Parking and the City

Donald Shoup brilliantly overcame the challenge of writing about parking without being boring in his iconoclastic 800-page book The High Cost of Free Parking. Easy to read and often entertaining, the book showed that city parking policies subsidize cars, encourage sprawl, degrade urban design, prohibit walkability, damage the economy, raise housing costs, and penalize people who cannot afford or choose not to own a car. Using careful analysis and creative thinking, Shoup recommended three parking reforms: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2) charge the right prices for on-street parking, and (3) spend the meter revenue to improve public services on the metered streets.

Parking and the City reports on the progress that cities have made in adopting these three reforms. The successful outcomes provide convincing evidence that Shoup''s policy proposals are not theoretical and idealistic but instead are practical and realistic. The good news about ou