Biography

Most people think parking is simple. Donald Shoup spent forty years proving them wrong — and changing the way cities think about land, money, and people in the process.

A professor of urban planning at UCLA, Shoup became the world's most influential thinker on parking policy. His central argument was deceptively straightforward: free and underpriced parking isn't free at all. Someone always pays — in higher rents, in sprawl, in congestion, in the slow decay of walkable urban life.

His landmark 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, became one of the most cited works in urban planning. It argued for removing minimum parking requirements, charging market-rate prices for curb parking, and returning that revenue to the neighborhoods that generate it. City after city has since adopted his ideas — from San Francisco to London to cities that had never heard his name, but now live by his principles.

He was known as a teacher and mentor of extraordinary generosity, shaping generations of planners and economists who carried his ideas into practice around the world. When a book was proposed celebrating his life, he redirected it — suggesting it focus on ideas and reforms instead. That modesty was entirely in character.

Donald Shoup passed away before this evening, but his ideas are very much alive — in every city that has rethought its relationship with the parking space.

Please welcome Donald Shoup into the Parking Hall of Fame.