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Volume 20, Number 6, June 2015

DONSHOUP:Celebrating a 'ParkingRock Star'

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Don Shoup: Parking EvangelistBy John Van Horn

It’s important when you are in the public eye not to take yourself too seriously. To Don Shoup’s credit, he has made that his credo. Anyone who calls himself “Shoup Dogg” has to have his head screwed on straight.

The essence of Don’s theories can be distilled quickly. 1. Set on-street parking rates

so that about 15% of the spaces are always empty.

2. Return the money collected on-street to the neighborhoods from whence they came.

3. Do away with minimum parking requirements.

Those three little sentences tend to send parking consultants and urban planners into a tailspin. They are simplistic, we are told. There is little true research to back them up. They are politically impossible to put into practice.

Shoup heard all these objections and others, but soldiered on. Telling his story with a cute PowerPoint presentation to anyone who would listen, he met with mayors, city councils, planning boards, rotary clubs and parking professionals. He repeated his mantra over and over.

He used examples (Old Pasadena, CA) to help prove his points. He became an evangelist for change. And many in academia, and out, became his disciples. They are called Shoupistas.

Don’s book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” became a hit. It reached the point that it was published in paperback, a few years back, by the American Planning Association’s Planners Press. So someone must be reading it. He tells me the hard cover was the largest seller the APA ever had, topping 10,000 copies.

Shoupistas and many in city government love his theories because they are simple, easy to understand, and make sense. Some in the parking business took affront because they felt that his theories were too simplistic and flew in the face of reality. And that’s where the debate was struck.

Don doesn’t couch his theories in terms of being “sustainable,” although I sometimes feel he is tempted. He told his story by quietly using unfailing logic:

“There’s a lot of urban space that is dedicated to parking, but is never used.”

“You don’t build a church for Easter and Christmas – why build parking for the day after Thanksgiving?”

“If you return the money collected to the neighborhood where the parking exists, you will have the political will to make other changes. Besides, it’s the right thing to do.”

“Parking minimums make no sense – so many spaces per nun at a convent, so many spaces per gallon of water at a swimming pool, etc.”

When Don isn’t preaching his gospel, he is learning from others. He will host people who he thinks know about parking for lunch at the UCLA Faculty center and then spend the time asking questions. Don knows he has to reach outside the academic Ivory Tower.

Do his theories work in the real world? The jury is still out. In many cases, the approach has been piecemeal. Raising on-street prices, but not quite enough to make any difference. It’s difficult for politicians to give up that cash flow into the general fund for quaint things such as street lighting, sidewalks and urban renewal.

And, of course, once urban planners have set the code as to the number of parking spaces per nun, it seems as if one is on the mountain with Moses, altering the Commandments.

Government change is glacial, and Don Shoup keeps at it. He has become a parking rock star. Whenever there is an article

or a news story on TV, he is often the first one the reporters call. He always has a pithy quote handy.

Don Shoup may not be right on everything, but he has done what many academics forget to do: He has made us think. He has challenged the conventional wisdom. We have had to rethink and defend our premises.

As an industry, we wish him well in his retirement. But, somehow, I don’t think we have heard the last of the Shoup Dogg.

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Don Shoup and his cut-out alter ego, which appeared at his retirement party.

Those three little sentences tend to send parking consultants and urban planners into a tailspin.

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If you read Parking Today, then you already know much about the revolutionary work of Professor Donald Shoup as related to parking theory and practice, and it has probably influenced your own work.

After 41 years of teaching at UCLA, Donald Shoup, Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning in the Luskin School of Urban Affairs, will retire June 30, 2015.

On April 20, 2015, in Seattle, Shoup received the American Planning Association’s highest honor, the National Excellence Award for a Planning Pioneer. On receiving the award, Shoup commented, “I am happy to be here to receive this award, since most previous Planning Pioneers were honored posthumously.”

A few who have benefitted from his teachings add their own comments here:

Stanley R. Hoffman

Early in his career, in the 1980s and ’90s, as Don Shoup was testing and developing his parking theories and their influence on urban design and transportation, he also was impacting the field of urban public finance. As an urban economist, Shoup always had a knack for looking at important planning and land-use problems “at the margin,” where the levers exist that can have the most impact.

in 2005, he also researched and helped influence California state legislation related to Deferred Special Assessments and Graduated Density Zoning, both creative solutions to the problem of infrastructure finance, especially in low-income areas.

paid parking became accepted practice and influenced both federal and state legislation.

