Richard Willson

Donald Shoup proved that free parking is not free and that minimum parking requirements make housing more expensive. Willson took on the next and harder step: how that rule is actually changed in a specific city, with its shopkeepers, its residents and its staff, without the attempt sinking at the first public meeting.

His technical argument is devastating in its simplicity. The parking minimums most cities apply come from manuals that measured peak occupancy at free car parks outside American suburban shopping centres on the busiest days. That number was copied for decades, applied to dense districts with public transport, and never rechecked. Willson measured actual occupancy and found empty spaces everywhere, paid for inside the price of every home.

A professor of urban and regional planning at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he has chaired his department, Willson combines research with consultancy for city governments, and his books are written as process manuals rather than essays.

Parking Reform Made Easy (2013) gives the procedure: how to count spaces, how to calculate a project's real demand, how to draft the new ordinance and how to explain it. Parking Management for Smart Growth (2015) adds the management tools, from variable pricing to car parks shared between uses with different timetables. A Guide for the Idealist (2018) is a different book, addressed to young planners on how to hold on to your convictions inside a bureaucracy.