People Behind the Plans: Donald Shoup, FAICP

[00:00:00.320] - Donald Shoup

The only thing I'm famous for is I was living in Honolulu when Pearl harbor was attacked. It's my earliest memory. My father was in the Navy. His ship was stationed there, fortunately out of port. So I think everything has been very calm ever since. If you start with Pearl harbor as your first memory, life seems very easy.

 

[00:00:29.120] - Courtney Kashima

Welcome to the American Planning Association Podcast. This episode continues our series that takes a look at the people behind the plans, showcasing the work life and stories of planners from all across the profession. I'm your host, Courtney Kashima, founder and principal at Muse Community Design, a planning and public engagement studio in Chicago, Illinois. I'm also a longtime member of the American Planning Association. Today, my guest is Don Shoup, Distinguished Research professor at the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Shoup is the guru of progressive parking policy and the closest thing we get to a celebrity in our field. He is the author of the pioneering book the High Cost of Free Parking and most recently Parking in the City. He is known for his research, his passion, his sense of humor, and those he has converted known as "Shoupistas". Professor Shoup, welcome to the podcast.

 

[00:01:34.660] - Donald Shoup

Well, thanks for inviting me.

 

[00:01:37.500] - Courtney Kashima

So, change is hard and parking is no different. I'm curious how you became interested in the topic and what you've learned by studying it over the last, what, 40 years?

 

[00:01:55.310] - Donald Shoup

Well, I think I backed into the topic. Like most people in parking, I was always interested in the land market. And I wrote my PhD dissertation on the land market. And then I began to realize that parking was a big factor of the land market. And in 1976, the California Transportation Authority asked me to write an essay on equity in transportation planning. And I had just seen a master's thesis at USC by two students who wrote together, and they looked at the effects of employer paid parking. They compared two groups of employees in downtown Los Angeles. One of them worked for the federal government who didn't give any subsidy to any kinds of transportation. The other group worked for the county of Los Angeles who gave everybody free parking. They interviewed the two groups of employees and it turned out that something like 43% of the federal employees drove to work and 78% of the county employees drove to work. It was a huge difference, saying that if, if I offer you free parking, many more of you will drive to work. So that was clearly inefficient. It was counter to all the things that the city of the county said they were trying to do, have less traffic congestion, less air pollution.

 

[00:03:34.140] - Donald Shoup

But it also seemed to me unfair because I was asked to write about equity and I thought that employer paid parking is very inequitable because it gives a big subsidy to people who drive to work and nothing to everybody else. Everybody else often was too poor to own a car. So it's a federally subsidized fringe benefit because it's a tax exempt fringe benefit. So I thought here was a very unfair federal and county policy that was making everything worse in terms of traffic congestion and air pollution. So my first interest was in employer paid parking. It was very hard to make any progress on that because I quickly learned you can't say, oh, you should charge for parking. You know, that's not politically doable. And it made me sound like a crank. So one day when I was at the UCLA swimming pool, I was underwater. And the idea came to me about parking cash out is that if the employer offers to pay for your free parking at work, it should offer you also the cash value if you don't take it. So if you don't take the parking subsidy, you should be able to take it as cash.

 

[00:05:00.140] - Donald Shoup

You use it for public transit or bicycling or walking or carpooling or something like that. So it doesn't take anything away from anybody. It doesn't say, we're going to start charging for parking. But it seemed to me that it would be effectively you would be paying for parking if you didn't take the cash. You lose out on the cash if you take the free parking. And I thought that was going to save the world. It seemed to be so easy to explain and so fair and so efficient in terms of reducing traffic congestion and air pollution. But it, it didn't take off right away. I wrote an article about it. That's what academics do. And somebody in the California legislature staff member read it, thought it was a good idea, and they drafted up the legislation to enact it without telling me. And then a year later, they sent me the legislation, which I thought was all screwed up. And I badly worded it, really didn't say what I meant. But they revised the bill and it was about to go through the legislature until employer groups, real estate operators said, this is unfair that local governments require us to provide this parking, these spaces.

 

[00:06:28.450] - Donald Shoup

We can't build a building without having the parking spaces. And now the state has come along and saying we have to pay people not to use them. And I was kind of dumbfounded at that. I said, why didn't I think about that? But it was very clever, the political maneuvering that politicians figure out how to make compromises. They scaled it back and said only if the employer pays a third party to rent the parking spaces will they have to offer cash out so that if they don't rent the space, they save the money that they would have paid for the parking space, and that funds the employees cash out. So now the employers can't say that we're forced to provide the parking spaces and then pay people not to use them. It's only if you rent the parking spaces from a third party. And then the legislation sail through the legislature because it doesn't seem that it's harming anybody. But what it does do, it generalizes a parking subsidy so you can use it for anything, and it treats all employees equally, that everybody gets the same subsidy regardless of how they travel. And it turned out that it benefited women and minorities more than others because they're more likely to ride the bus or carpool.

 

[00:07:54.530] - Donald Shoup

So they would benefit most from the option to cash out. Because with the current situation, when they say you could have free parking or nothing, it gives nothing to people who ride the bus or carpool or skateboard or bike tour. So I think that it was a policy that met most of the criteria. You would want that it's fair, it treats everybody equally, and it's better for the transportation sector because it means that more people will be riding the bus, and it's better for the environment because there'll be less solo driving. So that was my first taste of. Of getting an idea into legislation. And I thought, well, I'll keep on going in this direction. And I think that I've been lucky and that there's so many things in transportation, especially in parking, that are so screwed up that if you can think of a good reform, almost everybody can benefit. And there have been a number of other things that I've proposed that did get turned into legislation, because I learned that you can't just, you know, write an article and say that we should have less employer paid parking. You have to appeal to the largest group of people possible.

