is your number one priority, something you would like to see done on Grand Avenue, but you don't have the money for it. Here's a way to pay for it. If you have the if you have the meters, you'll get all the improvements you want. If you don't have the meters, you won't get the meters, you won't get the improvements you want. And we'll run the meters just as long as there isn't is necessary to manage parking and say if the if the demand falls at 7pm then the price either goes down or becomes free at 7pm if the demand doesn't increase till 10am the price remains free until 10am so I think if they combine as a package, a package of prices and public services, the merchants of the property owners would begin to see it in a different way. It is totally different from saying we're going to give you parking meters, but we're going to take all the money. So I think it's pretty. Elementary the city made a mistake saying that we want the money and therefore we're going to put in parking meters. Of course, that's going to be unpopular, but in cities that do offer meters and public services as a package, they're very welcome. There was one city in California. I visited, you know, I have a second life, going around and talking about parking and cities Well, I think they ought to do and this was Ventura, California, and I said, if you put in the mirrors, it would pay for whatever this neighborhood wants. They were going to pay for street sweeping and additional street furniture. And afterwards, I stayed for a few days and went to a number of restaurants. And every time I went into a restaurant, somebody, the manager or head waiter who had been to my talk came up said, Oh, I love your ideas, Professor Shub. And I said, Well, what do you like about it? Do you think it would reduce traffic congestion or air pollution? They looked at me as well as the dumbest person on earth, and they said, No, we want the money. If you hadn't offered them the money, they wouldn't have wanted the meters. But an interesting side effect that I think probably is occurring elsewhere is that when they put the meters in, they had to have enforcement officers. So they got police interns. They call them Police Cadets. People would want to be police officers, but they can't get in without being an intern. Well, they hired them to enforce the meters and be ambassadors for the area, to show how to use the meters and guide people around. And they were costumed as police officers, because they really were sort of like police officers, and the crime rate fell by half just because there were uniformed officers walking on the street to manage the meters. And the further thing that they did was that they used the Wi Fi to connect the meters to City Hall to validate credit cards, so they adjust prices up or down remotely. You don't have to touch the meter to change the prices. And the prices are different at different times of day. And they realized that there's not that much use of the Wi Fi, so they opened up the Wi Fi to everybody in the metered area, and now the restaurants and the coffee shops all abandoned their contract with at&t or Verizon to provide Wi Fi in their coffee shops, is, whenever anybody opens a laptop, they get Wi Fi, free, free Wi Fi courtesy of the parking service. So I think if around the world everybody begins to identify parking meters with free Wi Fi, they'll say, I see what you mean. And the people who don't own cars will benefit. All the merchants will benefit, and the customers will benefit. And it really doesn't cost anything extra. You just have to increase the size of the router on the there's a router on light poles connected to the power grid. Increase the size of the router. I think it'll it'll lead to a change in the way we think about Parker, if, if we identify it with free Wi Fi, is
Chuck Marohn 43:10
there any difference between, I mean, I know there's a big difference between, like, a Manhattan and a small town, but in terms of your insights on parking, and the cost of parking is, is there a different kind of approach you would take in a smaller, mid sized city than you would in a large city. Every
Donald Shoup 43:27
city thinks is unique. I'm sure St Paul thinks it's unique. This is different from Minneapolis and different from Osceola or any other little town nearby. I think most cities are very much alike when it comes to parking. If you have a parking problem and there's a shortage of parking on Main Street in a small city, that's the same as the parking shortage on Grand Avenue in St Paul and you could do the same solution. It just means there won't be nearly so many parking meters in the small city, and they won't charge as high a price, but you have to manage parking. And I think when you go to older cities, that's what I was telling you about in California, Ventura, California had a it had a beautiful, old 19th century Main Street, but it was in tough shape, you know, and needed a lot of public spending to improve it. And I think the meters can help there. And they didn't have any meters other everybody complained about a parking shorts or a lot of traffic on the streets. And as soon as they put in the parking meters and set the price, you know, so for one or two open spaces, almost all of the traffic congestion disappeared, because most of those cars were hunting for a free parking space. So I think a small town can benefit as well. It's just that there won't be as many spaces that have a charge. It'll solve the problem in a big city or a small city, some of the biggest cities like no Amsterdam does a great job, or London. Them does a great job. They have to charge a high price to create some some vacancies, but they do, they can do it a lot of good with the money they perceive. I've got
