Shoup Euology - Teacher Rockstar Parking Scarcity Borderlands

Donald Shoup was a brilliant storyteller. 

One of my favorite Shoup bits is about dogs & cats. 

It starts with how most transportation folks are like dogs obsessed with moving cars, chasing them, barking at them. 

Not like cats. Cats only really look at cars when they're stopped. They walk around them, sit on them, nap on them. He'd grin, "Cats like parked cars."

He was excellent with an audience, a crafted polished lecture with good timing. He let you fill in the blanks. I always wondered if he had a dog or a cat.

Shoup on his Sprite, me on a lowrider, and classmate Charlotte Burger Troy, outside the School of Public Affairs.  

Photo credit: Marcel Porras

 

Teacher to rock star

 

When I started UCLA in 2005, I had no clue who Donald Shoup was. The High Cost of Free Parking had just been published, and I hadn't been into economics or parking. I was focused on bicycling. But soon after classes began, everyone in my 60+ cohort was talking about him.

 

He wasn't a celebrity yet. Students were buzzing about his teaching style because he made the material accessible. I qualified out of the econ survey, but now I was wondering what I was missing. His approach was deceptively simple--to reframe parking as real estate, a marketplace transaction around land. The idea was so sticky and relatable. By taking the universal story of needing a parking spot and reducing it to convey supply, demand, and price, he demonstrated modeled the most important part of teaching and learning: How do we ask good questions?

 

The last time I saw him in person was in 2014. He gave a presentation at the Ed Roberts Campus in Berkeley. By then he was a planning rock star. I felt a little anointed that night because he remembered me. I believe I was the first to call him Shoup Dogg. 

 

Who was the last Planning Rock Star? Some bike/ped folks might nominate Janette Sadik-Khan. JSK is possibly the most contemporary influential champion renewing the urbanist transportation movement, but her name doesn't ring out that far beyond New York or the transpo realm. Our last rock star was power broker Robert Moses (representing motor vehicles and wealth, but also public gathering open spaces). And his fame was really from being the front-man for a chart-topping duo band with Jane Jacobs (representing walk/bike livability, humans, and middle-/lower-income communities). That was 70 years ago. 

 

Shoup was on Broadway. He was a star on Twitter, Youtube, Facebook. He was probably on TikTok. He was everywhere. He'll always be everywhere influencing our hearts and minds. 

 

Parking and scarcity

 

What's weird is we've only just begun to internalize Shoup's lessons. When I began at SFMTA, staff warned me: people are sensitive about parking loss. Almost a decade as a Shoupista, I was confused. Didn't we have SF Park? Haven't we explained the high cost of free parking to everyone? "No. SF Park failed," they told me, "People hate paying for parking." That's no surprise. Why doesn't SF have Shoup's Community Parking Districts? Shouldn't we locally share the wealth of the land with the revenue going back to the merchants and residents?

 

Ahhh, but SF Transportation Code dictates all parking revenue be routed to support Muni. So we can never get to what Andy Thornley calls "the third leg of the Shoupian Stool" because we've weaved this web between transit monetary need and parking's monetary value. Chaining parking to transit funding doesn't make long-term sense since transportation systems might be improved with more space for transit and biking to encourage mode shift.Shoup never talked about the inherent limitations within a monetization narrative!!

 

This is where we've been trapped. Parking is still the biggest conflict in SF, whether it's for bikeshare stations, daylighting, or the Valencia corridor. I’ve had to argue for single parking spaces with merchants who oppose bike corral requests by other merchants. Even in places with ample oceans of parking, and incoming parking structures, the first cry from everyone becomes "There's not enough parking!" Without the option of shared benefit from priced parking, explaining the tragedy of the commons must shift to emphasize our shared scarcity.We need to reframe the story, reset the baseline with a sad woeful message THERE WILL NEVER BE ENOUGH PARKING.

 

 Artist: Leon Ferrari

 

Prioritizing cars takes up a lot of room. They need roadways to go fast. They need storage, room for large delivery vehicles, room for drivers who need room for things like wheelchair access, room for large emergency vehicles, room for more parking in case all the parking is taken. Because if people don't have parking, then how will they come to your store?

 

Have you heard about the Freeway Revolts? They were sparked when cars hogged so much space they were messing up neighborhoods. Making room for cars started to subsume joyful communities. Do we need a future where people build more parking garages instead of residences, and it incites Parking Garage Revolts? Why can't we at least just have smaller cars so that they take up less space? Why do cars get bigger and bigger in some demented kind of Mutually Assured Destruction? How are cars like guns? 

 

The curb as border and transaction 

 

Shoup's comically logical interpretation of parking as land transaction spawned the Parking Day celebrations in the 20-teens. It points to deeper cultural consideration. What is the curb zone? And what are the transportation identities surrounding it?

 

   

 

 

If curb space is land, then the curb is at least the borderland between people moving in the roadway and people on the sidewalk and in place. It's useful to remember everyone is both, constantly transitioning between moving and being in place.  With all the problems we have and all the change needed for improvement, our guiding question into the future can't be "How do we keep everything the same?" That doesn’t work for individuals as we get older, and it doesn't work for cities as we grow denser.

 

We should ask: How do we want to move? What should we keep and what should be left behind? How do we grow, cherish the things we love, and balance resources to get there?

 

Borderland studies traditionally focus on international border dynamics, which can range from cooperative mutual benefit, or competitive rift and conflict. Some theatrical interpretations include The Bridge and Counterpart. Borderlands are an exploration of discreteness and continuity. Inclusion and exclusion. Tariffs. Migration. These are the forces that often embrace other humans as fellow people, or reduce them to tribal interpretation. How do we want to see other people through and across the border of the curb?

 

Shoup reminds us how defaulting to a parking framework compels us to regard land as transactional exchange rather than a source of possibility and potential for a new model of public realm utility. 

 

Bicyclist

 

Shoup was a bicyclist. He rode a Raleigh Sprite from the 70s. He'd had it for a long time, and it was clean. It was the perfect complement to his tweedy professor drip. It tickled me to think he'd made his career in the marketplace of ideas with theories about parking. But, he'd actually divested himself from their transaction entirely. I like to think it was the bicyclist part of him that helped to objectively observe people talk and puzzle out parking.

 

There aren’t a lot of bicycling celebrities. The last one infamously flamed out, which was fine cuz no one needed a lycra role model anyway. The only other one I can think of is David Byrne who almost shouldn't count because he's already a rock star anyway.

Alignment

The coolest thing about Shoup's style was how he aligned all of himself--teacher, economist, bicyclist, cat-appreciator. With that ingenuity and integrity, I'm sure he also found enlightenment.