The High Cost of Free Parking, Updated Edition

One of the American Planning Association’s most popular and influential books is finally in paperback, with a new preface from the author on how thinking about parking has changed since this book was first published. 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.

• Parking and the City
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
• Parking Reform Made Easy
• Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
• Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places
• Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
• Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream