Donald Shoup, the author of the groundbreaking The High Cost of Free Parking and UCLA Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, passed away last Thursday evening, February 6, 2025.
Shoup earned a doctorate in economics, and brought that training to his studies of parking policies. The High Cost of Free Parking demonstrated how urban parking policies, especially low-cost or free parking and minimum parking mandates, were damaging cities economically and culturally.
The High Cost concludes with three solutions to the dilemma, which have been adopted to at least some degree by cities across the country: charging fair market prices for curb parking, returning parking revenue to the neighborhood where it was collected for community investment, and removing off-street parking requirements for new development.
Shoup committed decades to researching flawed fundamental assumptions that governed minimum parking requirements, clear writing to educate a wide audience, and engaging decisionmakers with how his findings should shape policy.
His message was simple, although at first few wanted to hear it. “Parking is free for us only in our role as motorist--not in our roles as taxpayer, employer, commuter, shopper, renter, as a homeowner," he would point out. "The cost of parking does not cease to exist just because the motorist doesn't pay for it.”
He often joked that he set out to study parking because nobody else would. He likened himself to a cat, sniffing and marking the tires of parked cars, while other transportation planners, he said, are more like dogs, “running after and trying to bite at cars as they drive down the road.”
“I thought I could find something useful if I studied what cars do for 95 percent of the time, which is park,” he told former Streetsblog editor Melanie Curry. She first met him when she edited Access Magazine at the University of California, where Shoup was consistently one of the most solid, clear-thinking contributors. He often found new angles to approach his singular subject. For example, he once came to Access with an analysis of the way the influential Manual of Parking Generation from the Institute of Transportation Engineers based its assumptions about parking needs on almost no data at all. That analysis forced planners to pay more attention to those underlying assumptions, rather than just copying numbers out of the book.
Shoup published three books written just on parking and has written countless articles at other publications. He even has his own author page at Streetsblog, where he published his last article, Here’s a Parking Policy That Works for the People. And of course Streetsblog has quoted or referenced his work literally hundreds of times.
The High Cost of Free Parking can be found at most major bookstores and via a free searchable manuscript is online.
The professor will also be remembered for his sense of humor. The gray bearded, white man with leather patches on his tweed blazer embraced the “Shoup Dogg” nickname given to him by his grad students. He influenced an entire generation of planners, many of whom call themselves "Shoupistas" and have promulgated his ideas and recommendations to encourage better city planning.
In this interview with Kea Wilson, he even joked about the difficulty of bringing about change on the ground, even as most experts agree with his views on parking.
Wilson: In a nutshell, how do your recommendations about parking policy differ from that norm?
Shoup: My recommendations are pretty much the opposite of current parking policy in most places!
Professor Shoup was active locally as well, helping to plan and organize the Los Angeles Bike Summit (2008) and Los Angeles Street Summit the following year. An avid cyclist, Shoup chose two-wheeled travel as often as possible and could regularly be found at CicLAvia and other bike events throughout the city.
Shoup is survived by his wife and an army of urban planners he helped train that revere him not just for his body of work, but also his spirit and compassion. The eulogies on Shoupistas on Bluesky include not just activists and academics, but also mayors, Congressmembers, and television personalities.
Rest in peace, Professor Shoup. Your memory will always be a blessing and your legacy will live for generations.
Consider making a gift to the Donald and Pat Shoup Endowed Fellowship in Urban Planning to support the education of future parking leaders at UCLA.
