Free parking versus free markets.

• Author: Klein Daniel B.
• Position: The High Cost of Free Parking - Book review

Donald Shoup is a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a doctorate in economics from Yale. He has spent several decades researching parking, a subject on which he has long been known as the authority within transportation and planning fields. Now he has poured his learning into a massive book, The High Cost of Free Parking (Chicago: Planners Press of the American Planning Association, 2005).

The book persuades me that the impact of parking polices is much greater than I thought. Fundamentally, the policies in question are these two: city governments, first, mismanage curb parking and, second, require developers to provide extensive off-street parking.

Pesky policy wonkery? Shoup shows that the magnitudes are huge. Approximately 87 percent of all trips in the United States are made by personal motor vehicles, and parking is free for 99 percent of these trips (p. 590). Free parking is not, however, a spontaneous outcome. The required parking lot at a restaurant usually occupies at least three times as much land as the restaurant itself Shoup reckons this excessive set-aside a subsidy to parking, and he estimates the U.S. total of this subsidy to be between $127 billion and $374 billion a year. "If we also count the subsidy for free and underpriced curb parking, the total subsidy for parking would be far higher.... Do we really want to spend as much to subsidize parking as we spend for Medicare or national defense?" (p. 591)

Like freeways and free schooling, free parking is not free. "We don't pay for parking in our role as motorists, but in all our other roles--as consumers, investors, workers, residents, and taxpayers--we pay a high price" (p. 2). Meanwhile, when motorists drive downtown and cannot find a parking spot, they curse and increase congestion, exactly as they do on freeways.

The extent of free parking is so enormous and so normal that people think of it as nature's endowment, like air. Everyone feels entitled to free air and free parking. Hence, "most people do not see it as being any subsidy at all" (p. 591). The upshot, however, is that "[b]ecause parking costs so much and motorists pay so little for it, the hidden subsidy is truly gigantic" (p. 591). Yet scholars hardly notice parking at all. Having surveyed various leading textbooks and sources, Shoup concludes: "Somehow, the urban land use with the biggest footprint and a profound effect on the transportation system has been invisible to scholars in every discipline" (p. 25).

Parking requirements "increase traffic congestion and air pollution, distort urban form, degrade urban design, increase housing costs, limit homeownership, damage the urban economy, harm the central business district, and penalize poor families" (p. 592). Mandated on-site parking "skews travel choices toward cars and away from public transit, cycling, and walking" (pp. 2-3).

Shoup's book is marvelous and wonderful. It explains that parking policy is stuck in a self-feeding cycle. It brilliantly criticizes the culture of parking policymakers. It tells all facets of the history. It provides theoretical underpinnings. It displays rich empirical evidence. It makes novel connections and illuminates old issues. It bubbles with illustrations, cultural allusions, and ripe quotations. And its 734 pages are gracefully written. It is one of the best policy books I know. The book represents a life's work in understanding the problem and enlightening the public.

Spontaneous Order Forsaken

The main thrust of Shoup's analysis is that parking should be left to the invisible hand. He wants to remove zoning requirements for off-street parking. As for the street, he does not propose full-fledged privatization, but something in that direction. The government should create local districts that receive the revenue of paid street parking and use that revenue for district improvements. Thus, Shoup advocates a radically decentralized form of government control and residual claimancy. The virtues he describes are precisely the virtues of private ownership. Why not just privatize? (More on that question later.)

Shoup explains that parking requirements are "a disastrous substitute for million of individual decisions--by developers, merchants, employers, and drivers--about how much a parking space is worth" (p. 497). In the proposed arrangement, parking will be a spontaneous order:

* "Parking will increasingly become unbundled from other transactions, and professional operators will manage more of the parking supply" (p. 496).

* "Emancipation from parking requirements will especially encourage adaptive reuse and infill development in older areas where providing more parking is difficult and will also favor development at locations with good public transit" (p. 498).

* "If cities charge market prices for curb parking, drivers will usually be able to find an available space near their destination" (pp. 14-15).

* "To solve the curb parking commons problems without imposing inept land-use regulations, cities can instead let the market do some work for the public good" (p. 594).

Binding Minimums

Perhaps the surest...