Last Friday, UCLA hosted a celebration of the life and work of the persona who was long the world’s foremost expert on parking, Donald Shoup.
Earlier this year, following a brief illness, Shoup passed away at the age of 86. Today’s post won’t attempt to compete with obituaries shared at the time; see accounts at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, the L.A. Times, the New York Times, and the Parking Reform Network – as well as Streetsblog California’s short obituary, and Streetsblog L.A.’s 2015 interview.
Friday’s ceremony was attended by hundreds of people whose lives Shoup had touched – from family to academic colleagues to former students to advocates for more livable cities.
A couple dozen speakers recounted Shoup’s wisdom, humor and persistence.
In delving into parking, Shoup truly shed light on a near-invisible overlooked field. Shoup revealed how extensively parking shapes cities. Shoup’s teachings – in classrooms, via publications and research, appearances, interviews and more – shaped important reforms in cities across the country and around the world.
Shoup frequently summed his parking policy recommendations into just three brief, but by no means simple or easy, policy recommendations:
- Charge fair market prices for curb parking to make sure there are just enough vacancies so that drivers don’t need to circle the block searching for parking.
- Build support for metering by reinvesting parking meter revenue in the metered areas
- End off-street parking requirements.
The UCLA event kicked off two important new endeavors that commemorate and extend Don Shoup’s legacy.
UCLA has a new Center for Parking Policy. Like Shoup embodied, the center works to bring academic research to bear on shaping real world change. The Center for Parking Policy website, which includes preserving Shoup’s own website, is already a useful resource for parking research
There’s also an eponymous new book, just out, that Shoup collaborated on. The Shoup Doctrine: Essays Celebrating Donald Shoup and Parking Reforms is available from Routledge. The Shoup Doctrine, edited by Daniel Baldwin Hess, includes three dozen essays – by city planners, economists, journalists, and parking professionals – exploring the impacts of and resistance to core parking reforms that were Shoup’s life’s work.
If you’re interested in the issues that Streetsblog covers, and you’re unfamiliar with Shoup and his teachings, at some point you probably need to read Shoup’s 2005 magnum opus The High Cost of Free Parking. It will change the way you see cities.
