Donald Shoup, Who Made Parking an Entertaining Subject, Dies at 86

New York Times

19-02-2025

Donald Shoup, a professor of urban studies whose provocative and occasionally amusing 734-page treatise on the economics of parking sparked reforms in thousands of cities, helping reduce traffic, create green space and make cities more walkable, died on Feb. 6 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
The cause was a stroke, his wife, Pat Shoup, said.
Professor Shoup was an intellectual hero to urbanists. His disciples called themselves the Shoupistas — their Facebook group has more than 8,100 followers — and referred to their bearded guru as Shoup Dogg, after the rapper Snoop Dogg.
Professor Shoup, who bicycled to his office at the University of California, Los Angeles, in khaki pants and a tweed sport coat, did not rap. But he managed to take a dry subject — parking — and turn it into an entertaining one.
'Many of us,' he liked to remind conference audiences, 'were probably even conceived in a parked car.'
In his 2005 book, 'The High Cost of Free Parking,' a hefty tome that legions of urban studies students have lugged around to the detriment of their spinal cords, Professor Shoup explained the problems that city planners created by providing too much free or underpriced parking after automobile use soared in the early 20th century.
He liked to quote George Costanza, the bald, neurotic 'Seinfeld' character: 'My father didn't pay for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody. It's like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?'
To Professor Shoup, that quote showed the economic calculus that drivers make: Instead of paying for a pricey garage, they are tempted to keep looking and waiting for an elusive (and cheaper) spot to become magically available — wasting energy and creating traffic and air pollution in the process.
'The curb spaces are like fish in the ocean: a parking space belongs to anyone who occupies it, but if you leave it, you lose it,' Professor Shoup wrote. 'Where all the curb spaces are occupied, turnover leads to a few vacancies over time, but drivers must cruise to find a space vacated by a departing motorist.'
As cities grew, free or inexpensive parking was regarded as an inalienable right. City planners mandated that developers provide off-street parking for residential and commercial projects, incentivizing driving over other forms of transportation. It was a waste of valuable land, Professor Shoup noted, that contributed to urban sprawl.
He drew on the board game Monopoly to illustrate his point.
'In Monopoly, free parking is only one space out of 40 on the board,' he wrote. 'If Monopoly were played under our current zoning laws, however, free parking would be on every space. Parking lots might cover half of Marvin Gardens, and Park Place would have underground parking.'
The problem would mushroom.
'Free parking would push buildings farther apart, increase the cost of houses and hotels, and permit fewer of them to be built at all,' Professor Shoup wrote. 'Smart players would soon leave Atlantic City behind and move to a larger board that allowed them to build on cheaper land in the suburbs. Connecticut Avenue would not be redeveloped with hotels, the railroads would disappear and every piece on the board would move more slowly.'
He proposed a three-pronged solution: Ban off-street parking requirements, letting developers (and market forces) dictate how much parking to supply; employ dynamic pricing for on-street parking, raising prices when demand is highest; and spend the resulting increased revenue from meters to spruce up sidewalks, encouraging more walking.
'The High Cost of Free Parking' was widely praised, especially for turning parking into a riveting read.
'When I told a group of transportation colleagues about the book, they expressed both disbelief and sympathy — how could there be that much to say about parking, let alone anything interesting?' Susan Handy, a professor of environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, wrote in The Journal of Planning Education and Research. 'But as Shoup adeptly shows, parking is interesting, and it is hugely important.'
The book captured the attention of progressive policymakers and grass roots activists, who began pushing for cities big and small to adopt Professor Shoup's ideas.
'Don is treated in some places like Einstein, like he has discovered the theory of relativity,' Bonnie Nelson, a founder of Nelson\Nygaard, a transportation consulting firm, told The Los Angeles Times in 2010.
More than 3,000 cities have adopted some or all of Professor Shoup's recommendations, according to the Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit that champions the book's ideas.
'The size and breadth of this book gives it authority,' Tony Jordan, the group's founder, said in an interview. 'You can literally stand on it when you make an argument.'
Donald Curran Shoup was born on Aug. 24, 1938, in Long Beach, Calif. His parents were Francis Elliott Shoup Jr., a captain in the U.S. Navy, and Muriel Shoup, who ran the home.
When Donald was 2, the Shoups moved to Honolulu, where his father was stationed.
'The only thing I'm famous for is that I was living in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was attacked,' he recalled in an interview with the American Planning Association. 'So I think everything has been very calm ever since. If you start with Pearl Harbor as your first memory, life seems very easy.'
He studied electrical engineering and economics at Yale and then did his graduate studies there in economics, receiving his doctorate in 1968.
After teaching at the University of Michigan, he joined U.C.L.A.'s department of urban planning in 1974.
Back then, parking wasn't exactly in vogue as a scholarly subject. He covered his office door with cartoons about it.
'Because most academics cannot imagine anything less interesting to study than parking, I was a bottom feeder with little competition for many years,' Professor Shoup wrote in 'The High Cost of Free Parking.' 'But there is a lot of food down there, and many other academics have joined in what is now almost a feeding frenzy.'
He was married for 59 years to Ms. Shoup, who helped edit his writing. She is his only immediate survivor.
Professor Shoup loved being called Shoup Dogg, she recalled, and even used the nickname as his website address.
'He would do absolutely anything,' she said, 'to get people to pay attention to the important issue of parking.'