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The Prophet of Parking: A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup

A eulogy for the great Donald Shoup

From his stuffy office on the fifth floor of the Luskin School of Public Affairs at UCLA, he had chosen to make parking the focus of his studies—an impossibly boring topic, even by the low standards of a city planning department. Yet by the final accounting, Shoup has a strong claim on being the scholar who will have had the greatest impact on your day-to-day life, radically changing how we approach the unglamorous problem of how and where we park our cars—and, in turn, where we can live, how we move about, and the form our cities take. The result was a rare win for San Francisco governance: We know from pilot areas that implementing demand-based pricing reduced congestion and parking citations while speeding up transit and increasing overall sales tax revenue.

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