Right pricing: The parking reformation

Parking visionary Donald Shoup argues that although parking may appear a mundane subject it is at the heart of many issues that people care passionately about, such as affordable housing, climate change, traffic congestion and urban design

Professor Donald Shoup, the US academic widely regarded as the world’s leading thinker on parking issues, is the editor of a new book of essays looking at the relationship between cars and cities.

Parking and the City is a follow-up to Shoup’s 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking, which showed how city parking policies often prohibit walkability, damage the economy, raise housing costs, and penalise people who cannot afford or choose not to own a car. In his now classic text, Shoup recommended three parking reforms: remove off-street parking requirements; charge the right prices for on-street parking; and spend parking meter revenue to improve public services on the metered streets.

The 51 essays collected in Parking and the City report on the progress that cities have made in adopting these three reforms. The chapters are a mix of pieces by Professor Shoup and contributions by academics and parking practitioners. They address issues such as: the planning and pricing of on-street and off-street parking; disabled parking policy; employee parking schemes; developing environmentally sensitive management approaches; and the development of ‘Parking Benefit Districts’.

Over the past 20 years Donald Shoup’s ideas have been adopted by a growing army of planning and transport experts, academics and practitioners, sometimes called ‘Shoupistas’, across the USA and internationally.

Shoup is currently Distinguished Research Professor of Urban Planning in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. His research has focussed on how parking policies affect cities, the economy and the environment. His research on employer-paid parking led to the passage of California’s parking cash-out law, and to changes in the US Internal Revenue Code to encourage parking cash out. Shoup is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, an Honorary Professor at the Beijing Transportation Research Center, and the editor of ACCESS. In 2015, the American Planning Association gave Shoup its highest honour, the National Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer.

Parking and the City

Parking is far too important not to study, so settle down and read this extract from  Parking and the City...

At the dawn of the automobile age, suppose Henry Ford and John D Rockefeller had asked how city planners could increase the demand for cars and gasoline.

Consider three options. First, divide the city into separate zones (housing here, jobs there, shopping somewhere else) to create travel between the zones. Second, limit density to spread everything apart and further increase travel. Third, require ample off-street parking everywhere so cars will be the easiest and cheapest way to travel.

US cities have unwisely adopted these three car-friendly policies. Separated land uses, low density, and ample free parking create drivable cities but prevent walkable neighbourhoods. Although city planners did not intend to enrich the automobile and oil industries, their plans have shaped our cities to suit our cars.

Cars themselves have also reshaped our cities. As John Keats wrote in The Insolent Chariots (1958): “The automobile changed our dress, manners, social customs, vacation habits, the shape of our cities, consumer purchasing patterns, and positions in intercourse.” Many of us were probably even conceived in a parked car.

Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are particularly ill advised because they directly subsidise cars. We drive to one place to do one thing, and then to another place to do another thing, and then finally drive a long way back home, parking free almost everywhere. Off-street parking requirements are a fertility drug for cars.

In The High Cost of Free Parking, which the American Planning Association published in 2005, I argued that parking requirements subsidise cars, increase traffic congestion, pollute the air, encourage sprawl, increase housing costs, degrade urban design, prevent walkability, damage the economy and penalise people who cannot afford a car. Since then, to my knowledge, no member of the planning profession has argued that parking requirements do not cause these harmful effects. 

Instead, a flood of recent research has shown they do cause these harmful effects. Parking requirements in zoning ordinances are poisoning our cities with too much parking.

On average, cars are parked 95% of their lives and driven only 5% (The High Cost of Free Parking, Appendix B). As a result, cities require an enormous amount of land for parking. In Los Angeles County, all the parking spaces that cities require cover at least 200 square miles of land, equivalent to 14% of the county’s incorporated land area and 1.4 times larger than the 140 square miles dedicated to the roadway system.

Ultimately, parking requirements can make driving more difficult because all the cars engendered by the required parking spaces clog the roads and congest traffic.

Los Angeles has more parking spaces per square mile than any other city on Earth (The High Cost of Free Parking, pages 161-65), and, according to the INRIX 2016 Global Traffic Scorecard, Los Angeles also has worse traffic congestion than any other city on Earth.

