Smart Growth Resource Library

The High Cost of Free Parking

Free parking isn't really free. In fact, the average parking space costs more than the average car. Initially, developers pay for the required parking, but soon tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the cost of parking has diffused throughout the economy.

When we shop, eat in a restaurant, or see a movie, we pay for parking indirectly because its cost is included in the price of everything from hamburgers to housing. The total subsidy for parking is staggering, about the size of the Medicare or national defense budgets. But free parking has other costs: It distorts transportation choices, warps urban form, and degrades the environment.

It doesn't have to be this way. In The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald 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.

Hardcover, 752 pages. Order online from the APA at the resource link below.

Resource: http://www.planning.org/bookservice/highcost.htm

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