Why charging for parking doesn't solve the real urban problem, because the real problem isn't price, it's people, made into a crisis by mass immigration.
Donald Shoup devoted his career to one of modern urban life's most irritating experiences: circling endlessly for parking while muttering about humanity's moral collapse. His landmark book The High Cost of Free Parking became gospel in planning schools and municipal policy circles. Its core claim is now orthodoxy: parking isn't free, it's just cross-subsidised — embedded in rent, retail prices, urban sprawl, congestion, pollution, and wasted human life in the form of time spent cruising for spaces.
From this diagnosis follows the prescription: abolish parking minimums, price curb spaces dynamically, let the market allocate scarce spots, and — voilà — congestion falls, emissions fall, urban form improves, cities become more liveable, and the angels sing in perfectly priced increments of $ 5 per hour.
There is something genuinely important in Shoup's work. He exposed a massive distortion in urban policy: the forced oversupply of parking via zoning codes that require developers to build far more parking than markets would otherwise support. This inflates housing costs, spreads cities outward, weakens public transport, and locks in car dependence. On that front, Shoup deserves his reputation.
But his deeper claim — that paid parking is the key lever for fixing urban mobility and parking scarcity itself — is where things go wrong. Not because pricing is useless, but because it mistakes allocation for solution, treats symptoms as causes, and substitutes elegant economic theory for stubborn physical reality.
Parking, it turns out, is not a pricing problem.
It is a space problem.
And deeper still, it is a people problem.
Pricing Doesn't Create Space — It Just Redistributes Scarcity
Shoup's central insight is that free parking creates excess demand. If curb spaces cost nothing, drivers overconsume them, cruise longer, and clog streets. Charge a price, and demand falls to match supply. Spaces turn over efficiently. No more circling. No more chaos.
But notice what pricing doesn't do:
It doesn't create new parking spaces.
It doesn't widen streets.
It doesn't shrink cars.
It doesn't compress urban geography.
The number of vehicles that can physically occupy a given urban area at any moment remains fixed by geometry and land constraints. Paid parking merely determines who gets to use those spaces, not whether enough spaces exist in the first place.
This is the fundamental blind spot. Shoup treats parking like bandwidth: price congestion and usage drops smoothly. But parking is more like lifeboats. If there are 100 boats and 500 passengers, pricing the seats may allocate them efficiently — but the ship still sinks with 400 people aboard.
Paid parking doesn't solve parking scarcity.
It monetises scarcity.
That may be administratively elegant. It may reduce cruising. It may increase turnover. But it does not address the underlying mismatch between vehicle volumes and urban space capacity — especially in dense cities like Sydney where land is irreducibly scarce.
In short:
Parking is not congested because it is free.
It is congested because there are too many cars.
The Market Assumes Substitutes That Often Don't Exist
Shoup's framework rests on standard microeconomic substitution logic: when parking becomes expensive, people will shift modes — transit, cycling, walking, rideshare — or change travel times and destinations.
This works tolerably well in cities with:
Dense mixed-use development
Reliable public transport
Safe pedestrian and cycling infrastructure
Short trip distances
But most cities — especially in Anglosphere suburbs — were built precisely to exclude these substitutes. Land use zoning separates homes from jobs. Transit is infrequent or nonexistent. Cycling infrastructure is patchy. Walking distances are absurd. For millions of commuters, driving is not a preference — it is a structural necessity.
In such contexts, parking pricing doesn't cause substitution.
It causes pain.
Drivers still have to go to work. Still have to take children to school. Still have to reach hospitals, shops, and services. The demand curve becomes nearly vertical — price rises without much change in quantity demanded. Parking fees function less as efficiency tools and more as blunt taxes on constrained mobility.
Shoup tends to interpret resistance to paid parking as irrational entitlement — a cultural addiction to "free" curb space. But often resistance reflects a simpler truth:
People aren't refusing to change behaviour.
They lack alternatives.
Markets can only reallocate efficiently when agents have meaningful choice sets. Pricing parking in transit deserts is not market optimisation — it's coercive rationing.
Paid Parking Often Displaces Problems Rather Than Solving Them
In theory, priced parking reduces cruising. In practice, it often redistributes it.
Drivers respond by:
Parking farther away and walking longer distances
Searching for cheaper zones
Flooding adjacent residential streets
Circling neighbourhoods instead of commercial districts
Municipalities then respond with:
Residential parking permits
Enforcement escalation
Zonal price maps
Enforcement bureaucracies
The result is a complex regulatory ecosystem whose purpose is no longer efficiency but boundary policing — determining which blocks are allowed to suffer spillover and which aren't.
