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.
I’m sad to learn of the passing of Professor Donald Shoup. While he is often described as America’s “parking guru” (which he was!) and author of the seminal book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” I’ll remember him first as a great urbanist — an urbanist who saw very early on that excessive, subsidized parking worked against making places that people really value.
I love that he gave me — a random fan he’d never met before — a tour of UCLA in 2018 when my family was staying in LA. During our chat, knowing that I was familiar with theaters in California, he pointed out what happens when a show lets out of the LA Music Center vs. say, the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. In LA, people take an escalator down to the multilevel parking structure underneath the complex and drive home; in San Francisco, where the theater is woven in the urban fabric, crowds spill out into the streets in all directions after a show and enjoy the downtown for drinks and dessert. That has stuck with me.
American cities still need a lot of work, but thanks to his parking reform evangelism, we are definitely in a better place because of Professor Shoup.
I love that he gave me — a random fan he’d never met before — a tour of UCLA in 2018 when my family was staying in LA. During our chat, knowing that I was familiar with theaters in California, he pointed out what happens when a show lets out of the LA Music Center vs. say, the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. In LA, people take an escalator down to the multilevel parking structure underneath the complex and drive home; in San Francisco, where the theater is woven in the urban fabric, crowds spill out into the streets in all directions after a show and enjoy the downtown for drinks and dessert. That has stuck with me.
American cities still need a lot of work, but thanks to his parking reform evangelism, we are definitely in a better place because of Professor Shoup.