Free Parking? There’s No Such Thing
On Wednesday November 2, CNT, Chicago Metropolis 2020, the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Metropolitan Planning Council hosted a lunch featuring Donald Shoup, an economist who teaches in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning. Shoup, an expert on transportation economics who recently published a book called The High Cost of Free Parking, argued to a group of about 200 attendees that current zoning laws, which regulate the amount of parking that different land uses require, end up costing all of us money. The cost of providing that parking becomes assimilated into the price of just about everything we buy–housing, merchandise, services, etc. Shoups’s proposition to the Chicago region: Reduce parking requirements.
CNT’s Jacky Grimshaw talks with WBEZ’s Steve Edwards about Shoup’s arguments as they relate to the Chicago region and how they could improve quality of life here. Listen to Jacky here this story starts about 7:45 minutes into the segment.
Listen to an interview with Donald Shoup on NPR here.
