ACSP Distinguished Educator,2017: Donald Shoup

This essay is the twenty-seventh in a series on the recipients of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Distinguished Educator Award, ACSP’s highest honor. The essays appear in the order the honorees received the award.

There is a moment near the end of “Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?,” a documentary about Noam Chomsky, where Chomsky explains both the movie’s title and one of his career’s signature insights. Early in his career Chomsky noticed a peculiarity, common to all languages, in how humans turn declarations into questions. Everyone understands, for example, that converting “The man who is tall is happy” into “Is the man who is tall happy?” requires moving an “is” from the middle of the sentence to the front. But everyone also understands, instinctively, that we don’t move the “is” that is closest. Computationally, that would be efficient. But it would yield gibberish: “Is the man who tall is happy?” We instead move the “is” that is further away.

For most people, this fact—assuming they even noticed it—would be banal. For Chomsky, it was everything. Whatever was happening when humans formed sentences, it wasn’t linear. He dwelled on it, and the research he produced fundamentally altered linguistics, biology, psychology, and computer science.

He also took a broader lesson: “The world,” he says, “is a very puzzling place, and if you’re willing to be puzzled, you can learn. If you’re not willing to be puzzled, and just copy down what you’re told, or behave the way you’re taught, you just become a replica of someone else’s mind” (Gondry 2013).

I’ve always liked that story, and it has always reminded me of Don Shoup. Don, who has been a professor of Urban Planning at University of California, Los Angeles since 1974, is many things: economist, planner, engineer, mentor, cyclist, and pedestrian. One thing he is assuredly not is a mere replica of someone else’s mind. Over the course of his career, Don has exhibited not just a willingness to be puzzled but a delight in it. A natural nonconformist, good-natured, optimistic, and generous, his delight in being puzzled has led him down paths other academics overlooked. His travels down those paths have profoundly changed the way we understand cities, and inspired a viable movement to improve them.

The puzzles Don has tackled include the timing of development (Shoup 1970), the problem of land assembly (Shoup 2008), and underinvestment in infrastructure (Shoup 1974). But the puzzle that most captured his mind—and that, as anyone who encounters him can attest, still captures his mind—was parking. Parking, pre-Shoup, was a neglected corner of planning academia. Land use researchers considered it a transportation problem. Transportation researchers mostly ignored it. Transportation research instead emphasized the problems of moving vehicles: congestion, pollution, network optimization.

The trouble with that approach is that most vehicles don’t move much. The typical car spends most of its life parked.Which presented a small mystery. If most cars are mostly parked, parking should be one of the largest costs of owning a car. But for most drivers, parking was actually a tiny cost, because it was everywhere. This sheer abundance, in turn, was a puzzle of its own. If parking is so cheap that almost no one pays for it, then by extension almost no one makes money off it. People generally don’t supply goods that make no money. Yet even places with valuable land were awash in parking. Why?

Don provided answers. City governments, he said, made two mistakes with parking. First, they kept their curb parking free or underpriced. Free parking is popular, but also makes residents worry that new development, by bringing new cars, will congest the curb, and make parking difficult. To address that worry (this is the second mistake), cities impose minimum parking requirements—laws that force developers to provide parking on-site with everything they build.

Mystery solved. Cities were combining a price ceiling on the street with a quantity floor off it: holding the price of public parking down while steadily forcing private parking into existence. Small wonder parking was cheap and abundant.

Don’s bigger point, however, was that nothing is really free. Parking requirements were a slow-moving disaster, a disease masquerading as a cure. Parking requirements hid the largest cost of driving in the cost of development, which made driving easier and development harder. They made buildings smaller and pushed buildings apart from each other and back from the street. Rowhouses and garden apartments became de facto illegal; strip malls became almost inevitable. Driving rose, density fell. Parcel by parcel, cities became better places to store cars and worse places to do all the things that make cities worthwhile: live, work, walk, play. In pursuit of a seemingly simple goal (“enough” parking), planners had dramatically changed the American landscape. The postwar built environment, a facsimile of urbanity remade in the car’s image, is to a startling degree the consequence of misguided parking policy.

“Misguided” doesn’t mean “evil.” None of these outcomes, Don emphasized, arose from malice. Bad actors exist, but bad actors aren’t behind every bad result. Sometimes we pull back the curtain on urban problems and just find ordinary people—harried and half-informed, well-intentioned but fallible, doing what we might do in their shoes. Such was the case with parking. Many planners had been tasked with ensuring that every new building had ample parking. Few had been tasked with considering what a city would look like if that happened. And so as the planners did their jobs, we became satisfied with our buildings but disappointed by our cities.

