Shoup's advice on parking could unclog the streets of urban India

High parking fees will find public support if these collections are used for local-area improvements

- NITIN PAI

Very few people in India have heard of Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who passed away earlier this month. That is a pity, because his life's work holds the answer to one of India's biggest challenges: improving the quality of life in our cities. Shoup was the world's foremost scholar of parking policy. No, that does not do justice to his biography. He was, as one of his students described him in a eulogy, truly a prophet of parking. The book that he has left behind, aptly titled The High Cost of Free Parking, ought to be read by every economist, urban planner, civil servant and urban governance activist in the country.

One of the main reasons why traffic flow in India's cities is clogged is the cholesterol of parked (and double-parked) vehicles that make journeys slow and stressful. In addition to economic, health and environmental costs, traffic congestion corrodes our social capital. Readers will recall that in a recent column, I declared bad traffic as anti-national, for it damages our already weak sense of fraternity by exposing our worst forms of behaviour to each other on a daily basis.

Unchoking our roads ought to be an important priority of urban policy. Shoup's studies show us not only what to do, but how to do it. Let me jump straight to the answer before I explain the logic.