The High Cost of Free Parking,   ISBN:9781884829987

Customer Rating: 

As a formerly employed land planner, it was not uncommon to wade through page after page of municipal zoning codes specifying nothing but parking requirements just to determine all the hoops a client would need to jump through. Having used several trees to print parking requirements, clearly parking is a significant concern for cities. As Shoup describes in The High Cost of Free Parking, instead providing seemingly arbitrary (or pseudo-scientific) parking minimums, cities should price parking to better reflect its true cost - affecting demand, rather than supply.

If you're interested in how to create better cities, read this book.

Customer Rating: 

I strongly recommend any students in Planning, Architect, Real Estate or Political Science to read all or part of the book. This book should be a required reading for the majors. Anyone who appreciates living in compact, walkable cities will enjoy this book.

I will be purchasing extra copies to distribute to my local representatives.

Customer Rating: 

Come on, I know what you're thinking. There's no way you'd want to read an 800-page book about parking, let alone pay $60 for it. That's what I thought too.

Amazingly, I was wrong. Shoup shows how the simple matter of providing some free parking kicks off a chain reaction that leads to disastrous effects. First there's just a little free parking space in front of your house. But then a store opens down the street and its customers start taking your spot. So you demand the store provide enough parking for its customers. Which means the store gets pushed back from the street by its huge new parking lot. Which means nobody wants to walk to it, so more people start driving. Which means it needs more parking and more roads and more traffic cops and more cruising for parking and more sprawl and more pollution and on and on.

Shoup provides a simple solution to this madness: performance parking. If you provided everyone with free ice cream, you'd always have lines around the block. You'd go bankrupt from trying to make sure you always had enough supplies. You'd reorient your whole economy around ice cream. But luckily, we don't do that. We charge the market rate for ice cream. Shoup's simple suggestion: do the same for parking. Install parking meters that talk to each other and figure out how much parking is available and automatically adjust the price to ensure that 15% of the spots are always free. Imagine: no more looking for parking, a parking space always available.

Shoup has a political plan for getting there as well, involving playing one neighborhood off another. But I've given enough away already; perhaps you should just read the book.

Customer Rating: 

The author makes many good arguments against providing free parking for motorists. The basic premise is that everyone pays for the parking anyway - just not directly. The expense is in the cost of rent or goods sold so everyone pays for it indirectly.

While free parking is viewed by most motorists as a birth right, it has been a primary cause of unattractive an inefficient development patterns. Since drivers don't pay directly for parking there is no incentive to drive less and walk, bicycle or take mass transit more.

This lengthy book is most likely to attract planners and parking professionals. Its got a lot of good information and many references to back up the hypotheses. Its not exactly a page turner.

Customer Rating: 

You have to be willing to wade through a few equations to enjoy this book but if you care about cities, economics, or the environment, this impassioned (in its academic way) plea for rational parking management at the neighborhood level can open your eyes to the potential for a win-win solution to the world's infrastructure and quality of life problems. I came out of it saying, "wow, the world would be a better place if I had the option of driving to San Francisco to pay $12 to park on the street at my destination instead of wasting time trying to find free but nonexistent parking." If only.