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"Donald Shoup brilliantly overcame the challenge of writing about parking without being boring in his iconoclastic 800-page book The High Cost of Free Parking. Easy to read and often entertaining, the book showed that city parking policies subsidize cars, encourage sprawl, degrade urban design, prohibit walkability, damage the economy, raise housing costs, and penalize people who cannot afford or choose not to own a car. Using careful analysis and creative thinking, Shoup recommended three important parking reforms: (1) remove off-street parking requirements, (2) charge the right prices for on-street parking, and (3) spend the meter revenue to improve public services on the metered streets. Parking and the City reports on the progress that cities have made in adopting these three reforms. The successful outcomes provide convincing evidence that Shoup's policy proposals were not theoretical and idealistic but instead are practical and realistic. The good news about our decades of bad planning for parking is that the damage we have done will be far cheaper to repair than to ignore. The 53 chapters by 46 authors in Parking and the City show how reforming our misguided and wrongheaded parking policies can do a world of good."--Provided by publisher

Suppose curb parking is free but all the spaces are occupied, and off-street parking is expensive but immediately available. In this case, you can cruise to find a curb space being vacated by a departing motorist, or pay for off-street parking right away. This paper presents a model of how drivers choose whether to cruise or to pay, and it predicts several results: you are more likely to cruise if curb parking is cheap, off-street parking is expensive, fuel is cheap, you want to park for a long time, you are alone in the car, and you place a low value on saving time. The model also predicts that charging the market price for curb parking – at least equal to the price of adjacent off-street parking – will eliminate cruising. Because the government sets curb parking prices, planners, and elected officials strongly influence drivers' decisions to cruise. The failure to charge market rates for curb parking congests traffic, pollutes the air, wastes fuel, and causes accidents. Between 1927 and 2001, studies of cruising in congested downtowns have found that it took between 3.5 and 14 min to find a curb space, and that between 8 and 74 percent of the traffic was cruising for parking.

Free or underpriced curb parking creates a classic commons problem. Studies have found that between 8% and 74% of cars in congested traffic were cruising in search of curb parking, and that the average time to find a curb space ranged between 3 and 14 min. Cities can eliminate the economic incentive to cruise by charging market-clearing prices for curb parking spaces. Market-priced curb parking can yield between 5% and 8% of the total land rent in a city, and in some neighborhoods can yield more revenue than the property tax.

In 1992, California enacted legislation (AB 2109, KATZ) that requires many employers offer employees the option to choose cash in lieu of any parking subsidy offered. This report presents eight case studies of employers who have complied with California's cash-out requirement. One employer is a government agency, and the other seven are private firms, including three law firms, one accounting firm, one bank, one managed-care medical provider, and one video post-production company. They range in size from 120 to 300 employees, with a combined total of 1,694 employees. The price of parking at the worksites ranged from $36 to $165 a month. After cashing out, solo driving to work fell by 17 percent. Carpooling increased by 64 percent. Transit ridership increased by 50 percent. Walking and bicycling increased by 33 percent. Commuter parking demand fell by 11 percent. These mode shifts reduced total vehicle miles traveled for commuting by 12 percent, with a range from 5 to 24 percent for the eight firms. To put this reduction into perspective, reducing VMT for commuting by 12 percent is equivalent to removing from the road one of every eight automobiles used for driving to work. In total, cashing out reduced 1.1 million VMT per year. Cashing out reduced total vehicle emissions for commuting by 12 percent, with a range from 5 to 24 percent for the eight firms. To put this reduction into perspective, reducing vehicle emissions by 12 percent is equivalent to eliminating vehicle emissions for automobile commuting from January 1 to February 13 every year. The eight employers' average commuting subsidy per employee increased from $72 a month before complying with the cash-out requirement to $74 a month after complying with the cash-out requirement. The employer's commuting subsidy declined by $70 per employee per month at one firm, and increased by an average of $13 per employee per month at the other seven firms, with a range from $8 to $33 more per employee per month. Employers praised the cash option for its simplicity and fairness, and said that it helped to recruit and retain employees. In summary, these eight case studies show that cashing out employer-paid parking can benefit commuters, employers, taxpayers, and the environment.

Employer-paid parking subsidizes about a third of all automobile travel in the United States, and about two-thirds of all automobile travel during the morning peak hours. To reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, California has recently enacted legislation requiring employers who subsidize employee parking to offer employees the option to take the cash value of the parking subsidy, in lieu of the parking itself. The legislation also requires cities to reduce the parking requirements for developments that implement a parking cash-out program. This study estimates how the option to cash out employer-paid parking will reduce commuter parking demand, and recommends a corresponding reduction in minimum parking requirements. To deal with spillover parking problems that may occur if cities reduce parking requirements, the article concludes with a proposal to create "Parking Benefit Districts" where the revenues from market-priced curb parking are dedicated to paying for neighborhood public services. At market parking prices, curb parking revenue could easily exceed the current residential property tax revenue in neighborhoods subject to spillover parking.

Almost all parking in the United States is provided free to the user. In the 1990 Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey, motorists reported receiving free parking for 99 percent of all automobile trips. Because the average car is parked 95 percent of the time, it seems clear that, in most cases, congestion tolls would charge motorists for the use of roads during the brief time they are travelling between free parking spaces. In considering the potential benefits of congestion pricing, previous research on parking pricing provides useful evidence that automobile use is surprisingly sensitive to its price. The purpose of this study is (1) to present the evidence from parking studies on the price elasticity of demand for automobile travel, (2) to explore how employer-paid parking subsidies contribute to the problems that congestion tolls are meant to solve, (3) to propose a policy to "cash out" employer-paid parking subsidies, (4) to explain California's new parking cash-out legislation, and (5) to describe some early results of the California legislation and speculate on how it may serve as a precedent for implementing congestion pricing.

The first thing to understand about transportation in California is how grave the problems really are. In terms of both traffic congestion and air pollution, California's problems are the worst in the nation. Traffic congestion is difficult to comparea mongci ties, but one attempt to rank Americanc ities in terms of their traffic congestion found that Los Angeles is number1 , San Francisco-Oaklandi s number3 , and San Bemardino-R/versidea hd San Diego tie for number8 . Addedt ravel time and added fuel consumptiona ssociated with reduceds peeds in congestedt raffic are estimatedt o cost motorists in these four cities a total of $13 billion a year. Ninety percent of this cost is for the added travel time and 10 percent is for the added fuel consumptionc aused by delays in peak-hour traffic) To put this $13- billion-a-year cost estimate in perspective, the total general revenue (property taxes, sales taxes, business license taxes, etc.) of all c2ities in Califomiaw as $9.4 billion in 1994-1995. Therefore, the estimated costs of traffic congestion in Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, San Bemardino-R/verside, and San Diego alone are 38 percent more than the general revenues of all municipal governments in California combined.

Ninety-five percent of automobile commuters in the United States park free at work. To deal with the traffic congestion and air pollution caused by parking subsidies, California law now requires many employers to offer employees the option to cash out their parking subsidies. Similar Federal legislation has been proposed. This nationwide survey found that employers in the United States off employees 84.8 million free parking spaces. Employers own 65.3 million of these free parking spaces, and rent the other 19.5 million. Employers of fewer than twenty employees provide more than half of all employer-paid parking spaces.