Shoup
May 14, 2020 11:28 AM   Subscribe

Y'all! Donald Shoup has a WEBSITE! Please enjoy these parkumentaries.

further reading (publications)
further reading (journalism)
further reading (parking links) (previously)
make it better (reforms)
posted by aniola (8 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
¡VIVA SHOUP!
posted by entropicamericana at 11:47 AM on May 14, 2020 [1 favorite]


https://youtu.be/Akm7ik-H_7U
It's estimated that in America there are 8 parking spots for every car, covering up to 30% of the cities.

What would it take to reduce this number to 2?
posted by rustipi at 4:46 PM on May 14, 2020


I think 2 is an unrealistic lower bound... (even if the number of cars is reduced, parking spots per car is still an interesting statistic.)

You've got one for home, one for work, and... All of the places that aren't work. So you think of, say, the Olive Garden, with a bunch of parking spots that are empty most of the time, but pretty well-utilized on weekend evenings by people who don't know what actual food tastes like, but enjoy the idea of breadsticks. When a place is only accessible by car, then parking becomes another limit on the utilization: you end up in a place where parking == tables. Thanks to uneven utilization over time, you get an 'oversupply' of parking at non-peak times, which, in turn, just means there's an oversupply generally.

And then different places have high utilization at different times. Compare Olive Garden peak hours to Home Depot peak hours to grocery store peak hours... Pad things out a bit for 'aspirational' parking spots (we /thought/ this Olive Garden was gonna be the most popular place in Bakersfield, but no one really comes here...). And then it's pretty easy to see how the number 8 could shake out.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:42 PM on May 14, 2020


(Also, as the actual video discusses, policy plays a terrible role in creating the problem in the first place...)
posted by kaibutsu at 5:47 PM on May 14, 2020


"You've got one for home, one for work, and..."

You don't necessarily need dedicated spaces for each purpose. You can use parking permits for structures that are shared between residential, office, and other uses.
posted by bfields at 6:17 PM on May 14, 2020 [2 favorites]


"Pad things out a bit for 'aspirational' parking spots"

Shoup's main idea is that the supply of parking is generally not the result of market forces and businesses taking good, honest guesses at how much space they need. It's primarily determined by local laws which and poorly designed engineering standards.

Parking is an unproductive land use, and all else equal, people who own and develop real estate would prefer to not build so much of it, but they aren't allowed to.
posted by voiceofreason at 2:16 AM on May 15, 2020 [1 favorite]


Shoup there it is!
posted by kirkaracha at 9:57 PM on May 15, 2020


from parking lot to park
posted by aniola at 9:01 AM on May 16, 2020


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