Despite all the harm off-street parking requirements cause, they are almost an established religion in city planning. One should not criticise anyone else’s religion, but when it comes to parking requirements I’m a protestant and I believe city planning needs a reformation

Three parking reforms

Reform is difficult because parking requirements don’t exist without a reason. If on-street parking is free, removing off-street parking requirements will overcrowd the on-street parking and everyone will complain. Therefore, to distill 800 pages of The High Cost of Free Parking into three bullet points, I recommend three parking reforms that can improve cities, the economy, and the environment:

• Remove off-street parking requirements: Developers and businesses can then decide how many parking spaces to provide for their customers.
• Charge the right prices for on-street parking: The right prices are the lowest prices that will leave one or two open spaces on each block, so there will be no parking shortages. Prices will balance the demand and supply for on-street parking spaces.
• Spend the parking revenue to improve public services on the metered streets: If everybody sees their meter money at work, the new public services can make demand-based prices for on-street parking politically popular.

Each of these three policies supports the other two. Spending the meter revenue to improve neighbourhood public services can create the necessary political support to charge the right prices for kerb parking. If cities charge the right prices for kerb parking to produce one or two open spaces on every block, no one can say there is a shortage of on-street parking. If there is no shortage of on-street parking, cities can then remove their off-street parking requirements. Finally, removing off-street parking requirements will increase the demand for on-street parking, which will increase the revenue to pay for public services.

Right pricing is also called:

• demand-based pricing (because the prices are based on parking demand)
• performance pricing (because the parking performs better)
• variable or dynamic pricing (because the prices vary)
• market-rate pricing (because prices balance the demand and supply for kerb parking).

I use these five terms interchangeably.

The goals of Parking and the City

Parking is the Cinderella of transportation. Universities preach equality but they have a rigid internal status hierarchy, including the status of research topics. Global and national affairs have the most prestige, state government is a big step down, and local government seems parochial. Even within the unglamorous world of local government, parking occupies the lowest rung on the status ladder. Because most academics cannot imagine anything less interesting to study than parking, I was a bottom feeder with little competition for many years. But there is a lot of food down there, and many other academics have joined in what is now almost a feeding frenzy. Parking is far too important not to study.

The 51 chapters in Parking and the City summarise recent academic research on parking. Several practitioners have also contributed chapters that explain their experience with charging market prices for on-street parking, dedicating the meter revenue to pay for public services, and removing off-street parking requirements. The results show that parking is an important policy issue, not merely a regulatory detail. Parking affects almost everything and almost everything affects parking.

The most emotional topic in transportation

Most people consider parking a personal issue, not a policy question. When it comes to parking, rational people quickly become emotional and staunch conservatives turn into ardent communists. Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for making snap judgments about urgent fight-or-flight issues, such as how to avoid being eaten. The reptilian cortex is said to govern instinctive behaviour involved in aggression, territoriality and ritual display – all important issues in parking.

Parking clouds the minds of reasonable people. Analytic faculties seem to shift to a lower level when one thinks about parking. Some strongly support market prices – except for parking. Some strongly oppose subsidies – except for parking. Some abhor planning regulations – except for parking. Some insist on rigorous data collection and statistical tests – except for parking.

This parking exceptionalism has impoverished our thinking about parking policies, and ample free parking is seen as an ideal that planning should produce. If drivers paid the full cost of their parking, it would seem too expensive, so we ask someone else to pay for it. But a city where everyone happily pays for everyone else’s free parking is a fool’s paradise.

Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his research integrating psychology and economics, summarised some of this research in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He examined two modes of thought. Fast thinking is instinctive, emotional and subconscious, while slow thinking is logical, calculating and conscious. It’s hard to be rational about an emotional subject, but when thinking about parking, we should slow down.

I hope Parking and the City will convince readers that parking is worth taking seriously. Few people are interested in parking itself, so I always try to show how parking affects whatever people do care strongly about, such as affordable housing, climate change, economic development, public transportation, traffic congestion and urban design. For example, parking requirements reduce the supply and increase the price of housing. Parking subsidies lure people into cars from public transportation, bicycles or their own two feet. Cruising for underpriced kerb parking congests traffic, pollutes the air and creates greenhouse gases. Do people really want free parking more than affordable housing, clean air, walkable neighbourhoods, good urban design and a more sustainable planet?

Recognising that our misguided parking policies block progress toward many goals that people care deeply about – from providing affordable housing to slowing global warming – may spark a planning reformation. Reforms in planning for parking may be the simplest, cheapest, quickest, and most politically feasible way to achieve many important policy goals.

Parking and the City, edited by Donald Shoup, is published by Routledge