Your Free Parking Costs Way More Than You Think: Shoup's Numbers

Free parking costs far more than you think, because on a Tuesday at midnight the supermarket lot has two hundred painted stalls, three cars and one lamppost, covers more ground than the housing block across the street, pays almost no tax, generates no street life and soaks up heat all summer, and somebody once judged it essential. Donald Shoup, the economist who wrote The High Cost of Free Parking (2005), calculated the figure that captures the whole matter: in the United States, the area of off-street parking per car exceeds the area of housing per person. The question is what land where nobody lives is worth, and who is paying for it.

Running the numbers: half a hectare of white lines on grey

Run the numbers on that lot. A single stall takes about twelve square metres, but with manoeuvring aisles each car consumes roughly thirty, so two hundred stalls mean around six thousand square metres, more than half a hectare, an order of magnitude rather than a design. On that surface an ordinary four-storey neighbourhood building could hold close to a hundred homes with ground-floor shops and a courtyard, or around two hundred shade trees, or a nursery school, a health centre and a square, all of it currently painted white on grey waiting for cars that rarely arrive together.

The vicious circle: minimums copied from tables, not from need

Almost no parking lot exists because a developer freely chose it; it exists because planning rules demand it. Ordinances set a minimum number of stalls per dwelling, per square metre of office, per shop unit, figures that come not from any local study of need but from tables copied between municipalities across decades. Shoup exposed the vicious circle: peak parking demand is measured where parking is free, that peak becomes a binding requirement, and so there is always surplus space and never a price, a prophecy that fulfils itself, written into the regulations.

Who pays: seventy thousand dollars a stall and a third more per flat

The cost is not symbolic. Recent estimates from California put the construction cost of one underground stall above seventy thousand dollars on average, land excluded, and an above-ground structured stall around fifty thousand; translated into housing, mandated parking adds between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars per flat, and Shoup had already calculated that the requirement raises construction costs by roughly a third when the garage sits above ground and by more than half when it is buried.

That surcharge is folded into the sale price or the rent whether you own a car or not: people who never drive pay for the garages of people who do. The effects on urban form run as deep: in many mid-sized North American cities off-street parking covers more than a third of downtown land, producing a centre with broken teeth, building, gap, building, gap, where walking becomes absurd, street-level commerce disappears and continuous asphalt turns the centre into a heat island.

Buffalo, Mexico City, Minneapolis and the counterargument

There is evidence about what happens when the requirement is dropped. Buffalo, New York, abolished its parking minimums in 2017, and a study of the projects that followed found that developers built fewer than half the stalls the old rule demanded and that most of the new homes would have been illegal under the previous code, not for their height or use but for failing to bring enough cars with them. More than a hundred municipalities in several countries, from Mexico City to Minneapolis, have since removed these minimums, and the evidence shows that without the mandate parking still gets built, but only the parking somebody is willing to pay for.

The counterargument deserves serious treatment: if a new building supplies no stalls, its residents will park on the street, a limited public resource already used by earlier neighbours, and in peripheries poorly served by public transport a car is no luxury but the only way to reach work, so reform without buses and rail merely shifts the problem onto the pavement.

It can still be argued that the answer is not forcing garages to be built but managing public space, as Shoup proposed: charge for kerbside parking at a price that always keeps a stall or two free, and return that revenue to the neighbourhood as pavements, trees or lighting, so the district sees a concrete benefit and stops defending free asphalt as an acquired right. Free parking is never free; the question is only who pays for it, and today it is everyone who does not drive.