Before Shoup’s work, parking policy was an afterthought in planning, rarely discussed by academics, and implemented mechanically by practitioners without regard to a market-based view of parking space requirements.

Shoup focused on developing creative solutions to the problems caused by mandated and underpriced parking – how to dynamically price curb parking to bring supply in line with demand and thereby eliminate the need for off-street parking requirements.

Professor Shoup is retiring this summer after more than four decades of service to UCLA’s Department of Urban Planning. Widely recognized as the “parking guru,” Shoup’s most notable contribution to urban planning is his research demonstrating that “free” parking comes with enormous hidden costs.

becoming best-practice for much of the field of parking management – influencing how people are more likely to drive less, thus reducing traffic,

not the path to a great city!” Steffen Turoff, AICP, Director of Planning Studies at Walker

Parking Consultants Don Shoup, as a young professor of urban planning in 1974, read

a research paper written by two graduate students in USC’s Masters of

coincidentally, also working in parking operations at the time they wrote “The

the research paper changed Shoup’s life; intrigued by the groundbreaking study of the intersection between parking economics, planning and psychology, Shoup began to research and to publish on this largely ignored field.

Shoup, or “Don” as his students fondly call him, went on to research

researched why these ideas work and why they should be applied not just to private parking operations, but also to public parking and more broadly to the realm of public policy and public finance.

Don has been able to communicate the ideas behind these practices plainly enough – while highlighting their importance – to make urban planners, the general public, and finally policy-makers take notice, and begin to change the way all three do planning.

Don has identified and articulated the negative impacts of not following these practices so eloquently and passionately that many, if not most, who hear him speak or read his book take up his quest to make parking and related land-use policies more effective.

It came full circle for me when, just a few years out of planning school, I interviewed

and operations, while I only knew what I had learned from Don in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning. But we could talk about parking, planning, the challenges clients faced, and the solutions, because Don was able to communicate these ideas to me, his planning student, and why they were important.

great interest to the experiences of those who work in the trenches of parking, while often having little patience for those taking a more theoretical approach.

exhibitions, listening to vendors of the latest parking technology, and he rides along with municipal parking staff to see how policies and technologies actually work in the field.

Planners, opposed its parent organization, the American Planning Association itself, in its stand against a California bill to limit the amount of parking that developers are required

Celebrating a ‘Parking Rock Star’Don Shoup Retires after Challenging an Industry

W. Shedrick Coleman (l), Director, American Planning Association, presents

Donald Shoup with the Association’s National Excellence Award.

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planner,” and his claims that Shoup’s recommendations interfere with what is already a free market for parking in the U.S. These are just two examples that Don has challenged: the Planning Establishment and the self-styled “Anti-Planner” alike.

While some may argue that Don’s recommendations are theoretical, the opposite often is true. Don often simply asks the hard questions in straightforward terms, and forces all of us who accept the status quo to think again. From minimum parking requirements to free on-street parking, why do we continue to follow these policies when the results have been, in many places, not just poor but outright counterproductive?

One thing I appreciate about Don and his ideas is their appeal to such a broad swath of the public. They do not fall in the domain of any one ideology or group.

Those of us who work in parking have seen his theories unite environmentalists, fiscal conservatives, champions of the poor, and most important, anyone who simply wants the transportation system – and government – to function properly and serve the public.

His efforts, and the extraordinary generosity and kindness with which he has shared them, are a wonderful legacy not just to those of us who work in parking, but truly to the public at large.

Mark Gander, AICP, Director of Urban Mobility and Development at AECOM Technology, and Founding Partner and Board Member of the Green Parking Council

In 1990, I was honored to work as Professor Shoup’s Teaching Assistant, supporting his graduate-level urban public finance course, having completed the class a year before at UCLA. Parking was a common thread that ran through the curriculum. Two decades later, about 2011, Shoup’s collegial and collaborative nature was again demonstrated when he accepted my invitation to join the Green Parking Council’s Advisory Committee. The council works at the intersection of parking, “green” building, clean technology, renewable energy, “smart grid” infrastructure, urban planning and sustainable mobility.

