No free parking

Jonathan Zasloff recently posted at Legal Planet on the work of Don Shoup, particularly his book (originally an article), The High Cost of Free Parking (APA Planners Press, updated edition 2011). Zasloff writes:

As Shoup observed — and more importantly, proved — land use regulations requiring massive amounts of free parking helped create sprawling urban form as well as incentivizing reliance on the automobile....

But isn’t that what the market was demanding? No, Shoup argued. Although an economist by training, Shoup became an ersatz historian, and demonstrated that most zoning codes’ parking requirements came from model codes in the 1920’s and had absolutely no empirical basis to them. Then urban planners just copied them, because that was easier. Shoup loves to compare the “science” of parking requirements to phrenology, and he’s right.