Donald Shoup: Saving the world one parking space at a time

Professor Donald Shoup revealed how reforming parking policy could transform the way in which cities work

Professor Donald Shoup, the US academic widely regarded as the world’s leading thinker on parking issues, has passed away.

His death on 6 February 2025, at the age of 86, was marked by obituaries both in newspapers, influential transport journals and urban planning websites. This was a testament to the renown of an academic who, through the unlikely medium of parking, had a far-reaching effect on transport and city planning policy across the globe. Shoup’s legacy is evident in the numerous cities that have adopted his recommendations, transforming urban landscapes to prioritise people over vehicles.

Shoup was professor emeritus of urban planning in the Department of Urban Planning at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focused on parking policy and its impact on urban planning, sustainability, and economic development. Shoup argued that traditional parking requirements – such as mandatory minimum parking spaces for new developments – led to urban sprawl, congestion, and higher housing costs.

In his 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup recommended that cities should charge fair market prices for on-street parking, spend the revenue to benefit the metered areas, and remove off-street parking requirements. In 2018’s Parking and the City, Shoup and 45 other academic and practicing planners examined the results in cities that have adopted this approach. The influential Planetizm website placed him in the upper reaches of its ‘100 Most Influential Urbanists, Past and Present’. Topped by legendary New York urbanist Jane Jacobs, Shoup was ranked 6th in a Top 10 line-up featuring the likes of architect Le Corbusier, placemaker Jan Gehl and Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo.

Born on 24 August 24, 1938, in Long Beach, California, Shoup earned his PhD in economics from Yale University in 1968. He joined UCLA’s faculty in 1974, where he dedicated over four decades to teaching and research, profoundly influencing land-use planning and transportation. Shoup noticed that among those studying local government, everyone seemed to ignore two issues: parking and sewage. As he didn’t want to study sewage, he focussed on parking. “I thought I could find something useful if I studied what cars do for 95% of the time, which is park,” he would recall.

He soon became immersed in parking, an apparently mundane subject that he felt was actually at the heart of many issues that people care passionately about, such as affordable housing, climate change, traffic congestion and urban design.

The High Cost of Free Parking 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.  Over the course of 700 pages, Shoup showed how free street bays make parking and driving worse because low cost creates a scarcity of spaces that leads people to spend time and fuel circling blocks in misery. He argued that city planners’ efforts to solve this problem by mandating that homes and businesses provide more cheap parking only worsen the situation.

“Parking is free for us only in our role as motorist, not in our roles as taxpayer, employer, commuter, shopper, renter, as a homeowner,” he pointed out. “The cost of parking does not cease to exist just because the motorist doesn't pay for it.”

The book argues that cities make two crucial mistakes regarding parking. First, they fail to price the parking on their streets, and as a result kerb spaces fill up and become hard to find. Second, to solve the problem they have created on the street, cities force into existence, through their zoning codes, excessive amounts of parking off street. In combination, these two errors compound each other. They lead cities to quietly subsidise cars, increase traffic congestion, worsen air pollution, encourage sprawl, degrade urban design, damage the economy, raise housing costs, reduce walkability, accelerate global warming, and make urban life more difficult for people who do not drive.

Shoup’s proposed solution was to reverse these mistakes. He recommended three parking reforms:

• remove off-street parking requirements
• charge the right prices for on-street parking
• spend parking meter revenue to improve public services on the metered streets.

His seminal work led to widespread policy reforms, including the reduction of parking minimums and the implementation of dynamic pricing for on-street parking. 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’s ideas have been adopted by a growing army of planning and transport experts, academics and practitioners, known called ‘Shoupistas’. He was dubbed the “Sir Isaac Newton of parking”, “UCLA’s parking guru,” a “parking rock star” and the “Shoup Dogg.”

The professor embraced the attention and was famed for his jumpers, love of cycling and peppering his lectures and essays with playful quotes from Monty Python and Seinfeld. His social media biography read: “Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA. Saving the world one parking space at a time.”

Shoup produced countless essays, lectures, podcasts and even in cartoon form when he was the subject of a YouTube animated feature on the television show Adam Ruins Everything.

Shoup became Distinguished Research Professor of Urban Planning in the Luskin School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.

Shoup became a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, an Honorary Professor at the Beijing Transportation Research Center.

In 1993, he was invited to the White House in recognition of his research on employer-paid parking. In 2015, the American Planning Association awarded Shoup its highest honour, the National Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer.

From 2009-2017, he served as editor of the University of California’s ACCESS magazine. He retired from UCLA in 2015 as a distinguished professor.

In 2018 Shoup edited Parking and the City, a new book of essays picking up the themes he explored in The High Cost of Free Parking. In the new book he wrote:

“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.”

Planetizen included Parking and the City in its Top 10 books of 2018, and it has become a vital resource for reformers.

The High Cost of Free Parking’s status as a classic text is secure. Revised in 2011, it has been translated into multiple languages, including Chinese, Russian, Romanian and Persian, and recorded as an audiobook. In 2018, the American Planning Association included the publication of The High Cost of Free Parking in its timeline of key events in US city planning since 1900. Other books in this timeline included Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Jane Jacobs’ “Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

Donald Shoup is survived by his wife, Pat Shoup, his brother, Frank Shoup, his niece, Allison Shoup, and nephew Elliot Shoup.

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