The death in February of an octogenarian named Donald Shoup did not make many headlines, but it did prompt a flood of admiring social media conversations among the “Shoupistas”, a small but fervent fan club of the man they called Shoup Dogg. Shoup was a tweed-wearing, extravagantly bearded economist. What had such a man done to inspire this fervent fandom? That’s easy to say and harder to explain. Donald Shoup revolutionised the way urban planners thought about parking. How he did it should be an example to economists everywhere.
Shoup’s argument was straight out of Econ 101: parking spaces in the US were oversupplied because of planning regulations, but the best spaces were also underpriced because of crowd-pleasing politics. As a result, cities were covered in asphalt, good developments were strangled by their own mandatory parking lots, yet the most sought-after kerbside spaces were in such short supply that drivers would occasionally end up brawling over them. Somehow the US was drowning in parking and yet nobody could ever find a good space.
The price tag for this policy failure was invisible, but enormous. As Henry Grabar wrote in Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains The World (2023): “you paid for it in the rent, in the check at the restaurant . . . buried in your local tax bill. You paid for parking with every breath of dirty air, in the flood damage from the rain that ran off the fields of asphalt . . . But you almost never paid for it when you parked your car.”
The world is full of economics professors with good ideas but rarely do they inspire a near cult-like devotion. What made Shoup different? First, he was entertaining. He would point to the Monopoly board, explaining that in the real world it would be papered over with “free parking” spaces. He would often begin talks by noting, “In an audience this large, some of you were probably conceived in a parked car.”
Second, he didn’t just rely on a theoretical argument. Shoup assembled an encyclopedic array of details about irrational regulations, their consequences and their costs. He was interested, for example, in the problem of drivers cruising around looking for a convenient kerbside space. Together with some graduate students, he investigated the problem first hand, by looking for parking spots and noting how long it took to find them. Shoup reckoned that in a small Los Angeles neighbourhood — just 15 blocks — drivers collectively drove an extra million miles a year in their hunt for a good spot. “Shoup concluded that nearly one-third of all the cars in parking-scarce neighbourhoods were looking for a place to park,” writes Grabar.
At the same time, new buildings were hemmed in by mandatory, and often absurdly generous, parking requirements. An apartment parking lot would be vacant during the day, while the office and retail would be empty at night. Regulatory parking minimums did not allow for sensible ideas such as the idea that an apartment building might share parking with a neighbouring mall — still less for the radical idea that building developers might have an incentive to balance the attractions of parking with the costs of providing it.
Architects would sketch new buildings that would enhance neighbourhoods by providing vital amenities or high-quality affordable housing. Those designs would be rejected by municipal authorities because they did not meet parking regulations, and the project would be suffocated by its own uneconomical parking.
Shoup also produced the delightful (and depressing) calculation that, given that each new parking space cost thousands of dollars to provide, and given that there were at least three spaces per vehicle, the value of all the parking spaces in the US exceeded the value of all the cars.
Third, Shoup suggested solutions. Some of these were technical, and rather obvious: abolish regulatory parking minimums, introduce parking meters and set the prices sufficiently high that people don’t have to waste time looking for a space — although they may instead walk, cycle, switch to public transport or drive at a less busy time.
But the game-changing idea was to propose that parking revenue from kerbside meters should be invested in local improvements to the streetscape such as litter collection, tree-planting or pleasantly paved sidewalks. This, says M Nolan Gray, one of Shoup’s many acolytes, was his “greatest contribution”. Locals stopped opposing parking meters, and started demanding them.
Gray says, “Shoup built up the next generation”. The number of fervent followers he acquired speaks volumes about how generous he was with his time and advice. As a result, Donald Shoup quietly changed the world. His ideas have been hugely influential. Other economists could do far worse than follow his example.
There is one more lesson we could learn from the life of Donald Shoup. He wasn’t interested in the grand debates. He took a problem that seemed boring and trivial, and showed that it was neither. It was precisely because the problem was so neglected and so far from the white-hot polarisation of national politics that he was able to make so much progress.
“I’m a bottom-feeder,” Shoup Dogg would say, “but there’s a lot of food down there.”
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 7 March 2025.
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