The High Cost of Free Parking, Updated Edition

Written by Donald Shoup

Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

In this no-holds-barred treatise, Donald Shoup argues that free parking has contributed to auto dependence, rapid urban sprawl, extravagant energy use, and a host of other problems. Planners mandate free parking to alleviate congestion but end up distorting transportation choices, debasing urban design, damaging the economy, and degrading the environment. Ubiquitous free parking helps explain why our cities sprawl on a scale fit more for cars than for people, and why American motor vehicles now consume one-eighth of the world's total oil production. But it doesn't have to be this way. Shoup proposes new ways for cities to regulate parking—namely, charge fair market prices for curb parking, use the resulting revenue to pay for services in the neighborhoods that generate it, and remove zoning requirements for off-street parking. Such measures, according to the Yale-trained economist and UCLA planning professor, will make parking easier and driving less necessary. Join the swelling ranks of Shoupistas by picking up this book today. You'll never look at a parking spot the same way again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469098227

Reviews for The High Cost of Free Parking, Updated Edition

[moshepit20 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wow! It took me an entire month to read this book. I had read so many other books about parking and cars and they all mentioned this book and I can see why. This is seriously like the bible of cars and parking. I learned so much from it and I think Donald provides a lot of really good evidence showing why parking is an issue and why it doesn't have to be by making smarter choices about parking that are economically and environmentally friendlier. Could the book have been shorts by a few hundred pages? Absolutely, but it was still a good read.

[devil_llama · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book would have benefited from being run through a slicer; it is too long by about 3x. There is a lot of good information in here, but the constant repetition does not help, and the book begins to wear long before it is completed. That being said, I did appreciate the level of work and thought that went into this, and it is an important topic. The chapters he said to go ahead and skip if you found statistics unpleasant were my favorite chapters in the book, because they detailed the critical information and how the numbers were actually achieved. He gave a lot of examples that were valuable, but in many cases, the stories could have been trimmed by 2/3 and still have been as valuable. As a planning book for expert reading, this might make some sense (but probably not), but as a published book for a general audience, he definitely repeated things too many times, and said the same words too many times over and over. A valuable book that reduced the value by being cumbersome and tedious by the end.

[bettybarcode_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There's nothing like parking to turn the most rugged free market individualist into a raving, self-righteous socialist. Shoup explains why using market-rate pricing for parking, like we do for every other land use, is good for our cities, our air quality, our housing costs, and the cost of doing business.