Ben read this book almost 5 years ago and raved about it. I’ve gotten to periodically hear about parking facts and ideas from Ben over the past 5 years and had listened to an interview of the author Donald Shoup but hadn’t actually read the book for myself. I’ll admit I was a bit scared off by an 800-page book about parking. While I do like learning about urban planning, I’m not nearly as much of an enthusiast as Ben so didn’t think I’d share the same appreciation for 800 pages about parking.
But I was very wrong - I found myself engrossed in the pages. While parking might seem like a bit of a dry topic, it is anything but. I didn’t grasp quite how much of an influence parking has on our towns and cities until I read this book. The main takeaways from this book are that we should remove off-street parking minimum requirements and charge market prices for curb parking. Shoup offers tons of supporting evidence and arguments for how these changes will improve our cities and lives. The writing is pretty repetitive at times, which can be a bit annoying to read, but I think Shoup probably just wanted to be very clear and drive home his points.
I found it frustrating to learn that many off-street parking requirements for various land uses are quite arbitrary. For example, if referencing the leading data used for setting parking requirements in the 1990s, the number of required spots per square foot of a fast-food restaurant with a drive-through window is chosen from a line through 7 data points with an R squared value of 0.069. All data points are based on peak demand for free parking at suburban locations with poor public transit and walking accessibility. These guidelines then dictate how our cities grow and change.
“The requirements drive businesses out of established areas and - most infuriatingly - they do it for no logical reason. Why, after all, does a bicycle shop “need” three times more parking spaces than a furniture store? The answer is anyone’s guess, but these nonsensical requirements distort the land market in wholly unintended ways.”
Different cities also often have very different parking requirements, which I found interesting to learn about. Take the parking guidelines for concert halls in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
“For a downtown concert hall, Los Angeles requires, as the minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum … Los Angeles borrowed the money to finance the $50,000-per-space parking garage, with the debt to be repaid from the expected revenues.”
That brings us to the high cost of parking lots. I had no idea how expensive parking spots are - I naively thought they’d be fairly cheap since the design is pretty simple and all. Given the high cost, it is crazy that developers are often required to spend so much money to build parking lots and structures to serve restaurants, stores, and other businesses, and that this cost is then just bundled into the cost of food and other goods. This greatly subsidizes driving and hurts people who don’t drive, who are often lower income.
“Although 8 percent of all households in the U.S. do not own a car, they pay for parking in the form of higher prices for everything they buy. Imposing hidden costs on the entire population to subsidize parking takes money from the poorest renters to subsidize richer homeowners.”
“Because off-street parking requirements hide the cost of parking in higher prices for everything else, solo driving appears much cheaper than it really is, and the result is massive overuse of both cars and parking.”
“As a result, drivers paid somewhere between 4 percent and 1 percent of the total cost of parking. The other 96 to 99 percent of the cost of parking was hidden in higher prices for everything else.”
Parking requirements also have a huge effect on housing affordability.
“If requiring one space per apartment in Oakland increased housing costs by 18 percent and reduced density by 30 percent, imagine how requiring 3.5 parking spaces per apartment must increase the cost and reduce the supply of housing in Los Angeles.”
While this first part of the book left me feeling disheartened that much of the U.S. has been developed such that cars dominate and driving is the only reasonable way to get around, the remainder of the book left me feeling much more hopeful. Shoup discusses the effect of cruising for parking and how charging market prices for curb parking nearly eliminates cruising, greatly reducing congestion and pollution. Charging the right price for curb parking such that around 15% of spaces in a given area are unoccupied makes a lot of sense and seems like it benefits everyone. Shoup elaborates on many good uses of meter revenue, including a promising example in Old Pasadena in Los Angeles. There are lots of ways that we can leverage parking pricing and policies to improve our cities, and it seems like we are generally moving in a good direction. Since this book was written 20 years ago, many cities have made parking changes such as removing parking minimums.
I’ll leave you with one last quote.
“Parking is important where the place isn’t important. In a place like Faneuil Hall in Boston it’s amazing how far people are willing to walk. In a dull place, you want a parking space right in front of where you’re going.”