Rethinking Free Parking

Alan Ehrenhalt revisits Donald Shoup’s "The High Cost of Free Parking"

1 minute read

July 14, 2005, 10:00 AM PDT

By Abhijeet Chavan @http://twitter.com/legalaidtech


"Think how odd that is...I wouldn’t open a restaurant so big I couldn’t fill it up except on Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve. Neither would you. You’d just accept it as a fact of life that once in a while, somebody will have to be turned away.

It’s only when it comes to parking lots that planners and local governments insist on invoking a concept as foolish as maximum capacity. And that’s for a rather simple reason: When it comes to parking, nobody worries about losing money. Parking, after all, is free.

Or, rather, they think it’s free. Of course, it isn’t....

Thanks to Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 in Governing

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