The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup

Chapter 1
The Twenty-first Century Parking
Problem

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
—JONI MITCHELL
Children first learn about free parking when they play Monopoly. The
chance of landing on free parking is low, about the same as the chance of
going to jail. Monopoly misleads its players on this score, however, because
parking is free for 99 percent of all automobile trips in the U.S. This book
will argue that another kind of deception is also at play on the Monopoly
board because in the real world, there is no such thing as “free” parking. e
cost of parking is hidden in higher prices for everything else. In addition to
the monetary cost, which is enormous, free parking imposes many other
hidden costs on cities, the economy, and the environment.
Why is most parking free to the driver? When only the ri owned cars at
the beginning of the twentieth century, motorists simply parked their new
cars at the curb where they had formerly tethered their horses and carriages.
But when car ownership grew rapidly during the 1910s and 1920s, the
parking problem developed. Curb parking remained free (the parking meter
was not invented until 1935), but there were no longer enough spaces for
everyone to park whenever and wherever they wanted. Drivers circled in
vain looking for a vacant curb space, and their cars congested traffic. In the
1930s, cities began to require off-street parking in their zoning ordinances to
deal with the parking shortage, and the results were miraculous. One
delighted mayor reported:
We consider zoning for parking our greatest advance…. It is working out exceptionally well, far
beer than we had expected. In brief, it calls for all new buildings to make a provision for parking
space required for its own uses.
This sounds like a good idea. In one sense, it was a good idea. Requiring
all new buildings to provide ample on-site parking did solve one problem—
the shortage of free curb parking—but the solution soon created new
problems. Urban planners began to assume that most people would travel
everywhere by car, park on-site while they worked, shopped, or dined, and
then drive on to their next destination. Cities began to require each site to
provide its own parking lot big enough to satisfy the expected peak demand
for free parking, and most commercial buildings are now required to provide
a parking lot bigger than the building itself. e required parking lot at a
restaurant, for example, usually occupies at least three times as much land as
the restaurant itself. Off-street parking requirements encourage everyone to
drive wherever they go because they know they can usually park free when
they get there: 87 percent of all trips in the U.S. are now made by personal
motor vehicles, and only 1.5 percent by public transit.
If drivers don’t pay for parking, who does? Everyone does, even if they
don’t drive. Initially the developer pays for the required parking, but soon
the tenants do, and then their customers, and so on, until the cost of parking
has diffused everywhere in the economy. When we shop in a store, eat in a
restaurant, or see a movie, we pay for parking indirectly because its cost is
included in the prices of merandise, meals, and theater tickets. We
unknowingly support our cars with almost every commercial transaction we
make because a small share of the money changing hands pays for parking.
Residents pay for parking through higher prices for housing. Businesses pay
for parking through higher rents for their premises. Shoppers pay for
parking through higher prices for everything they buy. We don’t pay for
parking in our role as motorists, but in all our other roles—as consumers,
investors, workers, residents, and taxpayers—we pay a high price. Even
people who don’t own a car have to pay for “free” parking.
Off-street parking requirements collectivize the cost of parking because
they allow everyone to park free at everyone else’s expense. When the cost
of parking is hidden in the prices of other goods and services, no one can
pay less for parking by using less of it. Bundling the cost of parking into
higher prices for everything else skews travel oices toward cars and away

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup