23 February 2025. Parking | Barbarians

Paying for parking: we’re all Shoupistas now // ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, re-imagined [#631]

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1: Paying for parking: we’re all Shoupistas now

Every so often when reading an obituary of someone, or a citation, you realise that you have internalised their work into your thinking without having read it directly. So it was with Donald Shoup, the California transport academic who spent his life working on the problem of urban parking, and who died earlier this month.

His sometime teaching colleague M. Nolan Grey has a long piece celebrating Shoup’s work at the Works in Progress newsletter.

The problem of urban parking is this: cars are only used about 5% of the time—that’s approaching an hour and a quarter a day, so in many cases that number is likely to be too high—and the other 95% of the time they have to be stored somewhere:

When Americans first started buying cars en masse in the early twentieth century, the solution seemed obvious: park them along the curb. In the most radical shift in city planning in human history, urban streets—once the site of gathering, selling, and playing—were redesigned around moving and storing cars.

That’s why our cities and towns are dominated, visually, by parked cars, almost everywhere you look.

Shoup’s insight seems simple, but in a world that had normalised car use, it was radical:

parking is nearly always too cheap.

This situation had come about slowly. As car ownership started to increase, people parked on streets because it was free to park there, and it took a long time to fill up this space. But once car ownership became a mass phenomenon, the problem of parking cars became a significant land use problem.

In the US, which experienced the problem first, planners responded in many cities by imposing minimum off-street parking requirements in new buildings, increasing the cost of housing significantly. Grey has a calculation in his article about the effect of this on even modest urban housing, which now needed to incorporate an off-road parking space into its design. It adds anything from $20,000 to $80,000 to the cost of the housing, depending on whether the parking space is at surface level or below ground, and may also make impossible the renovation of older buildings, and infill development to increase density.

There’s a chart in the article of Houston’s extensive rules on offstreet parking for different kinds of developments. They are based on an influential document by the Institution of Transportation Engineers, the Parking Generation Manual. But Grey suggests that this is “pseudo-science”:

At first blush, it seems very scientific, replete with charts, numbers, and statistical jargon. But the typical estimate in the Fifth Edition is based on fewer than 10 observations, often with no clear correlation.

The space given over to car parking in downtown areas also increased. Grey has a chart in his article showing the land take of car parking in downtown Lexington—about 38% of the total, marked in red on the map.

(Source: Parking Reform Network)

Some of this was deliberate policy. I’ve just finished reading Robin Robertson’s fine novel-length poem The Long Take, which unfolds over a decade or more in post-war Los Angeles. One of the narrative threads is about the way in which the old downtown residential area was systematically demolished by the city authorities to make way for freeways and car parks.

Down 3d to Main: houses boarded up, stores

with their windows soaped over, signs saying CLOSING OUT SALE.

Breaks in the street where buildings had been,

being cleared for parking lots.

A note at the back of the book explains that the CRA [Community Redevelopment Agency] which ran this process, was

[u]naccountable and largely corrupt [and] in thrall to the business community and the automobile industry. They demolished most of the old and historic residential buildings in downtown Los Angeles either to make way for freeways or for lucrative street-level parking.

Free parking also has more immediate day to day effects. Because services that are free are usually over-subscribed, it leads to people cruising the streets waiting or hoping to see a car pull out of an empty space. Some surveys estimate that a third of drivers in an American downtown are cruising for parking:

If we could flip a switch and reduce traffic by 30 percent—with all the attendant costs to air quality, street safety, honking, wasted time, and street damage—we would almost certainly do it.

The effect of all of this is to bake in an over-supply of car parking, and to transform the urban environment so it is dominated by the car:

In neighborhoods built before the car, they made a wave of demolitions legally necessary. Today, over a third of the typical American downtown is now taken up by surface parking lots—and that’s before considering parking garages. In the suburbs, built out consistent with these rules, the result is a landscape of garden apartments, strip malls, and office parks surrounded by acres of parking lots that are virtually never full.

Shoup’s challenge to all of this came in a vast book, The High Cost of Urban Parking, published in 2005. It argued, at length, that free parking was never free because of all of the costs that came with it. It also suggested that trying to regulate the problem away by increasing the supply of parking was looking at it from the end of the telescope.

It was more efficient to manage demand for parking by pricing it properly. If there was too much demand for parking (as seen in drivers jostling to find parking spaces), it was because parking wasn’t expensive enough.

