The Evolution of Modern Parking Best Practices: Revisiting Donald Shoup's Blueprint

Context

Parking technology and infrastructure can be confusing, leaving you wondering whether it actually addresses your problems. The purpose of this blog post is to ensure readers have an appropriate starting point for evaluating how to conquer their parking challenges. We feel that starting point should bring readers back to the most robust research that has been completed by the U.S.’s foremost urban planners focused on sound parking policy. With that foundation in mind, readers can then appropriately evaluate the technology and infrastructure options available to them.

Introduction

Donald Shoup was a leading urban planning scholar who reshaped the conversation around parking policy with his seminal books, The High Cost of Free Parking (2005, updated 2011) and Parking and the City (2018). Shoup is widely regarded as the father of modern parking best practices.

In this blog post, we revisit his research, supplement it with findings from Jeff Speck’s Walkable City (2012) and Walkable City Rules (2018) and detail how Fybr has designed its platform to help cities and businesses thrive within this combined framework and cater to their unique needs. Implementing these strategies helps transform parking from a hidden cost into a revenue-generating catalyst for sustainable, equitable, and pedestrian-friendly growth.

Donald Shoup’s Blueprint

Shoup addresses the age-old problems of limited parking availability, congestion, lost revenues, parking subsidies, inefficient urban land use, business vitality, safety, pollution, and more with three transformative reforms:

• Charge market-based prices for on-street parking using demand-responsive pricing to maintain 85% occupancy resulting in at least one open space per block.

• Remove off-street parking requirements, allowing developers and businesses to decide how much parking is needed.

• Return parking revenue to local communities to fund public amenities like sidewalks, transit, or green spaces, ensuring buy-in for pricing reforms.

In The High Cost of Free Parking, Shoup argued that "free" parking is anything but free:

• First, if cities don’t charge for parking and/or use inefficient enforcement methods, the vast majority of parking activity is concentrated in the most desirable spots. (“Parking activity” includes drivers cruising (constantly circling for spots) and actual parking). This leads to a perception (and reality) of limited parking availability which reduces spot turnover and hurts businesses and the economic vitality of areas, increases congestion, reduces safety due to parkers cruising, and increases pollution.

• Second, off-street parking requirements, mandated by zoning laws, inflate development costs and increase housing prices, and encourage car dependency. These policies distort urban land use, dedicating vast swaths of valuable space to parking lots—often at the expense of walkable, vibrant communities. Shoup estimated that parking subsidies cost billions annually, burdening non-drivers and exacerbating congestion, pollution, and sprawl. Shoup’s work highlights a critical equity problem: free parking subsidizes drivers at the expense of non-drivers.

In Parking and the City, Shoup built on his earlier work, showcasing how his reforms have been implemented globally and their measurable impacts. The book features contributions from urban planners, policymakers, and researchers who document case studies, such as San Francisco’s SFpark program that Fybr contributed heavily to. These real-world examples demonstrate that market-based parking reduces cruising, cuts congestion, increases safety, and lowers emissions.

Enhancements That Prioritize Walkability and Urban Vitality

Jeff Speck incorporates Shoup’s blueprint and enhances it based on his experiences in his books Walkable City and Walkable City Rules. In it, he takes Shoup’s reforms a step further by suggesting the following initiatives:

• As an extension of charging market-based pricing, decouple parking costs from other uses (e.g., housing or retail) to reveal its true cost and organize lots and garages to serve diverse needs around the clock (e.g., offices by day, entertainment by night).

• As an extension of removing off-street parking requirements, where needed, if parking minimums are eliminated, implement parking preservation plans to protect current residents. These plans are resident permitting programs enacted to ensure current residents retain access to on-street parking which prevent parking spillover into neighborhoods while optimizing curb space for visitors.

• As an extension of removing off-street parking requirements, create shared parking structures, strategically located as downtown anchors. These lots serve multiple users, reducing redundant parking and freeing land for walkable development.

At the heart of Speck’s enhancements are the ideas that cities and businesses should be looking to optimize the value of every space, protect the ability of citizens to park nearby their dwellings, and efficient urban land use drives economic vitality.

Fybr’s Role

At Fybr, we don’t create technology for the sake of creating technology. We create technology in response to discussing parking infrastructure problems people, communities, cities, and businesses are having. Every group has unique sets of challenges and data that have to be analyzed to determine the best policies applicable to them. This involves a continual feedback loop between listening to problems, learning from industry best practices, and iterating on our products and services. We’ve incorporated these cumulative learnings to help each group achieve their unique initiatives in the following ways to date:

We help groups achieve target on-street parking occupancy of 85% and the downstream quantitative and qualitative benefits it provides with our suite of products and services.

• Use FybrPuck to monitor live on-street occupancy levels and dynamically adjust pricing within FybrPark, our customer-facing app, to maintain target levels, efficiently distribute traffic flow and parking asset utilization, and maximize revenues.

• Use FybrPark to communicate live parking availability, which, when paired with in-app pricing and wayfinding and customers self-selecting into spots they desire, reduces congestion, circling, and pollution, and increases the economic vitality of the area and safety.

• Use FybrEnforce to enable real-time directed enforcement and maintain target occupancy levels and its downstream quantitative and qualitative benefits.

We help groups optimize the value of every space, determine efficient urban land use, and decouple parking costs from other uses to determine its true cost.

• Parkers use various assets (on-street, surface lots, garages, etc.) at various times of day for various reasons (work, tourism, entertainment, etc.) under various payment options (pay-per-use, daily, monthly, annually, permitted and non-permitted etc.). Use FybrInsights, our robust data analytics tool, to track demand patterns, occupancy, turnover, utilization, and more by asset type, time of day, payment option, and more. Use data derived from actual parking activity to determine true demand and create multi-use arrangements, dictate the appropriate amount of shared parking structures/spaces needed, and charge appropriate pricing across uses to facilitate equitable outcomes for parkers and non-parkers.

• The Fybr platform can be implemented across as many participating ownership/operator entities, parking assets, management types, and parkers as you desire. It is one system that unites operations and controls the customizations of the technology you’re using because we engineered it in the USA. Save time and use your energy on other things with the convenience and simplicity of one system.

• Real-time occupancy, dynamic pricing, live advertising, automated session resets, directed enforcement and more boost the value of every space.

We create and implement various types of permitting options to ensure residents and other users have adequate access to parking they need.

• Use FybrPass to enable automated, touchless payments in protected zones. When paired with FybrPuck, the FybrPass requires zero enforcement operations from your staff. Use real-time directed enforcement to document violations and reduce non-permitted overflow into protected zones.

• Implement digital permitting by license plate that can be enforced with either car-mounted or handheld LPR scanners.

• Facilitate payment by validation code to ensure special users have frictionless access to the spots they’re entitled to.

We promote modern parking best practices in order to help groups establish parking district benefits that contribute to the sustainability of the existing parking infrastructure.

• Donald Shoup knew there would be push-back from citizens, business owners, and cities when suggesting that implementing demand-based pricing can help solve parking challenges. So he suggested the excess revenues generated be re-invested back into the parking infrastructure that generated them, as a way to show these groups that the purpose of these policies isn’t to take advantage of them, but rather support the sustainability of their parking ecosystems. Without the funding needed to maintain this infrastructure, parking assets deteriorate and then everyone loses.

Why It Matters

Conquering your parking challenges can be a confusing and complicated process. Hopefully this blog post educates readers on best practices they should keep in mind when evaluating solutions. With the right approach, implementing these strategies can help transform parking from a hidden cost into a revenue-generating catalyst for sustainable, equitable, and pedestrian-friendly growth.