Remembering Donald Shoup (1938-2025)
Professor Donald Shoup passed away on February 6, 2025. Among many other significant achievements and honors he was a founding Advisory Board member of PRN.
Donald’s curiosity, intelligence, passion, generosity, and kindness allowed him not only to expose the critical problems with modern parking policy, but also to ignite and nurture a movement to change them and make the world a better place.
The Parking Reform Network wishes to provide our community with a place to share their stories and thoughts to remember and honor Donald.
Professor Shoup was a donor, member, and booster of PRN’s work. If you are so moved, you can honor his legacy and support the parking reform movement with a memorial donation.
Borrowing a copy of The High Cost of Free Parking from the local library a few years ago significantly reshaped my thinking around cities, transport and land use - and I didn't even finish reading the book before it was due back at the library! When I cofounded a pro-housing urbanist advocacy group, Greater Canberra, a short time later, we made parking reform one of our key priorities, inspired by the victories of housing reformers in the US, New Zealand and elsewhere who had turned Donald Shoup's ideas and evidence into real-world outcomes.
I look at the fights in front of me for parking reform and get discouraged because it always feels like we've got 3-5 years of work ahead of us to make real progress on this issue, but then I remember that Donald Shoup started working on this issue in a harder era than mine, in a harder, even more car-centric city than mine, as a pioneer with far fewer resources to draw on, and just kept chipping away at it for longer than I've been alive, until parking reform became a movement and the dominoes started falling. I'll be happy if I can have even a tenth of his persistence and perseverance.
Vale Shoup Dogg!
I look at the fights in front of me for parking reform and get discouraged because it always feels like we've got 3-5 years of work ahead of us to make real progress on this issue, but then I remember that Donald Shoup started working on this issue in a harder era than mine, in a harder, even more car-centric city than mine, as a pioneer with far fewer resources to draw on, and just kept chipping away at it for longer than I've been alive, until parking reform became a movement and the dominoes started falling. I'll be happy if I can have even a tenth of his persistence and perseverance.
Vale Shoup Dogg!