Donald Shoup's (1938-2025) 2005 book The High Cost of Free Parking (available for free here) is genuinely one of my favorite non-fiction books of all time even while it concerns one of the most mundane topics imaginable: off-street parking requirements in zoning. I remember reading a couple of interviews of Donald Shoup discussing his book after stumbling upon it on Reddit in late aughts, but as a high school student I hesitated reading the book as it was near 900 pages in length. But as soon I saw that its fan page boasted over 8,000 members - remarkable for an academic book of any kind - I came to see that it must be a most unusual book to arouse such a passionate fanbase. That was, indeed, entirely correct.

To understand the importance of the topic of parking regulations, it is helpful to go back to the beginning. Soon after cars became popular, the perennial troubles of automobility started: traffic congestion and cruising for parking in the hope of a free spot. To solve the latter issue, the city of Columbus, Ohio came up with a seemingly perfect solution through a new kind of zoning requirement in 1928: demanding developers to provide enough off-street parking to make sure any motorist could always find a spot. This was received well at a time and seemed to work perfectly. But overtime cracks started to become visible. The concept, when adopted at a wide scale, started choking cities, worsen congestion, increase rent and inequality, and make everything but driving more unaffordable. Besides the quantitative issues of costs both in money and time, the requirements wrecked havoc equally on the qualitative issues of urban aesthetics, function and historical preservation. Worse still, despite being one of the main tasks of urban planners as a profession, the requirements were often based on no more solid empirical grounding than that of copying the regulations of some other town.

How costly were the regulations? To the tune of 300 billion dollars per year in the United States in 2004 for off-street parking requirements alone. (Subsidized on-street parking being another 100 billion dollars.) The sum was close enough in size to the US defense budgets. This sum include merely the direct costs, which doesn't include homelessness, injuries, pollution and climate change, congestion, noise, and worse transit and public services in general.

How could this be? When a developer has to provide subsidized off-street parking through off-street parking requirements, the costs become bundled with the price of all other urban goods and services, from apartments either bought or rented to movie tickets and hair cuts. In a sense, those who don't drive or drive less, pay for the parking of drivers. The subsidy incentivizes every household to acquire a car, but as the ones who could do so are wealthier, the regulation became a source of upward transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from inner cities to suburbs and from the disabled to able-bodied people.

Shoup came up not only with an able in-depth critique, but also an elegant three prong list of solutions, each one supporting the other two but independent of them:

1. Abolish off-street parking requirements concerning the number and locations of parking spots. Only regulate their quality, safety and accessibility, including providing parking for the disabled.
2. Charge a price for on-street parking so that one in seven parking spots remains free. This keeps the spaces both available and encourages turn-over. Adjust the price according both by time and place to balance the supply and demand.
3. Collect 50-80% of the parking revenue for the public use of the neighborhood it was collected from. Pay for public improvements or transit services. Give rest of the money for poorer neighborhoods or the general funds of the city. This is significant revenue, easily over 1000$ per year per a parking spot. Spent in the neighborhood it could be transformative.

Shoup's achievement is taking a problem rarely considered, showing that it is quite immense in scale -difficult to unsee once one becomes aware it, indeed -demonstrating the many iatrogenic effects of current policy and finally providing not only an elegant solution list, but many other further proposals. He also provided an analysis of the political economy reasons behind the persistence of off-street parking regulations, providing a sketch to create a coalition to overcome the status quo and reinvigorate cities.

Since the release of the book, it has been influential in the real world despite the powerful opposition. Many cities around the world have adopted its policies and curtailed parking in general from Paris to Mexico city or even the state of Oregon. One of the fans included Ilhan Omar, who gifted a copy to each of the members of the Minneapolis city council. The city in turn abolished parking requirements across the whole city.

Shoup's book was to me also an introduction to the thought of Henry George, the radical 19th century land reformer, who most famously proposed basic income and socializing land. His reformist demand was to replace all taxes by a single tax on land. While his programme is logically subsumed within those of more radical than him such as Marx and the anarchists, reading him and later Georgists did convince me that land based rentiers and productive capital do not function the same within our economy, thus calling into the question the two-factorism of labor and capital held in common by both Marxists and the neoclassical. The overuse of land figures into most of ecological problems and many social ones as well. Land based critiques of politics are, in my experience, just as if not more effective than capital based ones and Georgist arguments are very dependable for getting people to question the system. Any future for socialism must deal with both land and capital at the same time and I thank Shoup for introducing me to George at an opportune time. Basic income and land taxation to me are the horizon of feasible non-reformist reforms.

My own political views have developed since my high school years to a more radical direction, but across all the reformist proposals on the local level of politics, Donald Shoup created some of the finest ones. Any future struggle and survival will become easier the sooner his ideas become practiced. Until we have the opportunity to exceed them, we can benefit from them as a part of demands for the right to city.

At last, let me admire the book one more time. Nearly 900 page book on parking policy becoming an influential academic hit is absurd. It's a real page turner: I read it over a weekend and became politically reoriented overnight. Shoup is even kind to readers, offering humor to readers between chapters. After all, if you become the foremost parking guru on the planet, why keep the amusing parts to yoursel? If I ever write a non-fiction book and my publisher lets get away with it, I will aspire to do the same for my readers.

I never got the chance to write to Shoup, though I regret it now as I my town had a parking related zoning corruption scandal which was, if nothing else, very juicy and yet another example of perverse effects of parking minimums. I am sure he could have appreciated the story. In lieue of that, let this be my appreciation.