 

[00:09:20.390] - Donald Shoup

In fact, one time I was asked to testify in the legislature about the parking cash out. And I made my spiel like I'm making to you. And behind me was the biggest, burliest union official I have ever seen who is asked to comment. And he said, listen, we work for employers. If they want to take a Coke machine off the floor, we'll go on strike. But what the professor said I like, because we could keep our free parking if we want it, but if we don't, we can get Cash. So I thought, well, I've passed a real test there, that if this union officials bought the idea that it had some legs.

 

[00:10:08.220] - Courtney Kashima

I'm an urban planner and besides all of the obvious reasons I chose urban planning, I also am bad at math and urban planning had very little math requirements. So you've approached urban planning from an economics lens and sort of the classic debate in planning is are we there to correct the market or enable the market. And what I fear is that the people who are smart about this and good at math are rarely in positions to do something about it. You're relying on local elected or appointed officials and planners who may not have the time, interest or capacity to understand pricing issues and other things you recommend. Have you found that and has it been an issue and how have you overcome it?

 

[00:11:07.280] - Donald Shoup

Well, yes, but starting out with the beginning of your question, you said that planners are trying to correct market problems. I'm also interested in correcting what the government is doing. It isn't just the market that makes mistakes, it's government that's making mistakes. It was the federal government that makes employer paid parking tax exempt, causing a huge array of problems. And it was the county government that was giving you the free parking. So it isn't just correcting the private market. I think that there are a lot of mistakes made in the public sector that I more focused on. Things like minimum parking requirements. That's government regulation. And I have spent a lot of time saying this is a terrible idea or that the curb parking on very valuable land in New York, for example, that 97% of all the on street parking spaces in New York are free to the driver. So that's not a market failure so much as a government failure. And I think the governments should be able to use the market for a public purpose. Another example, some of the ideas that I pushed that have have helped me to persuade elected officials that it might be a good idea is what's called a parking benefit district.

 

[00:12:32.040] - Donald Shoup

I think that the government should charge demand based prices for on street parking. Where the demand is very high, the price should be high, and where the demand is low, the price should be low. But how do you make that popular? If you have 97% of the spaces are free, how do you start saying, well, we ought to charge for them? Well, the policy that I propose to have parking benefit districts to say that if the government puts in parking meters in a neighborhood that all the revenue should be returned to the revenue to pay for added public services like fixing the sidewalks, planting street trees, giving free WI fi to everybody or giving bus passes to everybody. There are parking benefit districts that do all of these things. Say that I've tried to devise policies that a large number of people will say that will be better off for me. That I don't rely on the idea that it'll slow global warming or reduce air pollution. I'm trying to show them that you as a resident will be better off if you start charging for on street parking and spend the revenue and the government spends the revenue in the metered area.

 

[00:13:54.820] - Donald Shoup

I proposed this, well, maybe in 2005. That's right. Where the American Planning association last met in San Francisco was in 2005. And at that time the APA published my book the High Cost of Free Parking. They had a big session on it and I spoke. And at that time, I think half the planning profession thought I was crazy and the other half thought I was daydreaming because I said you should do three things. One, you should get rid of all minimum parking requirements. You should start market prices, you know, demand based prices for on street parking and you should spend the revenue to pay for public services in the metered neighborhoods. Those are the three basic things. They all go together, they work together. If you get rid of minimum parking requirements, be higher demand for on street parking and that'll mean more revenue and that'll mean more revenue to pay for public services in the neighborhood. So the parking benefit district sort of sugarcoat the pill of getting rid of minimum parking requirements and charging market prices for curb parking. Well, when I proposed these 800 pages of a book to explain it, I didn't know how long it would take before these things would ever get any traction.

 

[00:15:16.250] - Donald Shoup

And many people thought they never would. But now that we're meeting in San Francisco again, just this year San Francisco removed all its off street parking requirements, something that would have been unthinkable in 2005. And they charged market prices for on street parking at their meters, which was also have been unthinkable in 2005. So during that 14 years, just in this city, there have been a lot of big changes and similar changes in other cities and in other countries. Just last year, Mexico City got rid of all of its minimum parking requirements and started charging market prices for some of its current parking and spending the revenue in the meter district. So a lot has changed in the last 15 years. And I think it's because I have tried to propose policies that aren't just idealistic, but they're also realistic in terms of not expecting everybody to Be also idealistic that you have to. Economists are very comfortable assuming that everybody will work in their self interest. You know, there's a good chance that more people will operate in their self interest than in your interest. So if you allow the market to do some good for the public sector and to say, well, we're going to use the market to price the parking or have market prices for parking, some people thought this was like privatizing the parking.

 

[00:16:50.180] - Donald Shoup

But the government owns the land, uses the market to set the price, and then it spends the revenue to pay for public services. That's more like market socialism than like capitalism. So I think that given the audience you have, you should try to frame your proposal in ways that will make the stakeholders see that it's in their self interest. And here in San Francisco, I propose the same thing. I think my writing style has been affected by the audience that I'm trying to reach. To live in academia, you have to write academic articles, but who reads them? So we have a journal which was published by the University of California called Access Magazine. I was the editor of it. And it takes ask the authors of journal articles to pare it down for a popular audience. So intelligent people who are not familiar with what you're talking about. And I've learned a lot about trying to modify my writing in changing from an academic article into a popular article. And then I turned it into an op ed piece. I've written a lot of ed piece. These ideas are very simple. I'm explaining them now.

