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Books|Donald Shoup, 86, Dies; Scholar Saw the Social Costs of Free Parking
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/books/donald-shoup-dead.html
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He took a dry topic and made it entertaining, capturing the attention of policymakers and influencing the way cities are built.
Published Feb. 19, 2025Updated Feb. 20, 2025, 10:18 a.m. ET
Donald Shoup, a professor of urban studies whose provocative and occasionally amusing 734-page treatise on the economics of parking sparked reforms in thousands of cities, helping reduce traffic, create green space and make cities more walkable, died on Feb. 6 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
The cause was a stroke, his wife, Pat Shoup, said.
Professor Shoup was an intellectual hero to urbanists. His disciples called themselves the Shoupistas — their Facebook group has more than 8,100 followers — and referred to their bearded guru as Shoup Dogg, after the rapper Snoop Dogg.
Professor Shoup, who bicycled to his office at the University of California, Los Angeles, in khaki pants and a tweed sport coat, did not rap. But he managed to take a dry subject — parking — and turn it into an entertaining one.
“Many of us,” he liked to remind conference audiences, “were probably even conceived in a parked car.”
In his 2005 book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” a hefty tome that legions of urban studies students have lugged around to the detriment of their spinal cords, Professor Shoup explained the problems that city planners created by providing too much free or underpriced parking after automobile use soared in the early 20th century.
He liked to quote George Costanza, the bald, neurotic “Seinfeld” character: “My father didn’t pay for parking, my mother, my brother, nobody. It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay when, if I apply myself, maybe I can get it for free?”
