Lewis Center and ITS Faculty Fellow Don Shoup sat down with BuzzFeed news to expand on his astute sound bite at CityLab this week, “It’s unfair to have cities where parking is free for cars and housing is expensive for people.” The article condenses Professor Shoup’s some 700-page tour de force “The High Cost of Free Parking” into a 4 point Buzzfeed piece. Frequent readers of BuzzFeed articles may notice something missing: an absence of any pictures or references to cats. To address this problem, we wanted to add that Professor Shoup likens his work on parking to cats. “Dogs travel in packs and they chase after the moving cars, bite at the moving tires, like to ride around and stick their heads out the window. Cats, on the other hand, are solitary creatures. They mark the tires of parked cars, sitting on the warm hoods of recently parked vehicles. This gives the cats plenty of time to brew about the economics of all these parked cars.”
Lewis Center and ITS Associate Director, Juan Matute, joined the interview to provide his own quip to the conversation pointing out the ridiculous nature of parking requirements, “imagine if you required every housing unit to have a squash court.” As the BuzzFeed article points out, this would certainly increase the cost of housing.
You can read other thoughts on parking from Professor Shoup in the most recent issue of Access Magazine.