Chuck Marohn 45:10
one last question for you, and I appreciate you taking the time. It seems like for a while you had to have felt like a voice in the wilderness, and now it really feels like there's a lot of momentum around these ideas and that your insights are showing up in more and more places. They're becoming more and more mainstream. Give us a little bit of your perspective on the genesis of these ideas and where you think we're at today and where you think we're going to be in a short period of time. Well,
Donald Shoup 45:40
I think economists have recommended the right price for curb parking for a very long time, but it hasn't got much traction, because nobody wants to pay for parking. I think one of the key items in making this idea popular and discussable, and I think successful is to use the meter money to pay for services on the meter blocks, and what St Paul didn't offer to do. So I think some cities are getting just half of the message that we ought to get the price right, and they don't get the other half of the message is to make it politically popular and really useful, you have to spend the money in a very flamboyant way on the meter Street, very ostentatious. You put signs on the parking meter saying your meter money makes a difference in Pasadena, or turning small change into big change, and then showing its first street cleaning and sidewalk repair and tree planting and so that everybody knows that the they can see the media money at work, so that they can see the meter meters are working for them rather than against them. So I think as soon as that idea becomes just as popular as idea of charging the right price, I think the these ideas will will spread faster, and it's it's contrary to what most cities have done in the past, but because most meter money disappears into the general fund, that's why we have so few parking meters, that that most parking is free, and most, most current parking is free in most cities. And I think that if we learn how to recycle the parking revenue to improve the neighborhood that is where the charges are that then I well, I'll go overboard here. I think if we get the price of current parking right, if we spend the money to pay for public services on the meter streets, and if we remove these awful off street parking requirements, I think many cities will enter into a golden age, because there's so much money. The land is so valuable, that is worth so much, that value could go to improve our cities so much, and the minimum parking requirements do so much damage if we could get all three things right, getting the price right, for parking right, the distribution of the revenue, right, and get rid of minimal parking requirements, I think we'd see and all over the world. Let's put it that way. I'm kind of ambitious that I've spoken all over the world and and many countries say, like China, they're more receptive than they are here, because fewer people own cars, and it's quite obvious that the only the car drivers will be paying that the car drivers are richer. So it's not unfair. That obviously unfair to have free parking when only a few rich people own cars, but if this gets around, I think that these ideas will be successful all over the world,
Chuck Marohn 48:49
China, they're better capitalists than we are sometimes. But this isn't capitalism. This
Donald Shoup 48:54
is a market. I think that the government sets the prices. The government owns the parking spaces and the government spends the revenue. So it's more like socialism than capitalism. It's like successful socialism. Yeah, there's an enormous amount of very valuable land that the cities own, and it's squandering. The results is a very is really mismanaging. And I think the example that you showed in St Paul as an example of this mismanagement that the, I think the transportation experts say that parking meters would, would prevent employees from parking all day long in front of their restaurants and complaining about that there's no parking for customers, and it would provide a lot of revenue for things that the neighborhood wants, even to build an off street parking structure, if that's their first priority. But it rarely is, because parking is so expensive, they'd rather have clean sidewalks the new parking structure and. So I think that when we get parking right, that cities will will write themselves. Professor
Chuck Marohn 50:09
Donald shoot saving the world one parking spot at a time. I appreciate your ambition. You've long been someone that I've deeply admired, and I thank you for taking the time today to chat with us. No Thanks for calling me. Thanks everybody. And remember Black Friday parking. Go out, take your photos, share them and use the tag. Black Friday parking will help change the world, one parking space at a time, just like Don Shu thanks everybody. Take care and keep doing what you Can to build a strong tag.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
“The High Cost of Free Parking” (Amazon).
Victor Dover (LinkedIn).
Chuck Marohn (Substack).
Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.