Occasionally, Donald Shoup goes literary on me. Here he is quoting Machiavelli:
"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old order of things, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."
And, as Shoup notes on page 281 of his new book, Parking and the City (2018), if the entrenched forces of the status quo ever do give ground, they will whine a lot as they move. Nobody ever said this process would be easy, or pleasant, or neat. (The Machiavelli quote is also on page 281.)
Shoup's topic, of course, is parking. He's been at it for decades, and in the last decade there have clearly been some tectonic shifts. You wouldn't necessarily know this by looking at the streets of Philadelphia, but then we've rarely been seen as pioneers or even fast followers, and the new book gathers examples of progress from around the country and the globe.
Shoup edited the book, which contains articles by him and several dozen other writers.
The book also performs another important service. Since the publication of The High Cost of Free Parking in 2005, says Donald Shoup, "many people have asked for a shorter version of the book to appeal to general readers who are concerned about the future of cities but don’t want to buy or read an 800-page book about parking. ... The Introduction to Parking and the City is this shorter, updated version of The High Cost of Free Parking." (P. xviii.) The introduction is about 50 pages long, and it does what Shoup says it does. And it's available online for free. Just click here.
Sound Bites and Pithy Quotes
This is actually a well-written book. When it comes to economists, city planners, and traffic engineers, I'm generally willing to grade their writing on a curve, but I didn't have to do that here. (Well, maybe once or twice.)
Below are a bunch of quotations from the book - some of them brief, some of them very brief. I'm not convinced that the public's attention span is any shorter than it always has been - after all, the Greeks gave us aphorisms and the Romans gave us epigrams. However, some people persist in thinking that you can convince the man or woman in the street with dense prose and highly convoluted argument. And those people are as wrong today as they were in the Greek agora, back in the day.
These are snippets that can help you get your ideas across. Borrow them, or make your own. It will help you keep your audience awake.
The Wild West
Houston, Texas: "It's Saturday night. The streets are teeming with people streaming out of nightclubs and bars at the end of a raucous night. Partiers ramble down residential streets, searching for their cars, yelling and sometimes fighting in the yards along the way. Meanwhile, valets are running back and forth setting off car alarms to quickly identify customers' vehicles.
"Residents watch the mayhem from their bedroom windows and wonder if they will ever be able to sleep through the night on a weekend. They dream of waking up in the morning without finding empty cans, bottles, and pizza boxes in their front yards.
"Sound familiar? A burgeoning entertainment district can deliver great economic gains to a formerly sleepy area, but those gains come with a lot of pain." (P. 445.)
Austin, Texas: "Why lease a parking space if you can park on the street for free? Students stored their cars on the streets, sometimes without moving them for months at a time. On-street parking was completely unmanaged and overcrowded. People parked too close to intersections, cars blocked driveways and fire hydrants, and parking spaces were hard to find." (P. 455.)
Management: The X Factor
"For years, parking policy has been based on the fallacy that there is not enough space to park, while what is really lacking is effective parking management." (P. 190.)
Dreaming Is Not Planning
"The physical transformation of cities and the loss of valuable, active urban land are probably the most visible consequences of urban parking growth. The transformation was planned decades earlier in the futuristic forms popularized by Le Corbusier, Norman Bel Geddes, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others. In these designers' collective vision, high-rise towers were surrounded by parks and plazas and connected by giant, free-flowing highways. Missing from most of these early images, however, were the many cars required to move people around in these increasingly disconnected places and the space to store those cars while not in use. Only now can we see and measure those outcomes." (Pp. 126-127.)
"Demand is a function of price, and this does not cease to be true merely because transportation engineers and urban planners ignore it." (P. 73.)
"Misinterpreting the peak demand for free parking as the demand for parking and then requiring that amount of parking everywhere has led to a planning disaster of epic proportions." (P. 72.)
"Parking spaces outnumber cars, and each space can cost much more than a car parked in it, but planners continue to set parking requirements without considering this cost." (P. 83.)
Off-Street Parking Requirements Deform the Fabric of the City
"A successful Central Business District (CBD) combines large amounts of labor and capital on a small amount of land. CBDs thrive on high density because the prime advantage they offer over other parts of a metropolitan area is proximity - the immediate availability of a wide variety of activities." (Pp. 75-76.)
"The high cost of structured parking gives developers a strong incentive to build in low-density areas where cheaper land allows surface parking, thus encouraging sprawl. Surface lots cost developers less money, but they cost the city more land that could have better uses." (P. 85.)
"Because parking requirements reduce the supply of apartments, they increase the price of housing. On some days, planners think about housing affordability, but on most days they think about parking requirements and forget about housing affordability." (P. 92.)
"Cities thrive when they offer more rather than fewer choices; cities that remove parking requirements will create more diverse and inclusive housing markets, and become more diverse and inclusive places." (P. 212.)
"Would the public interest be better served if parking and housing were unbundled, creating separate markets for each? Vehicles could be parked off the street in parking garages independent of dwelling units." (P. 146.)
Trade-Offs
"Cities seem willing to pay any price and bear any burden to assure the survival of free parking. But do people really want free parking more than affordable housing, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, good urban design, and many other public goals?" (P. 200.)
Hard Work Ahead
"There is a largely unspoken assumption that city governments have an obligation to ensure parking is cheap, plentiful, and convenient at most destinations. In order to realize effective parking reforms and the associated benefits, cities must dispense with this assumption." (P. 111.)
"While there is no silver bullet, repealing minimum parking requirements is a foundational step toward sustainable, affordable, and equitable cities." (P. 124.)
"Fair market prices can end the Hundred Years' War over free curb parking, and the revenue will provide a peace dividend to rebuild our neglected public infrastructure." (P. 282.)
"Like the automobile itself, parking is a good servant but a bad master. Parking should be friendly - easy to find, easy to use, and easy to pay for - but cities should not require or subsidize parking." (P. 203.)
"Trying to reform your own city's parking policies may feel like paddling a canoe to tow an aircraft carrier but if enough people paddle, the ship will move." (P. 500.)
See also Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Parking in San Francisco, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, The Supreme Court and Parking.
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