 

[00:18:16.020] - Donald Shoup

That's an elevator pitch I'm giving you out of an 800 page book with a lot of mathematics in it. But then I go for an op ed and then a tweet. Because most good ideas can fit into a tweet. I think so. I think that it's to the extent that I've had any influence. I think it's through trying to be the best writer I could possibly be. And be aware that my audience is not as interested in parking as I am. I'm much more interested in parking than just about anybody else, I think, and I was lucky because I had the field pretty much to myself, that universities often emphasize the importance of equality and inclusiveness. But universities are very hierarchical with professors and associate professors and assistant professors and seniors and juniors and sophomores and freshmen. Everything is very rank oriented, but not just in the titles we give to people, but in the top say international affairs are very important, overarching. And then national affairs are almost equally important. But state government is not as sexy and local Government seems very parochial. And in local government, what could be the lowest status thing you could look at?

 

[00:19:48.730] - Donald Shoup

Well, it would be parking. So I've been a bottom feeder for about 40 years, but I found there was a lot of food at the bottom and nobody else was looking for it. So some very simple ideas of the sort that we've been talking about were easy to come up with. But now there's almost a feeding frenzy down there. There were I think five sessions on parking at this APA conference. A lot of other especially younger people are picking up and say it is important and that getting things wrong in parking screws up a lot of other things that I really think that almost every problem is at heart a parking problem. You know, our housing problem and our air pollution, our traffic congestion is all affected by parking or by government's mismanagement of parking through having minimum parking requirements. Say you have to two parking spaces for every apartment in an apartment building which drives up the cost of housing, makes parking seem free because the parking spaces are thrown in with the apartment. So you have a higher rent for housing and get free parking for cars because of government regulation. So I think that there are a lot of, not just low hanging fruit, it's just sitting on the ground waiting to be picked up.

 

[00:21:18.220] - Donald Shoup

But maybe I picked up all the easy stuff and the hard stuff is left for the young people.

 

[00:21:25.020] - Courtney Kashima

So you mentioned the high cost of free parking and coming up on 15 years old. Was that the time the shu pistas were born?

 

[00:21:35.980] - Donald Shoup

I think it's. Well, I didn't invent the word shu piste. It was funny. It was a parking consultant who was, who had discovered my work very early and he often met along with all the other transportation planners in San Francisco at a bar here. I would ask him which bar it was. The planner's name is Patrick Sigman, who is now a well known parking consultant. And he would go to this bar and he said, did you see this interesting new idea that Shoup proposed on Parking Benefit District said somebody looked at him sort of in disgust and said you're just a shupista. And so he was the first shupista. But it caught on partly because it sounded kind of radical, like a Sandinista. And so it sounds like a radical name for what are actually very market oriented policies. So left wing students could feel comfortable saying, oh, we shouldn't have these government parking minimum parking requirements and we shouldn't have free parking, we should charge market prices for it. It sort of gave a cover for them to think that well, yes, I'm not a capitalist. I'm not in favor of markets in general, but I like these ideas about parking.

 

[00:22:58.710] - Donald Shoup

And then it just spread, I guess. And then we asked and one of my students started a Facebook group and he named it the Shupistas. And it isn't people, it isn't about me. It's about the park ideas. A lot of people post links to newspaper articles or government documents or things like that. It's. I don't know. There are over 4,000 members, I think all over the world.

 

[00:23:24.170] - Courtney Kashima

I looked today and they were north of 4700.

 

[00:23:28.060] - Donald Shoup

Is that right? Well, most of them probably don't even know who I am. But they know that if they're interested in parking reforms, I guess you know, it's a Facebook group about parking reforms.

 

[00:23:41.970] - Courtney Kashima

I'm quite confident they do know who you are. But. So you discussed the sort of holy trinity, right? The three pieces that need to fall into place. Where has that worked? And is there anywhere that it has failed?

 

[00:23:58.690] - Donald Shoup

Well, the second book, which was published last year called Parking in the City, is an edited book. I wrote the introduction, a number of the chapters. The introduction is about a 50 page summary of the high cost of free parking, along with some of what has happened. But the other 53 chapters are by other authors, mainly practitioners and some academics who have implemented these ideas in cities. So it's a way and to say what they did and how they did it and what the results were. Sort of like a report card on the high cost of free parking. Here's, here's where we adopted it and how we got it through and what the effects were. So I think that the gist of it is that a number of cities have taken up these ideas. San Francisco, of course, is the most famous one, getting rid of minimum parking requirements and, and charging market prices for curb parking. But Buffalo, New York got rid of its parking requirements. At Hartford, Connecticut and Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, a number of cities picked on one thing, like getting rid of minimum parking requirements. Charging market prices for curb parking is something I, I didn't expect to take off so fast.

