Prime, free downtown parking spaces like these on the west side of the Monroe County Courthouse Square are quickly filled most days and evenings. Jeremy Hogan | Herald-Times
Prime, free downtown parking spaces like these on the west side of the Monroe County Courthouse Square are quickly filled most days and evenings. Jeremy Hogan | Herald-Times
San Francisco project

Much of the current thinking on urban parking strategy — including many of the recommendations in the city’s Walker report — are drawn from the work of UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup, a national authority on modern parking management.

The “Shoupian” vision, applied by Walker Parking Consultants to Bloomington, includes regulation of demand through pricing, a scheme that can also fund downtown development. Consumers drop coins in the meters to pay for lighting, sidewalks, benches and repairs.

With a parking meter, the more you are willing to pay, the longer you are allowed to stay.

Shoup, who wrote “The High Price of Free Parking,” has been labeled a “parking rock star” by the Wall Street Journal. Walker’s 85 percent measure of parking space occupancy as an upper limit for best practices is a “Shoupian” idea. When it was applied here, it revealed that Bloomington’s on-street parking supply fell short of the mark in 24 of 56 downtown blocks.

The most notable of Shoup’s parking “laws” in action is the “SFpark” project in San Francisco, detailed in a short video about the project at sfpark.org.

“It shows in three minutes what it took me 800 pages to write,” Shoup said in an email.

The video depicts cartoon cars under the pressure of dynamic pricing. Prices at specific meters, all computer controlled, go up if occupancy level on a block exceeds 80 percent and drop if occupancy runs below 60 percent. Under this model, Shoup believes, at least two open spaces on each block can be maintained, thus preventing the waste of fossil fuels in circling the block.

The plan is in place in a portion of San Francisco, where on one block, meter prices have risen to close to $5 an hour. On others, a quarter can buy you an hour. A driver can find the best combination of price and location by browsing the project’s website before heading for a destination.

What Bloomington Mayor Mark Kruzan has offered is less audacious than the SFpark project, but rests on the same principles. And revenues, he has said, will be directed toward beautifying the downtown.

— Jon Blau
Drivers today sit behind the wheels of powerful machines, but Rachel Weinberger wonders sometimes if many of them think they’ve got reins in their hands, ready to tie up to the hitching post just outside the general store.

Weinberger, who has served as transportation policy adviser under New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, says drivers often define their journey as starting at Point A and ending within a few feet of the store where they want to shop — their Point B. In New York City, she has often watched as drivers angrily try to fulfill that outdated frontier expectation.

“We have this psychology that we are entitled to a free parking space,” Weinberger said. “The psychology of this, and it’s uniform, is people get kind of panicky when they are told they’ll have to pay for parking.”

She remembers one shopkeeper in particular, a florist in the “Big Apple,” who wailed when meter rates went up in front of his business, pushing him out of his customary spot and into a parking garage.
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