This was a solvable problem, and Don proposed a two-part solution. First, cities should charge market prices for their curb parking, not give it away free. Pricing the curb would prevent shortages, raise public revenue, and remove the justification for minimum parking requirements. Second, with that justification gone, cities could abolish the parking requirements, and unshackle development from its mandate to accommodate cars.

The political obstacle to this reform was simple: people like free curb parking. Why would they agree to prices? Don’s answer: spend curb parking revenue in the neighborhoods where it was collected, on things the residents value. Residents choose free parking, Don said, in part because they never see what they give up by having it. Being offered free parking or nothing is very different from being offered free parking or a steady stream of money for street trees, sidewalk and street repair, or any number of things money can buy.

Don had paired a careful analysis with a series of practical, specific policy recommendations. Naturally, he was for decades almost completely ignored. Then things started to change. In 2005, he published The High Cost of Free Parking (Shoup 2005), a 700-page treatise on urban parking policy. A 700-page parking book might seem an unlikely trigger for a movement, but what happened next affirms Rudi Dornbusch’s truism about economic policy: “Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you think they could” (Staff 2002).

A Shoupian snowball started rolling, and has only gained size and speed. By 2007, the federal government was spending millions to pilot dynamically priced curb parking. In 2008 a Facebook group (“The Shoupistas”) formed spontaneously to spread Don’s ideas. (It currently has 5,800 members). A more legislatively oriented group, the Parking Reform Network, formed to do the same. Parking requirements became the bete noir of a new generation of urbanists, and governments large and small began overturning them. Buffalo went first among bigger U.S. jurisdictions, but San Francisco, San Diego, and the state of Oregon soon followed. Then, in September 2022, came a monumental act of reform: the state of California, a pacesetter for the United States and an epicenter of auto-oriented development, abolished parking requirements within a half-mile of transit. The governor, in signing the legislation, called it essential to meeting California’s climate and affordability goals. Undoing a century of error will take time, but a giant ship is changing course, tacking slowly away from the iceberg in front of it.

It would be an exaggeration to say that all this reform begins with Don. But it wouldn’t be a huge one. Don’s work has changed cities because Don is, however improbably, a consummate activist scholar. Almost every planning academic, if asked, says they want their work turned into action. But most of us, when push comes to shove, succumb to our incentive structure, and write for other academics. Academia, first and foremost, rewards being published, and after that being cited. Being read ranks a distant third, being understood is a silly luxury, and being acted upon is a pipe dream. All of us know this, and many of us act accordingly.

At the risk of sounding cynical, there are two ways to get ahead in academia: be so vague that no one can be sure you’re wrong, or be so clear that no one can doubt you’re right. The former is easier, but it can only get you published and cited. It can’t lead to actual change. Ambiguity can be protective (your errors are hidden) and occasionally deceptive (some readers, because they’re confused, will think you’re smart). But it can’t be transformative, because transformation requires reform, reform requires action, and actions can’t be ambiguous. Actions are clear and specific—what exactly should we do?

Don Shoup is clear and specific: price the curb. Abolish the parking requirements. Invest in the neighborhoods. Don doesn’t talk about himself much (why do that when you could talk about parking?), but if pressed he’ll attribute his success to a combination of longevity and perseverance. I think those matter, and Don is persistent. He talks constantly with planners, advocates, and elected officials, and he has devoted thousands of hours and airplane miles to the cause of parking reform. But there is more to his story than that.

What truly sets Don apart is his relentless pursuit of clarity. Don Shoup is different because he is always writing for everybody. Other academics, yes—but also undergrads, advocates, planners, elected officials. Random people who might spontaneously form a thousands-strong Facebook group. He wants to be so clear that no one can doubt he’s right. A Don Shoup article isn’t written just to be published, or to convince readers Don Shoup is smart. It’s written to change people’s minds, and to give them the tools to act once their minds have changed. This is generous, and democratic, and it works: Don has shown that when we give people knowledge, they will use it, and the world will, in small steps, get better.

I’ve known Don for more than twenty years, and I can say without reservation that there is no one in academia to whom I owe more. He was my first teacher in graduate school, my dissertation advisor, and he is now, to my great fortune, my colleague a few doors down the hall. Though technically retired, he’s still on campus most days, setting a simple but powerful example for the rest of us: Find a puzzle. Find a solution. Tell everyone.