RIP Donald Shoup aka "the Charles Darwin of parking"
Donald Shoup had a brain tumor in 1995 and something perhaps unusual happened after that. A light switch turned on and he began to see something that sounds totally boring, mundane, and unapproachable as something we as a society had been getting simply very wrong for many decades.
“As an economist, he was anti valuable land being wasted on parking,” notes my friend Will Chilton in a new video he has produced to honor Shoup, who has passed away at the age of 86 after a short illness.
Shoup was an urban-planning professor at UCLA who, late in life, plunged into the work of better understanding the economics (or lack thereof) of parking and “demonstrated that seemingly mundane provisions in zoning codes had rendered many places overly dependent on driving.”
He was known by a variety of nicknames—which he endearingly accepted and played along with—including “UCLA’s parking guru,” a “parking rock star” and the “Shoup Dogg.”
Chilton and I had the pleasure of including him in a video (that has gone on to have about 6 million views on YouTube and Facebook) that we produced for Vox and Mobility Lab back in 2017.
Shoup detailed in that video how people were parking in U.S. cities long before the thought of creating a price for parking was ever considered. “The parking meter wasn’t even invented until 1935,” he said. “Mandatory parking minimums,” or “offstreet parking requirements” came along and were the second important invention, and they are the very specific reason why most of the parking lots we all use all the time are in existence.
These requirements, especially as suburbs built up and up, became exceedingly popular options for cities to demand of developers. And why not? It cost the cities absolutely nothing. So then these requirements would have to be based on something, such as three spots per hole at a golf course, or 1.8 spots for every bed at a hospital, or three per 1,000 gallons at a swimming pool.
My favorite quote from that video is when Shoup said, “One of the oddest [parking requirements] is for a funeral home because that serves up, ‘parking spaces per what?’”
I would urge you to watch that short video. Parking sounds a snooze of a topic, but it’s fascinating to see how we have done it so incorrectly and that Shoup gave us all the tools to reimagine and in turn rebuild our cities and decrease all the traffic congestion within them.
From there, I urge you to watch Chilton’s new video catching up with Shoup just months before he passed away. The video grabs you right away as Shoup is asked whether it’s true that “a lot of the kids who will watch this on YouTube were conceived in cars.” Shoup laughs, “In the old days, cars were the most available place for conception.” If that line of questioning interests you, dig a little deeper with my article, Would you have sex in a driverless car?