Shoup had had this insight as “the token economist” in UCLA’s Planning Department:

If you set a high enough price, at least one spot will always be available. Nobody will have any incentive to waste their time cruising. Better yet, if prices can fluctuate in response to demand, drivers will be incentivized to adjust their trips efficiently. Those with options could instead take the bus, minimize driving at peak times, or park a little further away and walk the rest of the way.

In fact, people had been trying to price parking, in fits and starts, at least since Carl Magee patented the coin-operated parking meter in 1935. But the politics of getting people to pay for something that used to be free is always tricky.

(Source: Google Patents)

This was one of Shoup’s critical insights. If you hand some or all of the parking revenues over to districts, the politics changes:

If you take curb parking revenue and invest it in conspicuous local improvements, such as street trees, repaved sidewalks, or regular street sweeping, locals will not only support pricing curb parking—they will often demand it. Once a parking benefits district is established, the politics of pricing curb parking will be secure, and planners can remove minimum off-street parking requirements without fear of backlash.

And although some of the issues I’ve discussed in this article are more skewed to the United States, this issue of getting people to pay for parking—and by extension to pay a fair price for car use, given its external costs—is still a problem everywhere.

The book wasn’t released into a vacuum either. Shoup had spent several decades training transport planners. What The High Cost of Urban Parking did was to give them the manual.

Shoup was hardly the model of a rock-star academic. Grey describes “a stuffy academic straight out of central casting”—tweed jacketed, bearded, cycling into the office. But unlikely as it seems, given his persona and his subject, he’s given his name to a transport movement: shoupista.

And the shoupistas are winning in the US at the moment. Cities are pricing parking, and abolishing off-street parking rules, slowly, to be sure, but steadily.

(Valentine card seen on the Shoupista Facebook group.)

Grey has some thoughts on why Shoup was effective. He picked a topic that was “simultaneously important, tractable, and neglected”, on which planners had quite a lot of agency, and which was largely neglected.

Second, he found a way to reframe the policy problem of free parking so it appealed to people with different political perspectives:

Are you a conservative? People should pay for the services they consume. Are you a progressive? All this unnecessary driving can’t be good for the environment. Are you a libertarian? Clearly, the solution to scarcity is prices and markets. Are you a socialist? Let’s stop privatizing the public realm by turning it into a free parking lot.

Third, he kept telling the same story. He stuck to parking, rather than diversifying into other issues.

Fourth, he built the next generation, training them at UCLA. And more:

Shoup eagerly responded to emails from planners in even the most unremarkable small towns and often helped young scholars to co-author some of their first research on parking. In his seminars, students were encouraged to publish their work via op-eds or academic papers.

And last, when there was a parking issue to campaign for, he rolled his sleeves up and got involved, working with people to lobby for good policy.

There’s maybe some broader lessons here.

This short TL:DR animation actually features the voice of Donald Shoup explaining his ideas in a nutshell, and has a good punchline.

H/t to Peter Curry for the link.

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2: Waiting for the barbarians, reworked and re-imagined

(The Fitzwilliam Museum. (C) John Naughton)

John Naughton’s Memex 1.1 blog—whose main theme is usually about something at the intersection of technology, politics, and ethics—always starts with one of his photographs, which is welcome, since he is a good photographer.

Sometime these are topical, sometimes not; sometimes colour, sometimes black and white.

A week or so back he’d passed the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, and noticed that the facade had been illuminated with quotations. This was part of a series of works and installations at the museum by the American artist Glenn Ligon (video introduction here).

The quotes are all from C.P. Cavafy’s poem ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, written in 1898 and published privately in 1904. More specifically, they are all different English translations of the last two lines of the poem, although you might have to zoom in to see this. Here’s the most widely used English version of those two lines, by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard:

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution.

Well, as Ezra Pound said,

Poetry is news that stays news.

Cavafy was writing just as the forms of the modern European nation state were starting to harden, as the technologies of bureaucracy were being put in place, as states started to insist on travel documents such as passports to cross boundaries.

One of the things the nation state tends to do is to “other” strangers. It is a familiar political strategy. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, published in 1902, captures contemporaneously the sense of this in London.

And it’s worth giving more of a flavour of the poem, since the citizens are busy blaming everything that isn’t happening in their city on the imminent arrival of the barbarians. Here are the first seven lines of the poem, again from the Keeley and Sherrard translation:

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?

Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

What’s the point of senators making laws now?

Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.

And spoilers, but as you might have guessed from the final two lines, quoted above, the barbarians never show. And worse than that: they don’t actually exist at all.

In other words, as metaphors go, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ is a poem that stalks the 20th and 21st centuries, It has had a long cultural afterlife, in particular from the later part of the 20th century, when Cavafy’s work was popularised.

