February 24, 2025 ☼ The Intersection ☼ public policy ☼ social capital
Remembering Donald Shoup, the "prophet of parking"
This is an unedited draft of The Intersection column that appears every other Monday in Mint.
Very few people in India have heard of Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who passed away earlier this month. That is a pity, because his life’s work holds the answer to one of India’s most challenging problems: improving the quality of life in our cities. Shoup was the world’s foremost scholar of parking policy. No, that does not do justice to his biography. He was, as one of his students described him in a eulogyhttps://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-prophet-of-parking, truly a prophet of parking. The book that he has left behind, aptly titled the High Cost of Free Parking, ought to be read by every economist, urban planner, civil servant and urban governance activist in the country.
One of the main reasons traffic flow in India’s cities is clogged is because of the cholesterol of parked (and double-parked) vehicles that make journeys slow and stressful. In addition to economic, health and environmental costs, traffic congestions corrode our social capital. Readers will recall in a recent column I declared bad traffic anti-national for it damages our already weak sense of fraternity by exposing our worst forms to each other on a daily basis. Unchoking our roads ought to be an important priority of urban policy.
Shoup’s studies show us not only what to do but how to do it. Let me jump straight to the answer before I explain the logic. One, set the right price for street parking; two, return the parking revenue to pay for local public services; and three, remove minimum parking requirements. Indian cities don’t have the extravagant minimum parking requirements of the kind that American cities impose on building owners, but the first two points are wholly relevant to our context.
The reason there are too many cars parked on the streets is because parking is free. But free parking exerts severe economic and environmental costs. It is also an unconsidered and undeserved transfer of social wealth to its richer citizens. That’s because the 100 sq ft of space that the car is parked costs the same as the market price for real estate in the area, but is given to the car owner at zero price. It is astounding how governments running deficit budgets due to massive social spending commitments and a small revenue base are giving away public wealth to anyone on a first-come-first-served basis. Every city in India can raise easily raise 5% more revenue by collecting parking fees in its busiest areas.
Yet, very few cities in India have successfully implemented a paid parking policy. Shoup’s greatest insight is that such policies can be made successful if the parking revenues are transparently channeled back to the locality in terms of better public services. Citizens are likely to oppose paid parking schemes if the money goes to the government treasury in the state capital or New Delhi, but will be more forthcoming if they can see that the money comes back in the form of better footpaths, garbage clearance, bus stops and street lights. The more granular the fiscal arrangement, the greater the chance of success. This is the trick our cities are missing. Extreme decentralisation — where parking revenues collected in a municipal ward are spent in the same ward — is more likely to win public acceptance of paid parking.
Shoup writes that paid parking should appeal to all shades of political opinion: “Liberals will see that it increases public spending. Conservatives will see that it reduces government regulation. Environmentalists will see that it reduces energy consumption, air pollution, and carbon emissions. Business leaders will see that it unburdens enterprise. New urbanists will see that it enables people to live at high density without being over-run by cars. Libertarians will see that it increases the opportunities for individual choice. Developers will see that it reduces building costs. Neighborhood activists will see that it devolves public decisions to the local level. Local elected officials will see that it reduces traffic congestion…and pays for local public services without raising taxes.”
So why does paid parking meet with so much resistance? Because, as Shoup puts it “all these people also want to park free.” Everyone from homeowners to newspaper columnists have a personal interest in free parking, which can be won over if they see the money coming back to benefit them in other ways. When Singapore introduced high taxes on car ownership and later, electronic road pricing, the government insisted that these revenues will be used to improve and subsidise public transport.
The status quo in our biggest and most dynamic cities is untenable. Even if public transport displaces half the cars in our metros, we will still have congestion on our streets. We can widen roads and build flyovers to correct the infrastructure deficit, but vehicular traffic will only grow as Indians become richer. Cities will have to charge for parking sooner or later. Studying Shoup’s recommendations can help us do the right thing the right way.
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