Tolls may be an idea that some people and some cities are finally willing to debate, but free parking remains the blind spot in urban and transportation planning. I'd heard various estimates (four, eight, 13) for the number of parking spots per car in North America, and I have to admit that, initially, I was shocked. After all, like most people, when I'm driving around hunting for a legal space – all the while burning fossil fuels, spewing emissions and adding to the traffic congestion – it never occurs to me that North American cities devote so much space to parking.
But the typical driver has a parking spot at home and one at work (usually bigger than the cubicle he or she spends all day in) as well as shared spots at malls, stores, restaurants and even churches.
We're so accustomed to abundant free parking that we resist paying for it, hate looking for it and, most of all, dread getting tickets. As Donald Shoup, America's parking guru, told me, "Everybody thinks parking is a personal problem, not a policy problem." But everybody is wrong.
Born in California in 1938, Shoup was living in Honolulu when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. Now a professor at UCLA's urban planning department and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking, he has a growing band of followers who call themselves Shoupistas even though the market-oriented policies he advocates could best be summed up by the battle cry, "Charge whatever the traffic will bear."
He'd offered to arrange "free (or rather fully subsidized) parking" for me, but I wanted to take the bus in order to experience public transit in Los Angeles. I made it to UCLA 45 minutes early and spent the time checking out the campus, and then went up to his office and found a bald man with a grey beard sitting at a desk that had a radio in the shape of a parking meter on it.
Shoup isn't sure what the ratio of parking spots to cars is – he suspects it's at least three or four to one, probably more – but he knows it's too high. He's also convinced that free parking not only encourages people to drive, it's actually expensive because subsidizing it costs the economy more than the U.S. government devotes to Medicare.
Turning to his computer, he showed me aerial photos of several cities to demonstrate how much land we waste just to give drivers a place to leave their wheels. "Parking is the single-biggest land use in almost any city and almost everybody has ignored it," he told me. "It's like dark matter in the universe: We know there's something there, and it seems to weigh a lot, but we don't know what it is. If only we could get our hands on it."
While he was at his computer, he also gave me a virtual tour of the Old Town Pasadena neighbourhood, with before and after photos that showed how it had gone from skid row to upscale destination.
ONE OF HIS IDEAS was instrumental in that transformation. The city faced a common problem: Parking was free, but the few merchants who were still in business complained that it was inadequate. The people who worked in the stores took most of the spots, leaving customers to drive around searching for one – or just staying away. Meanwhile, the city had a vision of a revitalized downtown but no money to repair sidewalks, plant trees, increase security or take any of the other steps necessary to attract people.
Shoup recommended charging enough for parking to maintain an 85 per cent occupancy rate and using the money shoppers dropped in the meters to improve the neighbourhood. The revenue couldn't go into the city's general coffers; it had to be spent on the streets.
Once that happened, the business community started to invest, too – even sandblasting and renovating derelict buildings – and soon the shop owners, who had initially opposed meters, wanted to charge for parking until midnight. They wanted the money for the improvements, but they also discovered that their fears about scaring away customers were unfounded – anyone who really wanted to shop or eat in the area was willing to invest a few quarters.
As the area became more popular, the meters raised more money for more improvements, which increased the popularity. And so on. The city now collects one million dollars a year to pay for upkeep that includes sweeping the sidewalks nightly and steam-cleaning them twice a month.
In Calvin Trillin's Tepper Isn't Going Out, a slight but charming novel about a man who becomes a New York folk hero because of his parking acumen, once Murray Tepper finds a parking spot, he just sits there and enjoys it. But when Shoup and I talked about the book, he pointed out that Tepper wouldn't have stayed put so long if Manhattan charged the right price for street parking. The right price is the one that means there are always one or two open spots per block. Since the cost encourages turnover, time limits are unnecessary; in fact, any place that needs to impose time limits is not charging enough.
A city should adjust the rate every quarter to ensure the 15 per cent vacancy rate, always letting the market decide the price. "Nobody can tell you what the right price of gold is, or the right price of wheat or apples," he argued. "It just happens."
Free off-street parking isn't something that just happens, though, because planning departments always insist that developers include a minimum number of parking spots. Shoup doesn't have much respect for the ability of urban planners to determine how many spots are necessary. Since planners don't learn anything about parking in school, they learn it on the job, but because parking is so political – NIMBY neighbours constantly squawk at the thought of anyone parking on their street – what they really learn is the politics of parking.
"Planning will be looked back on as worse than phrenology, because phrenology didn't do any harm," he said, referring to the nineteenth-century pseudoscience that claimed to be able to determine character and other traits from the size and shape of a cranium.
The harm abundant free parking does feeds on itself: All that land dedicated to parking, which often sits empty for much of the day, increases sprawl, and that sprawl makes alternatives such as public transit and walking less feasible, which forces more people into cars, which increases the need for more parking.
Again, Shoup argued that the market should decide: Freed from the arbitrary and capricious demands of the planners, developers will put in the right amount of parking – enough to meet their customers' needs, but not so much that they waste valuable space or money.
When the Westfield San Francisco Centre reopened in September 2006 after a major renovation, it was triple the size, featured high-profile tenants such as Bloomingdale's and expected 25 million visitors a year – all without adding any new parking. A lot of people shook their heads at that, but the mall is close to 32 transit lines and sits across the street from a large parking garage that was rarely anywhere close to full.
In 1992, the state of California adopted another Shoupism: Under the parking cash-out law, companies that pay for employees' parking must offer the equivalent in cash to nonparkers. So someone who works for a firm that pays $150 a month for each spot in an underground lot can opt to forgo the spot and pocket the cash. After the law came in, 13 per cent of employees took the money – most switching to car pools or taking public transit, though a few started riding a bike or walking to work.
ALTHOUGH HIS ideas seem like so much common sense, Shoup still feels they're underappreciated. Many places want to thrive the way Old Town Pasadena has, but few realize how crucial the meter money was to that success.
Still, he knows some planners are curious because he receives more invitations to speak than he can accept. Cities pay him large lecture fees, fly him first class and then wine him and dine him, but they don't all do what he suggests because parking is so political.
"All I can do is go and say, 'You're doing everything wrong,' " said Shoup, who rides a bike about three kilometres to campus, puts just 5,600 kilometres a year on his Infiniti, and admitted that he's often mistaken as an enemy of the car. He insists he's not; it's just that people would live differently – read: drive less – if they had to pay for parking.
The good news is that all that parking space is an accidental land reserve for housing that can bring in tax revenue even as it helps ease traffic congestion, air pollution and energy dependence.
"The nice thing is that when cities adopt what I'm saying" – he snapped his fingers – "like that, it works."