 

[00:25:30.130] - Donald Shoup

But the technology for doing it has exploded in terms of offering new ways of paying for parking and measuring occupancy. I think the first parking meter was put in in 1935. Functionally, it's still the same in most cities. You put your money in the meter and hope to get back for your time runs out. How many other ways of paying for anything have stayed the same for what, 80 years? Now we have credit cards and debit cards and Apple pay and automatic deduction from bank accounts and things like that. But the parking meter industry was almost as more morbid than anything outside of North Korea, probably. But suddenly, like everything in Silicon Valley, the technology has exploded. Now you can now on the newer cars, the newest cars, especially the car itself, pays for parking. These telephone apps are very common now. You pay for parking with your cell phone, but the cars are much more connected than your cell phone is. So I think the most advanced technology is that the cell phone connection is in your car and it's on your dashboard. So when you want to park, you just tap a button on the dashboard or and you're starting to pay for park because the car knows where it is, it knows what the price of parking is there.

 

[00:26:55.210] - Donald Shoup

It knows if there are any time limits. It knows everything. And it pays for parking and charges your credit card until the car moves off and then you stop paying for your park. So you only pay for the time you use cell phone apps already do that, but you have to get out your cell phone and open the app and start the parking session. But now it's shifted to the car itself. And I think that it's very seamless, as they say, frictionless parking, that it'd be the easiest thing to pay for. Easier than using a credit card in a grocery store as you just tap a button on the dashboard and you're paying for parking. And they also, the cars can with gps, they know where they are and they know where all the parking spaces are. That's all on the web. And you could say that this is your destination, will give you turn by turn directions exactly where to go, where is the best deal in parking. So I think from a very crude way of paying for parking, we're moving quickly towards a very effortless way of paying for parking. So you'll still have to pay money, but it won't be difficult to do.

 

[00:28:06.710] - Donald Shoup

And you won't worry about getting a ticket because you're paying for parking until you leave.

 

[00:28:12.960] - Courtney Kashima

How are cities preparing for this rapid advancement in technology?

 

[00:28:19.600] - Donald Shoup

Well, I think they're just following. It's a nightmare of selling anything to a city in terms of technology because you have to go through all kinds of elaborate bids and documentation of everything. But I think that the firms that manufacture the technology are very competitive now and they really understand that not innovating will leave them behind. In fact, one of the major meter manufacturers came to see me. Somehow they think they'll learn something from me. But I just learned things from them. But anyway, I told them I'd made so many wrong predictions in the past, I shouldn't make any new ones. And one of my wrong predictions was that in vehicle parking meters would take off, that they were invented maybe 15 years ago and popular in Europe. They call it electronic wallet. It's a little thing about the size of a cell phone and it's like a debit card for parking. So when you want to park, you just start your parking session and you hang it in your window and it shows that you're paying for parking and then you turn it off when you get back to your car. Universities use it because they have a captive audience and people pay just for the time they use on campus.

 

[00:29:43.140] - Donald Shoup

But it didn't take off because you have to have the infrastructure. The city has to participate in the deal and they have to agree to enforce parking by looking at the in vehicle parking meters. So I said, well, I thought these in vehicle parking meters were going to take off, but they haven't. He said, oh no, I think that's the future of parking. Remember, he was a regular parking meter manufacturer and he knew that this technology was getting so much better moving into the cars that it was going to decimate his business, which was manufacturing old style parking meters. So I think the technology manufacturers know they have to run very fast just to stay in place. Even though they were one of the premier parking meter manufacturers, he knew that's not the future of parking. At least that's what he told me. And I think that is coming true as it is migrating into the car that people we pick into the car. There are parts of London where the only way you can pay for parking is from inside your car with the cell phone or in the dashboard. It is better for everybody if it's a bad climate, if it's raining, if it's snowing, or if it's late at night.

 

[00:31:08.510] - Donald Shoup

You know, everybody would much rather pay inside the car than get out and get your wallet, your credit card out and put it in the parking meter or put coins in or something? In a dark night in an isolated place, you feel much more comfortable paying for parking in your car.

 

[00:31:28.800] - Courtney Kashima

So how do these ideas play out in smaller towns that might not have the bandwidth or means to manage and enforce and measure the efficacy of these changes?

 

[00:31:43.810] - Donald Shoup

I think it's easier in smaller towns because you have less area to cover. There are fewer meters to deal with. There are not so many conflicting interest groups. Say Pasadena, California is one of the earliest examples of a really wonderful parking benefit district. Old Pasadena was the old part of town, and it had been decaying since the 1920s. It was one of the premier shopping districts on the west coast, or maybe even the whole United states. In the 1920s. A lot of rich people from the Midwest would come in the winter and enjoy the summer. And they actually widened the main street called Colorado Boulevard in 1929 to put in a rail line, a trolley line. So they cut 14ft off both sides of the street. So every building had to remove back the front of their building by 14ft. Some of them kept the original facade and moved it back. Others just cut the front part of it off and put in a new facade. So it looks like the very best commercial architecture circa 1929, which was so much better than what you see now. But then the Depression came along, and then World War II, and then after that, there were shopping malls with ample free parking came along.

 

[00:33:17.180] - Donald Shoup

So this. It slowly decayed. There were wonderful buildings in terrible condition because it didn't pay to restore them because the rents would justify it. And there wasn't enough parking for all their customers. And the on street parking was their main supply. And the employees and the store owners parked on the street and moved their cars every two hours and complained about the lack of parking for their customers, saying the city ought to do something. Well, what it did was to have an urban renewal program that took out many blocks of this historic area and built an enclosed shopping mall with free parking. And then the city wanted to put in parking meters in the old part of town. There were no meters in the city. And the merchants said, they'll chase away the few customers we have because all the buildings were empty above the ground floor. A lot of the storefronts were vacant. So the merchants and the landowners opposed this until finally the city said, well, if we put in the parking meters, we will spend all of the revenue to restore all the public features of Old Pass City. We will rebuild all of your sidewalks.