In recognition of his decades of path-breaking work on parking in urban centers and finance, here are four “takeaways” from Shoup’s legacy that I carry forward as lessons learned:

Parking Matters a Lot – The ubiquity of parking is not accidental. Parking matters and is a crucial piece of a community’s infrastructure. It plays an important role in the success of cities, communities and places, as well as the development of mixed-use projects and sustainable transportation. Parking supply and pricing often have a direct impact on the ability to create compact, healthy communities. Too much parking at residential properties correlates with more automobile ownership, more vehicle miles traveled, more congestion, more carbon emissions, and higher housing costs. It also results in lost development opportunity, because excess parking area could have been used instead for residential or commercial development or for public-realm uses such as parks and plazas where people gather to enjoy livable space.

Transformation of Mobility – The problem is the car and how it is used. As of 2012, there were approximately 260 million registered vehicles in the U.S. Some 85% of Americans drive to work. When the vehicles are not in use, which amounts to more than 90% of the time, they must be parked. Because of this, the off-street parking space available is ubiquitous; its footprint is vast in scale. The average city has three non-residential parking spaces for each car, and spends a large portion of its budget maintaining roads and other vehicle infrastructure. When cars are not parked, in downtowns on average, 30% are cruising for parking. In many places, parking is the predominant landscape feature of the built environment. Cars are underutilized, overdesigned, inefficient, polluting, and poise a risk to life and safety. But the car, and the eco-system created to sustain the vehicle, are transforming rapidly. A wide range of technology and business enablers have emerged that, when combined in innovative ways, people and goods move around and interact in a vastly improved system. Electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, car-sharing,

on-demand vehicles, “smart” mobility, dynamic pricing, and parking guidance systems are a few of the technologies that offer mobility solutions to addressing the problem.

Changing Nature of Parking – Parking is a cornerstone issue in “smart growth” and urban policy. Coincidental with the transformation of mobility is the changing nature of parking. It is easy to recognize that personal vehicles are likely to be part of the overall transportation mobility mix for the foreseeable future. The integrated solution approach sees that this mix will be a coordinated, balanced multimodal and intermodal transportation network, where the sustainable parking garage and parking reform play key roles. Parking facilities should not be an end point in a journey. They should serve as active, mixed-use resources that seamlessly connect to a “smart,” reliable, grid infrastructure system.

Paving the Way as Agents of Change – The parking industry is undergoing an epic transformation toward sustainability in design, operation, and function of this unique building type. Naturally, from one perspective, the “greenest” parking is the one that is never built. Since we realize that parking is part of the problem, let us invert this perspective to see that parking is now part of the solution. The new mantra is to reduce the number of parking spaces that need to be constructed, and for the ones that are constructed to be as “green” as possible. Parking facilities can serve as active resources that seamlessly connect to reliable, “smart” infrastructure.

In response, the Green Parking Council, an affiliate of the International Parking Institute, and its partners are working to transform parking and mobility from the public face of fossil-fuel consumption into a picture of sustainable urban mobility and green design. The nexus of high-performance parking facilities and new mobility technology and design can lower congestion, reduce emissions and ramp up neighborhood-scale sustainability.

In 2014, the Council launched the Green Garage Certification program, the world’s only rating system that defines and recognizes sustainable practices in parking structure management, programming, design and technology.

In Shoup we trust. Cities and regions around the globe are using the ideas and applied work of Don Shoup, and are transforming the urban space and how parking is approached, managed, built and redeveloped. Congratulations to Don on his distinguished and award-winning career.

For more information on Don Shoup, go to these websites: shoup.luskin.ucla.edu/legacy/. A Tribute to Donald Shoup @ UCLA Luskin “Celebrating Donald Shoup’s Legacy” planning.org/awards/2015/pioneer/NAPA Award For A Planning Pioneer. Donald Shoup, FAICP, PhD

Endowed Fellowship in Urban Planning

Upon his retirement, the Donald and Pat Shoup Endowed Fellowship in Urban Planning is being established to support students at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs in perpetuity, lowering the costs of attending graduate school and making advanced study possible for those who might otherwise not be able to attend. To help achieve the goal, Donald and Pat have pledged to match each donation by a factor of 2-to-1. This means that a $100 gift equals $300 in increased funding for a future graduate student’s education. All donations are welcome and can be made at www.Shoupista.com.

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