AirGarage Remembers Professor Donald Shoup

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Professor Donald Shoup at the age of 83. Last year, we were honored to host a fireside chat with him at AirGarage. In his memory, we’re sharing our notes from that unrecorded conversation.

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July 7, 2023

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Today we had a special guest at our AirGarage All Hands: Donald Shoup.

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Who is Donald Shoup?

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He’s the author of The High Cost of Free Parking and is the preeminent thinker on parking land use in America.

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Professor Shoup got into parking opportunistically.

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While writing his PhD on land use in the United States, he realized that parking was the single largest use of land there was. Given the amount of parking in the US, it seemed like a massive opportunity for further research.

But nobody was talking about or thinking about parking. Professor Shoup even said “parking is a bottom feeder thing to talk about”.

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But that means there is a lot of opportunity because there is so little competition paying attention to how we use parking in the US.

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Shoup’s work has caused parking to become a more popular topic over time. It’s a hot enough topic now that news outlets make snappy videos about his research.

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His and others’ research also has given us a vocabulary and frameworks to discuss parking and the impact parking policy has on society for the first time.

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During the All Hands, Professor Shoup asked an interesting thought experiment: If you were hired to advise Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller in the early 1900s on what policies they could lobby to enact in the US to maximize car and oil sales, what would those policies be?

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Based on the hindsight knowledge we have now, it’s clear what has led to the domination of America by the car:

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1. Zoning rules that separate land uses so people have to live far away from where they work and where they shop

2. Ban density so everything we build has to be spread out

3. Once everyone has to drive because things are far away, institute Minimum Parking Requirements so there is always plenty of parking at every destination and also so the parking lots create even more space between buildings.

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When these policies were enacted in the mid 20th century, they all seemed innocuous enough. They were meant to create safer, healthier cities, in theory.

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But in reality they caused an oversupply of parking and made everyone dependent on their car to get around.

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The reason they are politically unpopular is obvious: nobody wants to pay for parking.

“Not even me or any of you at AirGarage,” Shoup said.

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On top of that, there is a mental fallacy because it seems like there is no cost to provide the parking. We basically think, “if the spot goes empty, it goes to waste, so why shouldn’t I be able to park here for free?”

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That is where Shoup’s research has come in to propose solutions. harging for parking is optimal despite its unpopularity because charging the market price will ensure:

1. there is always a parking space available for the next driver

2. there is high utilization

So, how do you make instituting paid parking more popular?

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Shoup suggests Parking Benefit Districts wherein cities direct the revenue generated by local parking fees toward local improvements to the neighborhood, infrastructure, and transit that will benefit the residents.

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In this way, you can turn a cost for a small group of people into a benefit for many people and change the political balance of the policy (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-24/how-parking-benefit-districts-could-transform-new-york-city).

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The coolest part of our All Hands with Donald Shoup was all the questions he had for us about AirGarage.

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We are the only parking company that has sophisticated, data driven dynamic pricing which means we also have unique data sets that are interesting for research!

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We have looked up to Donald Shoup since we founded AirGarage back in 2017, so this really was a surreal moment for us as founders, being able to talk to Donald Shoup live and even discuss the idea of him and his students using our locations near UCLA for research.

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If you want to learn more about parking and how it affects urban land use, Donald Shoup wrote the seminal book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193236496X.

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