The High Cost Of Free Parking At Gasworks

This post may have nothing to do with Gasworks or the Friends of Gasworks Park. But you'll have to read it to find out. Diabolical!

So here's the question: Have you ever wondered where "free" parking comes from? Well, it comes out of your pockets, with all that lint. It's estimated that the average parking space costs more than a car. When you shop, dine out, or see a movie, you pay indirectly for parking because its cost is included in the price of everything else.

At tonight's Urban Sustainability Forum, "The High Cost of Free Parking," Donald Shoup, Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, will explain how he ended up in Southern California, surely the antithesis of a successful attempt at urban planning. Or maybe he'll stick to the published topic:

Shoup will demonstrate that free parking has other costs: it distorts transportation choices, warps urban form, and degrades the environment. Shoup estimates that (1) if all U.S. parking spaces were combined into one surface lot, it would be the size of Connecticut; and (2) every year we spend as much to subsidize off-street parking as we spend for Medicare or national defense.

That's tonight, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. at the UW Architecture Hall, Room 147.

Who the hell is Donald Shoup to talk? Donald Shoup teaches courses on transportation, land use, public finance, and urban economics. Donald Shoup has served both as Chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning and as Director of the Institute of Transportation Studies. Where do you teach? Okay then.

His recent research has centered on parking as a key link between land use and transportation. His latest book, entirely unrelated to tonight's talk, is titled The High Cost of Free Parking.