Parking Policies: Shoup, Willson and Urban Mobility

Parking policies are one of the most effective and least visible tools for transforming urban mobility, because every car spends 95 percent of its life parked and the number, price and location of spaces decide how many cars enter the city. Two American researchers built that idea: Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of The High Cost of Free Parking (2005), who showed that free parking is a hidden subsidy to the car, and Richard Willson, a professor at Cal Poly Pomona and author of Parking Reform Made Easy (2013), who explained how to reform the parking minimums that zoning codes impose on every building.

Donald Shoup: parking is never free

Shoup starts from a calculation: parking is never free, only free for the person parking. Each surface space costs thousands of euros and each underground space tens of thousands, and that cost is paid by everyone, in the price of housing, shopping and rent, whether they drive or not. His study of downtowns showed that up to a third of traffic in some areas consists of drivers cruising for a space. His three reforms are to charge for on-street parking the price that keeps about 15 percent of spaces free, to return the revenue to the neighbourhood where it is collected and to abolish the parking minimums that force spaces to be built in every development.

Richard Willson: reforming parking minimums

Willson focuses on the minimums. Since the 1950s, the codes of almost every city require a number of spaces per home, per square metre of retail or per restaurant seat, calculated for the peak hour of a suburban shopping mall, and that requirement raises housing costs, prevents the reuse of old buildings, spreads the city and guarantees room for the car before the car exists. His method proposes replacing minimums with maximums or with zero, managing existing parking shared among uses with different schedules and tying each space to real transport alternatives, without removing supply where there is no bus or bike lane.

SFpark, Mexico City, Zurich and Amsterdam: reform under way

Cities have begun to apply those ideas. San Francisco launched in 2011 the SFpark system of prices varying with occupancy. Mexico City abolished parking minimums citywide in 2017 and replaced them with maximums. Buffalo, Minneapolis and dozens of American cities have scrapped minimums since 2017. Zurich has capped the number of downtown spaces since 1996, and Amsterdam removes thousands of on-street spaces each year for bikes, trees and terraces. The results show less cruising traffic, more housing built on previously unviable plots and more public space.

Gradual implementation: alternatives, revenue to the neighbourhood and explanation

Both authors warn about implementation. Removing parking without transport alternatives generates resistance and can hurt retail if unplanned; charging on the street without returning revenue to the neighbourhood is perceived as a tax rather than an improvement; and reform must be gradual and explained, because free parking is experienced as an acquired right. Willson insists that every change come with visible improvements in bus, cycling and pavements, and Shoup that parking benefit districts, such as Pasadena's, show residents that the money collected pays for their streets.

The lesson of Shoup and Willson is that parking is not a technical matter of traffic management but the decision that sets how much space and money a city devotes to the car. Charging what it costs, ceasing to mandate its construction and returning the freed land to more valuable uses, housing, green space, sustainable transport, is the policy that changes mobility most with the least investment, and the cities that have applied it show that the initial fear turns into better streets.