With Joe taking a much-deserved break to travel, we decided to extend the deadline for donations to Streetsblog and for qualifying for our raffle of four Livable Streets books: Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit; Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom; Parking and the City; and Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.

So don’t waste any time, make your first donation of 2020 to Streetsblog right now!

Joe already wrote reviews for Policing the Open Road by Sarah Seo and Better Buses, Better City by Steve Higahside, so now it’s my turn to write a review for Parking and the City by Streetsblog Hero (emeritus) Donald Shoup.

Except how do you write a review for a book that’s already been reviewed, and praised, by so many of the leading journalists who regularly write about urbanism in America? Heck, it took all of four seconds of googling to find excerpts and a mini review of Parking and the City already written by Joe back when the book was released in 2018. In it, Linton wrote, “Reading Shoup will change the way you look at and think about cities and streets.”

So let’s stick to the basics. Parking and the City is the 500-page follow-up to the even more thorough The High Cost of Free Parking, which despite being published fifteen years ago remains a popular book with urban planners, political scientists, and transportation reform advocates. Using his dry wit, statistical analysis, and some common sense, Shoup makes the argument that cities have too much parking and don’t know how to price the parking they have to maximize the good of this public space.

To remedy these issues, Shoup offers three recommendations that any city can embrace: remove off-street parking requirements for businesses and housing, invest in analyzing and setting prices for on-street parking to maximize the benefit for cities and drivers, and spend parking meter revenue on improving public services on and near the metered streets.

If this sounds familiar to anyone who has read The High Cost of Free Parking, there is still good reason to be excited about this book. James Brausell of Planetizen explains that Parking and the City isn’t just more of the same:

More than just providing an abridged version of  The High Cost of Free Parking, however, Parking and the City passes the torch of parking reform to a new generation of academics, professional planners, and transportation engineers…

…Following the introduction, Shoup has gathered 51 chapters of case studies and research, organized into three themes: 1) off-street parking requirements, 2) prices for on-street parking, and 3) parking benefit districts.

In short, even if you’ve read Shoup’s first work, this book is worth checking out.

If you’re still not convinced, you can read chapter 51 of Parking and the City here, other excerpts from the book from our 2018 review here, an interview with Shoup here, and the video version of Parking and the City here.