 

[00:34:35.700] - Donald Shoup

We'll put in historic street furniture, street lights, benches, beautiful wrought iron tree grates, plant all new street trees, clean all the alleys, all with meter revenues. And the merchant said, that's different. Why didn't you tell us that? Let's run the meters till midnight. Let's run them on Sunday. The only difference was that the meter. The city said, if we put in the meters, you will keep the money. And that made all the difference. And so they borrowed, I think, something like $5 million against the future meter revenue. And they rebuilt all the sidewalks so every sidewalk in this 15 block area was brand new and beautifully clean and beautiful street trees and historic street lights and everything like that. And the area took off. You could look at the sales tax revenue. As soon as the meters went in, the sales taxes shot up. And it didn't happen because there was less traffic congestion of people hunting for parking. It happened because of the money coming from the meters was spent to improve all of the public infrastructure. And then once the infrastructure was in great shape, the, the property owners restored their properties, which is quite expensive in a historic district because you have to follow federal rules on appropriate materials and things like that.

 

[00:35:54.380] - Donald Shoup

And it has just continued to take off and become the premier shopping district I think in Southern California. From a commercial slum, a skid row, to a place where 30,000 people walk around on an average weekend just enjoying. So I think it was, that's one of the, well, sort of proofs that one of these ideas, a parking benefit district, was working well. And I think other cities, LA has begun to copy it in a way. I think that other cities looking at Old Pas City and said could we do this in our neighborhood? Now Houston has them and Austin, Texas and Boston now has them. LA and Ventura, California, Mexico City. It's spreading because it's easy to explain and it fits in with the city's goals. They wanted to restore Pasadena and they did have a vision of what they wanted to become. They knew they had the skeleton of a wonderful structure for the, for the neighborhood, but they didn't have the money to pay for the public service. Now the alleys have become walkways that are, have restaurants in them. I mean, how many areas do you want to walk around in the alleys now?

 

[00:37:16.920] - Donald Shoup

So people go to Pasadena because the alleys are so wonderful. It's all because it's paid for by the parking meter revenue. So I think when you this, this new book, getting back to your question, 53 chapters, it's all chapters like that. Here's what we did and here's how it worked out. And in most cases, well, because I chose the authors, it was a great success in a sense. It's kind of a report card on high cost of free parking, showing how these ideas have worked out and written by people who took the ideas and they were convinced and they said let's try it in our city. And they did. And here's what happened.

 

[00:37:58.270] - Courtney Kashima

A big part of your influence has been making people realize the value of parking. These days there's a lot of discussion in the field about the value of the curb, not just in terms of parking, but as rideshare and autonomous vehicles and these things. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about where we are now, where we're headed and where we should be headed, perhaps.

 

[00:38:25.810] - Donald Shoup

Well, most cities now are in a terrible position, especially overseas. Anytime you see a picture of a city in India or China, their cars parked all over the sidewalks and out of the streets and the cars have just colonized the whole city. And I'm talking about decolonizing the city. So I think the attention to the curb is entirely appropriate. I think it's the new urban frontier. It's all owned by the government and it's been mismanaged ever since the car was invented. So I think that there's so many new opportunities. There are always loading zones and bus zones and parking that seemed to be the three uses of the street. But now there are pickup and drop off zones for Uber and Lyft. There are some curb lanes have been turned into bike lanes, Some curb lanes have been turned into bus lanes. There's a lot of competition for the curb. And whenever they orange or even putting in parks and outdoor restaurants in the curb lane, that's getting more popular, there are a lot of uses for that land that had assumed to be for free parking. So I think if you put the price on parking, it will tell you, well, how valuable is this land?

 

[00:39:56.560] - Donald Shoup

You could say it's priceless. Anything is priceless until you put it up for auction. And I think that when San Francisco began charging market prices for its own street parking, people thought the prices would shoot through the roof, including me. But that didn't happen. More prices went down than up. Because if you have the same price all day long at the curb, it's going to be too high sometimes and too low at others. Well, it turned out it was way too high in the morning, that maybe you start charging for parts at 8am how much demand is there at 8am and this is true in a lot of cities. So more prices went down than up in San Francisco and the average price went down by about 3%, which means it stayed almost the same. What had happened is that some was up in some places and at times and down in other places. At times the maximum was $6 an hour. They thought they had to put it at a maximum. But only I think 17 blocks ever reached that, that peak price. Whereas hundreds of blocks went down to 25 cents an hour, which was the lowest price they could charge.

 

[00:41:08.160] - Donald Shoup

So I think it reveals the value or lack of it. Of the curve for curb parking. Well, maybe if it only yields a few dollars a day for curb parking, maybe it'd be better off as a bus lane. Maybe we'd better off as a bike lane. Maybe we'd be better off as a wider sidewalk. So there are lots of other uses for the curb other than Parker. And I think that cities are now realizing this and realizing that pricing is the best way to reveal what is the best use of the curb. Because I think that if the bus system could buy the curb lanes for exclusive bus lanes, for the price the cars are paying, they could have all the bus lanes they wanted. Because they have dozens of people on the busses and many of them per hour. There was one, just even one simple video that I saw was wildly persuasive. In New York, there was a lot of controversy when they started taking away parking spaces and making them into bike stations. They're taking away our precious parking spaces. So a guy, Luke Olson is his name. I've never met him, but his video is terrific.

