Shoup argues for a context-dependent approach to the price of parking. Basically, street parking should be priced to match the price of off-street parking so people don’t cruise around looking for a deal and add to traffic and pollution finding a spot, and/or street parking should be priced to produce enough vacancies that people don’t have to cruise (about 15% vacancy). Hence, the price should vary throughout the day, as more and fewer people try to park.

The other big part of his argument is letting developers decide how much parking to build instead of forcing them to build more parking than they think they need to sell/rent their buildings (eliminating the “off-street parking requirements” in zoning codes). This would, for example, reduce the cost of building housing. In the long run, this is supposed to reduce the amount of parking and make it easier to foster a parking market.

The idea isn’t to raise the price of parking per se, but instead to have drivers pay for their own parking directly. Parking is never “free”, it’s always paid for by someone, usually by people who shouldn’t be paying for it. The direct price that drivers pay for parking can ensure that the resource will be under-utilized, or over-utilized.

So, people benefit from his ideas because there will be less traffic (less cruising), less pollution (less driving overall), more land for things besides parking, non-drivers will no longer have to subsidize drivers’ parking, and the meter revenue can be partially or fully returned to the spot where it is collected.

Still, it’s a tough sell politically, as the guy acknowledges in the beginning of his book. He compares the way we do parking planning to the way medicine used to do “lead therapy”.

Shoup is right though, parking is “a fertility drug for cars”. The High Cost of Free Parking (2005) should be required livable streets reading. It’s my second-favorite planning book ever :)

I don’t know, it seems like they blew it so many ways. They just increased the parking cost and stopped there. I live a single train stop away from North Hollywood and there is no advertising or easily accessible information in my neighborhood about getting to NoHo by train, expect if you’re already on the train and pick up some of the pamphlets. Why? I personally lived less than .5 miles from a subway stop for a year before I even realized LA had a subway because it wasn’t even something my apartment manger advertised with the apartment and I didn’t realize the mysterious looking buildings on street level were subway station elevator shafts.

If all the money that the City collects from meters goes downtown into a fiscal blackhole, and the whole Shoupian idea goes with it!

If sending all of the revenue back to the neighborhood doesn’t meet the city’s needs, why not send half back instead? This should go along with signage on the meters that tells people that part of their money is being reinvested in the neighborhood (which the meters in Old Town do).

People are usually wiling to contribute if they feel like they get something out of it.