Donald Shoup, a professor of city research whose provocative and once in a while fun 734-page treatise at the economics of parking sparked reforms in hundreds of towns, serving to scale back site visitors, create inexperienced area and make towns extra walkable, died on Feb. 6 at his house in Los Angeles. He was once 86.
The reason was once a stroke, his spouse, Pat Shoup, mentioned.
Professor Shoup was once an highbrow hero to urbanists. His disciples referred to as themselves the Shoupistas — their Facebook group has greater than 8,100 fans — and referred to their bearded guru as Shoup Dogg, after the rapper Snoop Dogg.
Professor Shoup, who bicycled to his place of job on the College of California, Los Angeles, in khaki pants and a tweed recreation coat, didn’t rap. However he controlled to take a dry topic — parking — and switch it into an entertaining one.
“Many people,” he appreciated to remind convention audiences, “have been most definitely even conceived in a parked automotive.”
In his 2005 ebook, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” a hefty tome that legions of city research scholars have lugged round to the detriment in their spinal cords, Professor Shoup defined the issues that town planners created by means of offering an excessive amount of loose or underpriced parking after car use soared within the early twentieth century.
He appreciated to cite George Costanza, the bald, neurotic “Seinfeld” persona: “My father didn’t pay for parking, my mom, my brother, no person. It’s like going to a prostitute. Why will have to I pay when, if I practice myself, possibly I will be able to get it without spending a dime?”
To Professor Shoup, that quote confirmed the industrial calculus that drivers make: As an alternative of paying for a dear storage, they’re tempted to stay taking a look and looking ahead to an elusive (and less expensive) spot to turn out to be magically to be had — losing power and growing site visitors and air air pollution within the procedure.
“The curb areas are like fish within the ocean: a car parking zone belongs to any person who occupies it, however should you go away it, you lose it,” Professor Shoup wrote. “The place the entire curb areas are occupied, turnover ends up in a couple of vacancies over the years, however drivers will have to cruise to discover a area vacated by means of a departing motorist.”
As towns grew, loose or affordable parking was once thought to be an inalienable proper. Town planners mandated that builders supply off-street parking for residential and industrial initiatives, incentivizing using over different varieties of transportation. It was once a waste of precious land, Professor Shoup famous, that contributed to city sprawl.
He drew at the board sport Monopoly for instance his level.
“In Monopoly, loose parking is just one area out of 40 at the board,” he wrote. “If Monopoly have been performed below our present zoning rules, alternatively, loose parking can be on each and every area. Parking a lot may duvet part of Marvin Gardens, and Park Position would have underground parking.”
The issue would mushroom.
“Unfastened parking would push constructions farther aside, build up the price of homes and inns, and allow fewer of them to be constructed in any respect,” Professor Shoup wrote. “Good avid gamers would quickly go away Atlantic Town at the back of and transfer to a bigger board that allowed them to construct on less expensive land within the suburbs. Connecticut Road would no longer be redeveloped with inns, the railroads would disappear and each and every piece at the board would transfer extra slowly.”
He proposed a three-pronged answer: Ban off-street parking necessities, letting builders (and marketplace forces) dictate how a lot parking to offer; make use of dynamic pricing for on-street parking, elevating costs when call for is absolute best; and spend the ensuing greater earnings from meters to spruce up sidewalks, encouraging extra strolling.
“The Prime Price of Unfastened Parking” was once extensively praised, particularly for turning parking right into a riveting learn.
“Once I advised a bunch of transportation colleagues concerning the ebook, they expressed each disbelief and sympathy — how may just there be that a lot to mention about parking, let by myself anything else fascinating?” Susan At hand, a professor of environmental science and coverage on the College of California, Davis, wrote in The Magazine of Making plans Schooling and Analysis. “However as Shoup adeptly presentations, parking is fascinating, and it’s massively necessary.”
The ebook captured the eye of innovative policymakers and grass roots activists, who started pushing for towns large and small to undertake Professor Shoup’s concepts.
“Don is handled in some puts like Einstein, like he has came upon the idea of relativity,” Bonnie Nelson, a founding father of NelsonNygaard, a transportation consulting company, told The Los Angeles Occasions in 2010.
Greater than 3,000 towns have followed some or all of Professor Shoup’s suggestions, in keeping with the Parking Reform Network, a nonprofit that champions the ebook’s concepts.
“The scale and breadth of this ebook provides it authority,” Tony Jordan, the gang’s founder, mentioned in an interview. “You’ll actually stand on it when you are making an issue.”
Donald Curran Shoup was once born on Aug. 24, 1938, in Lengthy Seashore, Calif. His oldsters have been Francis Elliott Shoup Jr., a captain within the U.S. Army, and Muriel Shoup, who ran the house.
When Donald was once 2, the Shoups moved to Honolulu, the place his father was once stationed.
“The one factor I’m well-known for is that I used to be dwelling in Honolulu when Pearl Harbor was once attacked,” he recalled in an interview with the American Making plans Affiliation. “So I feel the whole lot has been very calm ever since. If you happen to get started with Pearl Harbor as your first reminiscence, existence turns out really easy.”
He studied electric engineering and economics at Yale after which did his graduate research there in economics, receiving his doctorate in 1968.
After educating on the College of Michigan, he joined U.C.L.A.’s division of city making plans in 1974.
Again then, parking wasn’t precisely in fashion as a scholarly topic. He coated his place of job door with cartoons about it.
“As a result of maximum teachers can not consider anything else much less fascinating to review than parking, I used to be a backside feeder with little festival for a few years,” Professor Shoup wrote in “The Prime Price of Unfastened Parking.” “However there may be numerous meals down there, and lots of different teachers have joined in what’s now virtually a feeding frenzy.”
He was once married for 59 years to Ms. Shoup, who helped edit his writing. She is his handiest fast survivor.
Professor Shoup cherished being referred to as Shoup Dogg, she recalled, or even used the nickname as his website address.
“He would do just about anything,” she mentioned, “to get other folks to concentrate on the necessary factor of parking.”