 

[00:42:24.160] - Donald Shoup

He set up his camera and filmed a bike station. And across the street there were three parking spaces and the bike station took up three parking spaces on one side of the street, there were the three parked car on the other side of the street. He just filmed it for an hour and then sped it up. And the activity at the bike station was just like bees coming in and out of a hive. In and out, in and out, in and out. And the cars just sat there. And it turned out in an hour there were 200 arrivals and departures from that bike station that was the space of three cars and 11 people in the parking spaces. So that shows that at least at that, that hour on that street in Manhattan, the bike station was so much more productive. We want to make the curb more productive. And if you do the same thing with taking away parking spaces, making them lift an Uber loading zones, many poor people come in and out of that loading zone for Uber and Lyft than if there were parked cars there. So if you had a restaurant or, or a store, would you rather have an Uber or Lyft loading zone or would you rather have two parked cars that rarely move?

 

[00:43:39.660] - Donald Shoup

So I think that the, the attention to the curb will show that maybe parking is one of the least valuable uses for the curb blade.

 

[00:43:51.880] - Courtney Kashima

Our city starting to price these drop off pickup zones or is that something?

 

[00:43:57.280] - Donald Shoup

I don't think so. I think they can. That would be my recommendation that the many cities are charging Uber and Lyft rides. But I think they Ought to charge for Uber and Lyft pickups and drop offs in crowded areas. So if you paid less for a pickup at a drop off around the corner, you know, where there's no traffic, then you would, wouldn't pay a charge. But if you insisted on being dropped off right in front of the door, you're going to, you would pay a surcharge. So I think putting a price on the use of the curb is a very valuable way to make sure it gets into its most productive use. And one of our graduate students did his master's thesis on how Uber and Lyft manage themselves in traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, which is a big night spot. And he and his fellow students, they recorded every drop off and pickup. And half of all the Uber Lyft pickups and drop offs happened in the driving lane because all the curb spaces were occupied. So people had to get in and out of the cars in traffic, which is not safe.

 

[00:45:12.670] - Donald Shoup

And they were, was double parking. It was led to double parking in half the time. Half of, half of each hour was double parked because of people getting in and out of lift cars. So I think that shows that, you know, cities just haven't gotten around to shifting spaces from parking spaces, which are often free in the evening, into loading zones. So I think that having flexible use of the curbs, it could be for parking in the daytime and Uber, Lyft in the evening or something like that, being much more careful of, of the most valuable, the most productive uses of the curb. And you can't really do that without using prices.

 

[00:45:58.510] - Courtney Kashima

Let's switch gears for a minute and think about how this plays out on the private side. So for example, a Home Depot is being proposed in a suburban location. How should they do it differently? How many spaces should they build and how should they determine that number?

 

[00:46:19.660] - Donald Shoup

Well, Home Depot is a terrific example because every city has its minimum parking requirement for a Home Depot like operation. And usually it's about five or six parking spaces per thousand square feet of floor area in the Home Depot. Well, Home Depot realized that these parking spaces, parking lots were too big. They were having to pay too much. They if they had a particular site, there wasn't enough space left for the Home Depot because the parking requirement gave the maximum amount of space for the Home Depot and the rest of it for, for cars. So they hired a consultant to study parking demand at Home depot in something 17 different cities, Southeast, I think, Texas and that part of the world. And they counted the number of cars at the Park Depot on the day after Thanksgiving, you know, the peak hour of the year. And they were all had a lot of empty spaces at the peak hour of the entire year. And they used that study to argue for a reduction in the parking requirements for buildings like Home Depot. So it takes a big operation like that, you know, worth hundreds of millions of dollars of sales maybe every month.

 

[00:47:39.340] - Donald Shoup

Who could afford to hire a consultant to make these studies in so many cities and to show that cities were way over over requiring the amount of parking spaces at Home Depot and all their competitors, of course. So I think that my recommendation is to have no minimum parking requirements. Let Home Depot decide how many parking spaces to provide. And if you charge the right price for on street parking, they won't spill over onto the street. And if it does spill over onto the street, they'll pay the market price that will pay for improving the neighborhood. So I think that that's one of the legs of my stool is remove minimum parking requirements, charge market prices for curb parking, and make those two politically acceptable by sugar coating the pill with a parking benefit district. So I think if Home Depot decided themselves how many parking spaces to provide, that would be the way to do. Because they don't want their customers to say there's no park, there's never enough parking at Home Depot. They have all the incentive in the world to provide the right amount of parking. And planners, if you went to planning school, they learn nothing about parking requirements in planning a school.

 

[00:48:55.280] - Donald Shoup

The only thing that the planning students learn is how parking requirements get in the way of anything they want to do. If they want to develop affordable housing, for example, or a walkable neighborhood, they learn that minimum parking requirements prohibit that. That's all they learn about minimum parking requirements. They don't learn how to set parking requirements because their professors have nothing to teach them. They don't know how to set up. I don't know how to set a parking requirement. I know how to criticize them. But I know that most of them are pseudoscience, you know, masquerading as a professional operation. The minimum parking requirements are a disease masquerading as a cure. Cities put them in to say we're curing something, but they're poisoning our cities with too much parking. It's rather like lead poisoning lead. It's hard to believe it was a medicine. For thousands of years, lead actually had therapeutic properties. If you have a wound, they would put lead paste on it because without knowing why, it's antibacterial, it can cure a cut, something like that. But they didn't know it had effects beyond that, that it can poison the rest of your body.

