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.
Donald Shoup was an incredible thinker, writer, and mentor, and working for him at UCLA (after The High Cost of Free Parking had inspired me to apply to study planning there!) was a dream come true. His kindness, gratitude, humor, and spunk made what could have been very boring emails a delight to receive, and he always added an old cartoon or photograph in his signatures. Like himself posing with his motorcycle in 1964, or a cat reading a newspaper - he was never too busy for his students, and never too busy to inject a bit of fun.
But what impressed me most about him was his focus. He had other brilliant policy ideas, too, but while another talented academic might have been distracted by the fun and novelty of pursuing the next good idea that presents itself, he persevered with parking and seemed to sense how necessary repetition was for his reform ideas to take root in the real world.
His work has rippled and touched so many lives, in big ways and small, already within his lifetime. And it will continue to inspire and unite people across the globe around this once-obscure issue, to work for a world of greater economic justice, sustainability, health, and beauty.
RIP
But what impressed me most about him was his focus. He had other brilliant policy ideas, too, but while another talented academic might have been distracted by the fun and novelty of pursuing the next good idea that presents itself, he persevered with parking and seemed to sense how necessary repetition was for his reform ideas to take root in the real world.
His work has rippled and touched so many lives, in big ways and small, already within his lifetime. And it will continue to inspire and unite people across the globe around this once-obscure issue, to work for a world of greater economic justice, sustainability, health, and beauty.
RIP