Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

by Jeff Speck

Shoup himself notes how the “bible” of city planning, F. Stuart Chapin’s Urban Land Use Planning, doesn’t even mention parking once.● We did better than that in Suburban Nation, but our focus was more on the what than the why, which Shoup has refined to the level of science. What Shoup has discovered about parking—using both an economist’s cold logic and the careful, sustained observation of reality—is that every city in America handles it wrong. Rather than parking working in the service of cities, cities have been working in the service of parking, almost entirely to their detriment. He has also determined, and demonstrated, that this problem can be fixed fairly easily and with great rewards for all involved. And he is just beginning to see his ideas bear fruit in places like San Francisco,