 

[00:50:16.680] - Donald Shoup

And I think that minimum parking are like that. They may relieve a symptom of not enough parking at a Home Depot on the day, week before Christmas. But all of that parking has a terrible effect because it isn't just at Home Depot, it's at everything else. So I think it is something that has a local benefit but does global harm. And I think eventually they learned that lead does have these harmful effects and now we prohibit its use. Used to be in paint, for example. And as you probably heard that this old buildings that were painted had a lot of lead and children would eat the paint and it would harm their brains. Well, why would they do that? Because it tastes good. Hard to believe, but lead is sweet. The Romans used it to cook in it, make cooking pots. They stored wine in lead jugs. It sweetened the wine. It was considered something very good. And there are people who've tried to estimate the effects of lead poisoning in the Roman Empire. It turns out the aristocratic class had much more lead exposure than anybody else. They use lead paste as cosmetics and they cooked everything in lead and they stored wine in lead.

 

[00:51:48.120] - Donald Shoup

So they had a lot of lead poisoning. And it turns out that among the aristocratic families at the time of Caesar, that there was not a single living descendant. 200 years later, that some of the madness of Caligula and people like that may have been due to lead poisoning. They wouldn't know it. And I think minimum parking requirements are very similar. And I think we will look back at what we're doing now and say what did they think they were doing? There was lead in gasoline. Maybe not in your life. Leaded gasoline had higher octane. And just think it was the air. Every and many people, some people I don't know sounds plausible to me. They think that the reduction in crime in the 1980s is related to the getting the lead out of gasoline in the 70s. See, it was banned in the 1970s. And younger children, they're growing up with less exposure to lead. But the lead poisoning was terrible in this country because all the exhaust pipes were spewing lead into the atmosphere. And then when we took what volatile organic compounds out of paint, that was a way to reduce air pollution.

 

[00:53:11.730] - Donald Shoup

Take oil out of paint. Now it's all water based people. This is terrible. This water based paint doesn't last long, but it improves the atmosphere. These things are individually beneficial, but they're collectively very harmful. And I think minimum parking requirements may have a Local benefit, but they have a widespread harmful effect.

 

[00:53:38.220] - Courtney Kashima

So were you surprised? I think it was the February issue of ITE magazine, the international president called for an elimination of minimum parking requirements.

 

[00:53:48.290] - Donald Shoup

Well, I'm happy that he did because the IDE is complicit in these parking requirements that they produce the parking generation manual. What they do is they count the peak demand for free parking and suburban land uses and then report that it sounds like this is the use of parking land uses. And then planners take that information. The count on the maximum number of cars and areas that don't have transit, that don't charge for parking, say, well, that should be the minimum parking requirement. So the maximum number of cars observed becomes the minimum number of cars parking spaces required. That leads to spreading everything out and increases the demand for driving because everything farther apart. Planners, I think, would understand this. Suppose Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller In around 1900, at the dawn of the automobile age, had asked you to say, well, what planning policies would increase the demand for cars and for fuel, which is what they sold? He said, well, consider three options. Let's segregate land uses. Housing here, shopping there, jobs someplace else. So you would have to to travel between these locations in a day to get to everything you wanted.

 

[00:55:18.160] - Donald Shoup

So that would create more travel. And then we limit density everywhere. You know, no more than 45ft or only single family houses. Because zoning is all about limiting uses and limiting bulk, as they call it, with their setbacks and height limits and things like that. So we limit density and we segregate uses. Those two things will spread the city out. And then the third one is to have minimum parking requirements. So there will be ample parking everywhere. Well, the cars will be the natural way to get wherever you want to go. And now 87% of all our trips in a day are made by car nationwide, not in San Francisco. So. So those three policies, limited density, segregated land use, and off street parking requirements, are the three main elements of zoning that we have been using for the past 80 years. And that helps to explain why we're so spread out. And I think that if you want more housing and less traffic, you shouldn't limit the amount of housing at every site and require ample parking everywhere. See, we're doing. Our policies are exactly the opposite of what they should be. If we want to do what we say we would like to have happen.

 

[00:56:42.940] - Donald Shoup

So I think that all of our zoning policies are exactly the opposite of what they should be. Well, maybe not that. I say, well, say the opposite. Instead of minimal parking requirements, we ought to have maximum parking limits. I think that if we're going to have parking maximums, the easiest thing to do would be to say that every parking minimum is now a parking maximum. Because a minimum means that minimum with no limit on and above it the minimum parking requirements. You said the only thing you could do wrong is to have less than this amount of parking. A minimum with no maximum is what we have now in most cities like in la. And instead we say take the same numbers and say they're now maximums with no minimum. And if the minimum was said to be enough, you know that we, this is how a minimum is supposed to be put together. Say this is enough parking, we want you to provide enough. Why not say you can't provide more than enough. But if you want to provide less, you can. So San Francisco has has maximums but no minimums and LA has minimums with no maximums.