As Wikipedia notes, among other references, there’s a 1980 novel by the South African writer J.M. Coetzee called Waiting for the Barbarians, which reworks the poem. There’s a Philip Glass opera based on the Coetzee novel and an opera based on the poem by Constantine Kouklas. There’s a choral work based on the poem by Andrew Ford, and also a setting of the poem by Laurie Anderson. (There’s a video of her piece and performance below: her voice is as immediately arresting as ever.)

Doing some light research for this piece, I also found an academic article by Maria Boletsi, a Cavafy specialist, about two different artworks inspired by the poem, one indirectly via the Coetzee novel, one directly from the poem.

(Kendell Geers, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’. Via NRW Skulptur. The sign says: ‘Eintreten auf eigene Gefahr’ (Enter at own risk).

Kendell Geers is a South African artist now working in Europe, and his 2001 piece (inspired by Coetzee), also called ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, is an installation in a field in Germany. Boletsi describes it as

a labyrinthic installation with a side length of 30 meters, taking up 900 square meters in total. Its walls resemble border fences, whose top edge is crowned with a spiral of razon-wire – the type that is used at military bases and for the guarding of national borders.

Or for keeping people confined—in prisons or concentration camps. Who knows? Donald Trump’s ‘beautiful wall’ between the United States and Mexico might one day end up looking like this.

(Kendell Geers, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’, details. Via NRW Skulptur.)

A website about the work says that

it functions here as a sort of trellis, leaving all of the fences to one day be overgrown with ivy. The installation seems to suggest that all of the conflicts between opposing viewpoints – war and peace, savagery and civilization, art and nature – will only come to an end once nature has triumphed. Beyond that, however, it also asks about inside and outside, about who is seeking protection from whom, about cause and effect.

Boletsi references this idea of ambiguity in her article:

Civilization becomes a prison we have constructed for ourselves by violently imposing divisions between self and other... Could we, the civilized subjects, be the barbarians for which the installation is waiting fearfully, trying to guard itself by means of barbed wire and warning signs? The title suddenly takes an unexpected meaning.

The second piece that Boletsi discusses is by the Argentinian artist Graciela Sacco’s, called ‘Esperando a los Barbaros’. It’s best to go to her site to look at the images, but the piece involves re-working this motif, of eyes looking through a slit in wall, in different ways.

((C) Graciela Scacco, from ‘Esperando a los Barbaros’.)

Again, there’s an obvious ambiguity here. Are these the eyes of someone looking through the city walls, scanning the horizon for the barbarians, or are they the barbarians, peering in to the city? Either way, the repeated motif of the eyes conjures the idea that someone is surveilling us, even if not all of the eyes are looking at us directly. Without any reference points, we don’t know who they are, or to what end. Boletsi writes:

Since the eyes do not allow identification, there is no clear social frame for the viewer’s confrontation with them: they pose an epistemological challenge... The viewer becomes vulnerable instead of achieving self- identification through the other. In our encounter with the artwork we cannot measure ourselves against any recognizable “barbarians” which would subscribe to our own representational system.

Boletsi became interested in Cavafy’s poem after 9/11, when she was writing a paper about it for her Master’s degree. She noticed the word ‘barbarian’ re-entering the language in news bulletins and public speech. That was interesting to me, so I did a quick check using Google’ N-Gram Viewer. It wasn’t just perception: after a long decline in the 19th century, and a bit of an upward bump during World War II, theres been a sharp and continuing uptick since 2000.

(Frequency of the word ‘barbarian, 1800-2022. Source: Google N-Gram)

Boletsi noticed at the time that the word ‘barbarian’ tended to be applied to acts of terrorist violence by Muslims, but not by white perpetrators:

Using the term “barbarian” for Muslim perpetrators enables their identification with a whole culture that is considered external to the West. By contrast, framing ‘white terrorists’ as deviant individuals de-culturalizes their acts: it casts them as exceptional deviations from the spirit of Western civilization.

As I said at the beginning, one of the ways that nation-states maintain their psychological boundaries is by having an over-developed sense of the “other” beyond their physical boundaries. And of course, one of the noisiest of tropes from the hard-right is that there are strangers among us. The hard-right leader of Britain’s Reform party, Nigel Farage, by way of example, obsesses about people who don’t speak in English in public spaces in England. Those barbarians are a kind of a solution.

There’s another famous quote about poetry and news, as Stephen Burt noted in a reflective post at the Columbia University Press blog. It is by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.

And women too.

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j2t#631

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