Donald Shoup
A surprising amount of traffic isn't caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather it is caused by people who have already arrived. Our streets are congested, in part, by people who have gotten where they want to be but are cruising around looking for a place to park.
Michael Manville and Donald Shoup
The pop culture image of Los Angeles is an ocean of malls, cars, and exit ramps; of humorless tract homes and isolated individuals whose only solace is aimless driving on endless freeways. From Joan Didion to the Sierra Club, LA has been held up as a poster child of sprawl. This is an arresting and romantic narrative, but also largely untrue.
To the extent that anyone has a definition of sprawl, it usually revolves around the absence of density, and Los Angeles has since the 1980s been the densest urbanized area in the United States. This would make it the least sprawling city in America. Compared to other US cities, LA also does not have inordinately high rates of automobile ownership.
Douglas Kolozsvari and Donald Shoup
The money you put into a parking meter seems to vanish into thin air. No one knows where the money goes, and everyone would rather park free, so politicians find it easier to require ample off-street parking than to charge market prices at meters. But if each neighborhood could keep all the parking revenue it generates, a powerful new constituency would emerge—neighborhoods that receive the revenue. Cities can change the politics of parking if they earmark parking revenue for public improvements in the metered neighborhoods.
Donald Shoup
How far is it from San Diego to San Francisco? An estimate of 632.125 miles is precise—but not accurate. An estimate of somewhere between 400 and 500 miles is less precise but more accurate because the correct answer is 460 miles. Nevertheless, if you had no idea how far it is from San Diego to San Francisco, whom would you believe: someone who confidently says 632.125 miles, or someone who tentatively says somewhere between 400 and 500 miles? Probably the first, because precision implies certainty.
Although reporting estimates with extreme precision indicates confidence in their accuracy, transportation engineers and urban planners often use precise numbers to report uncertain estimates. To illustrate this practice, I will draw on two manuals published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE)— Parking Generation and Trip Generation. These manuals have enormous practical consequences for transportation and land use. Urban planners rely on parking generation rates to establish off-street parking requirements, and transportation planners rely on trip generation rates to predict traffic effects of proposed developments. Many transportation models also incorporate trip generation rates. Yet a close look at the data shows that unwarranted trust in these precise but uncertain estimates of travel behavior can lead to bad transportation, parking, and land-use policies.
Jeffrey R. Brown,
Daniel Baldwin Hess, and
Donald Shoup
Imagine a transportation program that increases transit ridership, reduces traffic congestion, saves energy, cleans the air, and costs very little. Many American colleges offer such a program, and they have given it a variety of names—such as BruinGO, UPass, ClassPass, and SuperTicket. We refer collectively to these programs as Unlimited Access.
Unlimited Access turns student identification cards into public transit passes. The university pays the transit agency an annual lump sum based on expected student ridership, and the transit agency accepts student identification cards as transit passes. For every student on any day, a bus ride to campus (or anywhere else) is free. Unlimited Access is not free transit, but is instead a new way to pay for transit.
Donald Shoup and
Seth Stark
Vehicle ownership increased much faster in the US than in other nations during the 20th century. For every 1,000 persons, the US had 87 vehicles in 1920, 325 vehicles in 1950, and 767 in 1995. Ownership rates in 28 other nations in 1995 are noted in the accompanying graph to correspond with the year in which the US had the same rate. For example, in 1995 Bangladesh had the same vehicle-ownership rate as the US in 1905, Argentina the same as the US in 1925, and Denmark the same as the US in 1956.
Donald Shoup
We Americans first learn about free parking when we play Monopoly. Players pay rent, buy houses, build hotels, or go to jail after a toss of the dice, and one toss out of forty lands us on “Free Parking.” The odds of landing on free parking increase dramatically when we begin to drive cars because—notwithstanding the experience of commuters in some large cities—American motorists park free on 99 percent of all trips.
Donald Shoup
Chances are you drive to work alone and park free when you get there. Ninety-one percent of commuters in the United States travel to work by automobile, 92 percent of commuters’ automobiles have only one occupant, and 94 percent of automobile commuters park free at work. Employers provide 85 million free parking spaces for commuters. The resulting tax-exempt parking subsidies are worth $31.5 billion a year.
Donald Shoup
Have you ever wondered how much urban land is devoted to streets and parking? I realize there are many problems inherent in calculating this sort of statistic. For example, it’s not clear whether a driveway alongside a house should be counted as a street or as parking, or maybe as neither, because some driveways serve primarily as open space between adjacent houses and are rarely used by cars. Nevertheless, it would be good to have even a rough estimate of the share of urban land in streets and parking.
Donald Shoup
Ask anyone to define a livable city. Some will say clean air and safe streets. Others will mention good restaurants, affordable housing, pleasant parks, or less traffic congestion. But, chances are, they'll all agree on one thing - plenty of free parking.