If convenient parking is hard to find, it’s not because demand exceeds supply, says UCLA professor Donald Shoup, but because the available supply is being sold too cheap.

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Most automobiles sit parked and unused 95% of the time, says UCLA professor Donald Shoup (right). The inappropriately low cost of onstreet parking encourages wasteful and inefficient cruising for curbside parking, he argued in this essay from the New York Times.

Dr. Shoup will present his research on parking to an open workshop in the Santa Rosa City Council chambers on August 11 at 2 pm. Details about that free public event can be found here.

In high density residential neighborhoods, such as much of San Francisco, that can squeeze out any opportunity for visitors to find a space. But here, too, he argues, placing a higher price on the curbside spaces, is the simplest way to change that dynamic.

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In some cases, charging what the market will bear for streetside parking can be implemented one neighborhood at a time. But Shoup says the residents of those areas must be able to see how they will benefit from the change before they will accept it.

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Shoup explains how to monitize and manage onstreet parking in greater detail in this article from (who knew there was such a magazine?) Parking Today. But the biggest single change he'd like to see is the elimination of the commonplace civic requirement that all new construction include a predetermined number of parking places.

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