There Is No Free Parking

The pandemic has reshaped cities’ ideas about the best uses for public space. A longtime parking-reform advocate and a growing number of city halls say it’s about time

- Dayna Evans

Over a Zoom call from sunny Los Angeles, Donald Shoup— sporting a big white beard, a brown cardigan sweater, and a marketer’s telephone headset—was yelling at me. “Oh, how terrible, you have to move your car, so they can sweep the road. I think that’s just awful,” he said, with audible italics. “To overcome the base desires of people like you”—people like me?— “you have to give the money back to the neighborhood.”

I’d made the mistake of griping to the bona fide king of parking reform that owning a car in New York City was annoying. Twice-weekly street sweeping forces a large group of people to fight for a small number of free curbside spots that they must then vacate frequently. It’s the rare game of musical chairs that requires insurance. And for most people, exorbitantly priced garages aren’t really an option. The free spaces are the only way to make owning a car in New York feel sustainable.

Shoup wasn’t having it. “People have to ask—do they want free Wi-Fi, or do they want free curb parking for her?”

He didn’t say as much, but by his definition, I was a person suffering from paid parking derangement syndrome. In his writing, he describes this condition as “the acute onset of extreme paranoia in reaction to the prospect of paying for parking, leading the afflicted to speak in the hyperbolic language and to lose touch with reality.” Guilty as charged.