Free Parking Is Killing Cities by: Dayna Evens

 Nate Savarese

Mr. Roddy

IHSS

18 January 2021

Why  free parking is killing cities

    In my article, a journalist interviews Donald Shoup, who is an American economist that taught urban planning at UCLA. He specialized in parking. Donald Shoup believes that no parking should be free. he thinks that instead of having free parking there should be paid parking, and the revenue created from the paid parking should go to other infrastructures such as free wifi, cafes, bike lanes, or even something as simple as vending machines. 

    In most cities in America, cars are almost necessary to everyday life. This means that if you have a car, then you have to park it somewhere. Most cities have free parking in a lot of places. It is considered a normal thing to benefit community members. But Shoup argues that instead of having free parking, we need to have paid parking as well as better planned parking setups. In America, there are about 250 million cars however, there are approximately two billion parking spaces, which means that for every car there are eight parking spaces that take up 1000 sq feet. That is tons of space that is mostly made out of concrete which is terrible for the environment. With all this space, in big cities such as NYC parking is impossible to find. With Shoups paid parking plan, people will be able to spend less time looking for spots and can spend more time doing what they need to be doing. With the money, we can also clean up the streets, dispose of trash, and make the cities more beautiful.

    I personally agree with Donald Shoup because I think that cars play too big of a role in climate change, and a simple idea like this, it could easily help fix many of the problems we face around parking and climate change.

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