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UCLA Urban Planning Professor, Donald Shoup, advocates for a different way to view parking the cars we drive. While he freely admits that nobody likes to pay for parking, he feels strongly that the cost of parking is embedded in our lifestyle and that abundant free parking comes with a very dear price. This week on Sea Change Radio, Alex Wise speaks with Donald Shoup, parking policy authority and author of The High Cost of Free Parking. They discuss the environmental impact of free parking and Shoup offers a rational for revising traditional approaches to urban planning.
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alex wise, donald shoup, high cost of free parking, parking policy, urban planning
With all due respect to Professor Shoup, he is an academic moonshot. I say this because he seems to think that “free” parking encourages a certain lifestyle. He does not seem to understand that “free” parking is already priced in to every thing we consume. If this was a real problem, the market, ie the consumers, would not support it. Real simple.
Why is he trying to complicate things? Publish or perish? Grants? (sorry, that was cheap).
Yirgach: what you are missing is that people “support” the auto-sprawl system because it has critical mass. There is no other viable lifestyle. One problem, though, it is unsustainable. As free transit grows, the critical mass tipping point will be reached, and the massive autosprawl subsidy will be exposed to all and rejected. And, if you watch the video “taken for a ride” you will see that the auto-system was imposed by force, not by the “free” market.