How Does a College Professor Become a Parking Rock Star?

I was asked by ACS, a Xerox company, muse a bit on parking for their corporate web site. This is the second of the series…

Are you a Shoupista? Do you actually know the Shoup dog? Don Shoup is speaking tomorrow. The room is sold out.

When Professor Donald Shoup of UCLA published “The High Cost of Free Parking” in 2005 he had little thought of what might be coming. He was taking a radical position. On street parking pricing should be set so that it affected the demand. Parking requirements by cities should be abandoned. The money raised should be returned to the neighborhoods from wince it came.

This flew in the face of parking pricing programs that had been followed for decades.

Whether by design or not, cities sat out to subsidize parking in their downtown cores. Low priced or free parking was thought necessary to “bring customers into the downtown area,” and to keep constituents happy. The concept of keeping parking cheap or free was endemic.

The pricing model was upside down. Pricing in surface lots and parking structures, although still relatively inexpensive, was more costly than convenient on street parking. On street parking was jammed, and off street structures and lots had plenty of parking available. Drivers would cruise around and around looking for cheap on street parking….

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