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.
It was an honor to spend a good chunk of my career implementing Don's ideas, which were just catching on when I was getting started. His infamous tome was published just before I entered graduate school, so I was exposed to it by Dr. Rachel Weinberger, who well curated her transportation class at Penn to prepare us as practitioners. I'm grateful to have been hired on by Jay Primus for the SFpark team in SF - we were charged with implementing Shoup's performance-based pricing ideas for the first time in a large city at scale, thanks to a large federal grant. It was, frankly, terrifying being responsible for figuring how to make academic ideas work on gritty streets coordinating with many operational departments. Change is hard - very hard. But, we had the quality of strong, clear thinking behind us, infusing not just how we thought about parking but shaping a whole TDM philosophy we brought to the curbside, to permit parking, and many adjacent reforms. At the launch of SFpark, it was the young staff's first time meeting Shoup - the team was young, working long hours with a reformer's zeal, and empowered to rethink major tenets of the parking and curb system. His joke pointed at the young staff behind the successful launch brought the house down - "If I'd have known parking kept you this young, I'd have started getting into it long ago!"
It was a long, exhausting marathon to make SFpark work. Spending so much time inhabiting Shoup's ideas; the leadership of Primus and former SFMTA CFO Sonali Bose; and access to high quality technical resources thanks to federal funding overseen by Allen Greenberg all shaped by early career in ways I'm so grateful for.
Shoup remained a wonderful presence in my orbit throughout my career. The principles of demand management behind his book shaped how I practice every day - putting parking, transit, zoning, and induced demand principles at the heart of my work. I'm not sure quite what my career would have been like without his thinking, to be honest.
Perhaps more relevant than the work, it's nice to see such a kind, generous, and smart person succeed by all credible measures.
Just a month ago my last exchange was him, of course, him doing an act of kindness for my firm. I'm so glad my last note was a cheesy thank you note - I only wish I'd said more.
It was a long, exhausting marathon to make SFpark work. Spending so much time inhabiting Shoup's ideas; the leadership of Primus and former SFMTA CFO Sonali Bose; and access to high quality technical resources thanks to federal funding overseen by Allen Greenberg all shaped by early career in ways I'm so grateful for.
Shoup remained a wonderful presence in my orbit throughout my career. The principles of demand management behind his book shaped how I practice every day - putting parking, transit, zoning, and induced demand principles at the heart of my work. I'm not sure quite what my career would have been like without his thinking, to be honest.
Perhaps more relevant than the work, it's nice to see such a kind, generous, and smart person succeed by all credible measures.
Just a month ago my last exchange was him, of course, him doing an act of kindness for my firm. I'm so glad my last note was a cheesy thank you note - I only wish I'd said more.