 

[00:57:57.350] - Donald Shoup

Well, let's look at just two buildings. You've probably heard of Disney hall in la, our big concert hall. And Louise Davies hall is the equivalent in San Francisco. And for concert hall in downtown LA requires as a minimum 50 times more parking spaces that San Francisco allows as a maximum. Now some one city has to be wrong, maybe both, I don't know. But they can't both be right. And for Disney hall it has a six story underground garage with an escalator cascade that goes into the lobby. So most people going to a concert in Disney hall never set foot on the sidewalk. But after a concert in Louise David Halls, everybody goes out on the sidewalk and to go to their parking space if they drove or at all the bookstores and bars and flower shops were open. It's very lively. One time my wife and I parked at the LA library which is about six blocks away. They had dinner down there and walked to Disney Hall. And it was must have been in the summer because it was a pleasant evening and it was daylight. And after we, after the council ended, we walked back to the parking structure and we were the only two people on the street in the dark in Los Angeles.

 

[00:59:20.790] - Donald Shoup

It's not a very reassuring place for two old people walking alone. So I think that San Francisco probably has it right to say that we should have maximums with no minimum.

 

[00:59:35.360] - Courtney Kashima

Returning to the Home Depot example for a moment, I think you may be giving those corporations more credit than they deserve. I think I'm really fascinated on how decisions get made. By whom? Why? The stated reason, the real reason. And there's a lot of actors involved in parking beyond just the developer and the planner. There are investors, institutions, tenants. This was something I was surprised to learn. There was a wonderfully Transit Oriented Development proposed in Chicago right near a Red Line station. The city was on board with less parking. The developer was on board with less parking. Frankly, there were some west coast tenants that came in, didn't understand what it means to be in Chicago on the Red Line. And they were the ones made it as part of their lease agreement that more parking than anyone else involved thought there needed to be. So I want your reaction to that idea, understanding who makes decisions and why and maybe give a little bit advice to our listeners about what are some of the first things they can do if they want to start to enact some of these ideas.

 

[01:01:03.730] - Donald Shoup

Well, yes, you're right. There are a lot of actors involved and I would say the most important actor is the neighbors, the nimbys, you know that they do not want a Home Depot with insufficient parking because these customers will spill over into their neighborhood. So that is a big motive for minimum parking requirements. So I think that the tenants, yes, they want, many of them want parking and maybe they should have it if they're willing to pay for it. Taking a Chicago example that there was a study done in LA of talking to developers and planners and investors and saying, well, how do we decide how much parking there is? And Professor Richard Wilson at Cal Poly Pomona did this and he found that the investors wanted to make sure always that the billings had all the required parking and the banks always wanted to make sure that there was all the required parking, to make sure there'd be no cloud on the title for the building that it would be. This was inappropriately approved because it didn't. It's like having bad electrical wiring or something like that. So the bankers and the investors seemed to be very concerned about the number of parking spaces.

 

[01:02:35.170] - Donald Shoup

What they were really concerned about that meet the parking. Parking requirement. But, but Rick Wilson said that the developers thought the planners knew what they were doing. And. But one was very suspicious because he said he never saw an oil spot on the top deck of his parking structure. See that there's not really any occupancy measures. And so he was saying that it was really the minimum parking requirement was the driver of the number of parking spaces and that it was the. In Chicago, the, I guess the Chicago Transit Authority, is that right? Or the mta. Anyway, the municipal, some, some governmental agency wanted to, to, to replicate this to say, well that's Los Angeles, you know, what would it be like in Chicago? And people in Chicago were just as self centered or more self centered than any place else. So they did the same study and they found exactly the same result, that the spaces were under occupied. But the investors and the developers thought the planners knew what they were doing, that this was a scientific judgment as to how many parking spaces should be required. Now I have heard that tenants, because they're who are her national operators, you know, like a Home Depot or McDonald's or something like that, they may have a nationwide standard that they want to follow.

 

[01:04:07.530] - Donald Shoup

But I think that's becoming less common because we have McDonald's that are now urban McDonald's with no off street parking. Most people would think, well McDonald's, that's a drive in place. Well, you could look around all over the world and you'll see now McDonald's without any parking. So but I think if a tenant wants to do that, it's okay. But I don't think the government should require that the developer should provide parking. It should be if a tenant wants to pay for this, maybe it's okay, maybe not. I'm sure maybe there should be maximum parking limits because I think they're easier to justify the minimum parking requirements because maximum. Can the city air handle more cars? Can the city streets handle more traffic? If we're having more parking, that means more cars. I mean, are we really ready for more cars? Traffic is already intolerable. It'd be completely insufferable if there are more cars. So I think if people came without cars, they wouldn't even be noticed. But if they come with cars, which they do, if they're minimum parking requirements, they will be, there will be a lot of opposition to new people.

 

[01:05:27.360] - Courtney Kashima

I want to thank you so much for speaking with us today. And if you could share where folks can learn more if they're interested in the topic, that would be great.

 

[01:05:36.960] - Donald Shoup

Well, if you're on Facebook, you could join the Shupistas where people from all over the world post ideas about parking and reforms, especially reforms. That's right. And it's always good to have evidence that other cities have done this. And you can point to what Hartford has done or San Francisco has done or Buffalo has done. And I'm sure you'll find a city comparable to yours that has done something that you could probably adopt for your own city.

 

[01:06:14.980] - Courtney Kashima

Thank you so much.

 

[01:06:16.660] - Donald Shoup

Well, thank you. I think now I've got to go take a nap.

 

[01:06:22.100] - Courtney Kashima

Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the American Planning association podcast. For more information and to hear past episodes, visit planning.org podcasts you can also subscribe to the podcast on itunes and Stitcher. Have an idea for a podcast? Send them to podcast@planning.org.