So instead of:
No one cruising anywhere
we get:
Different people cruising in different places
often farther from their destinations, generating more vehicle miles travelled rather than fewer.
The assumption that drivers will happily walk an extra four blocks ignores climate, age, disability, safety, time constraints, and basic human psychology. People do not experience parking search as an abstract economic optimisation problem. They experience it as irritation, anxiety, and cognitive overload — which pricing alone does not reliably reduce.
Parking is Not the Disease — It is a Symptom
Shoup treats parking as the central pathology of urban dysfunction: fix parking pricing and you cure congestion, sprawl, pollution, housing unaffordability, and traffic chaos.
But this mistakes the output variable for the causal structure.
Car dependence is driven by:
Zoning that separates housing from employment
Low-density development patterns
Transit underinvestment
Highway-centric infrastructure
Cheap fuel
Cultural and political priorities
Parking scarcity arises because:
Cities concentrate economic activity spatially
Cars are space-inefficient machines
Urban land is scarce
Travel demand grows faster than road capacity
Parking is where these structural forces collide — not their source.
Treating parking pricing as the master lever is like treating emergency room wait times by charging admission. It may reduce queues — by deterring patients — but it does not address why people are sick.
Without parallel reforms in:
Transit provision
Land-use integration
Housing density
Employment decentralisation
Active transport infrastructure
parking pricing functions mainly as rationing, not resolution.
Equity: From Public Space to Paywall
Shoup often frames paid parking as progressive: pricing eliminates cross-subsidies where non-drivers subsidise drivers via higher rents and retail prices. There is truth in this. Parking minimums especially operate as regressive hidden taxes on everyone, including the carless poor.
But curb pricing flips the equity problem rather than resolving it.
Public streets are one of the last genuinely universal-access urban resources. Converting curb access into metered commodity space transforms shared infrastructure into market real estate. Those with higher incomes gain frictionless access; those with lower incomes are priced out — even when their alternatives are worse.
In dense cities with excellent transit, this trade-off may be defensible. In sprawling cities without viable alternatives, it becomes regressive extraction.
More importantly, pricing converts political problems into consumer problems:
Instead of:
How should we design cities that allow mobility without cars?
we get:
How much should we charge people for failing to live in such cities?
This is not urban reform.
It is urban cost recovery.
Parking is a Wicked Problem Because It's a Population Problem
Here is the deeper failure of the Shoupian framework:
It treats parking scarcity as a market inefficiency rather than as a population-density mismatch between vehicles and urban space.
Modern cities concentrate:
Millions of people
Millions of jobs
Millions of trips
Cars, meanwhile, require:
Roughly 12–15 square metres per parking space
Large road footprints
Extensive buffer zones
Storage at both trip endpoints
This geometry simply does not scale.
You can price spaces.
You can manage turnover.
You can reduce cruising.
But you cannot park metropolitan-scale vehicle volumes inside metropolitan-scale land footprints without either:
1.Massive land sacrifice
2.Severe congestion
3.Rationing by price
4.Structural mode shift
Paid parking selects option (3) — rationing — and markets it as efficiency.
But the underlying truth remains:
There are too many cars for the available space.
That is not an economic problem.
It is a physical constraint.
Parking, therefore, is a wicked problem:
Every intervention redistributes burdens rather than eliminating them.
Every solution creates new losers.
Every optimisation shifts costs across space, income groups, and time horizons.
No pricing curve can solve geometry.
Why Shoup Still Matters, and Why He Still Falls Short
Shoup deserves credit for dismantling parking minimums — arguably one of the most destructive planning policies of the 20th century. Removing mandated oversupply of parking absolutely improves housing affordability, urban density, and walkability. On this front, he is a genuine reformer.
But his leap from:
Parking minimums are distortionary
to:
Parking pricing is the master solution
is unjustified.
Pricing parking helps manage scarcity.
It does not resolve scarcity.
It improves allocation efficiency.
It does not improve capacity.
It shifts who bears the burden.
It does not remove the burden itself.
In short, Shoup gives us better queues — not fewer cars.
Parking is Not an Economic Problem — It is a Spatial Tragedy
The real tragedy of parking is not that prices are wrong.
It is that modern cities have attempted to store millions of private machines inside finite public space.
Paid parking may be sensible policy in many contexts. But treating it as the central solution to urban mobility misidentifies both the disease and the cure.
Parking scarcity persists because:
Cities concentrate people.
Cars require space.
Space is finite.
Travel demand grows.
That is not a pricing failure.
It is a scaling failure.
Shoup's great achievement was showing that free parking is irrational.
His great mistake was thinking that rational pricing solves irrational geometry.
Parking is not broken because it is free.
Parking is broken because cities have more drivers than space.
And no meter — however dynamically priced — can fix that.