With permission, Stuart Donovan, a Senior Fellow at Motu Research and urban economist, has allowed us to share this brief tribute he made on LinkedIn to Donald Shoup, an American engineer and professor in urban planning who died on 6 February.

A tribute to Donald Shoup

I read Donald Shoup’s book, “The High Cost of Free Parking”, soon after it was first published in 2005. Not only did the book completely change how I thought about transport and land use policy, but it also prompted me to return to university to pursue further studies in urban economics. I’m glad I did.

In subsequent years, I would work alongside many, many others arguing for the removal of minimum parking requirements. As part of those efforts, MRCagney arranged for Donald Shoup to visit Auckland, where he gave several talks that persuaded more people to join the cause.

A decade later, New Zealand managed to pass the National Policy Statement on Urban Development (NPS-UD), which essentially removed minimum parking requirements nationwide. This was a massive policy win and I’m confident that it wouldn’t have happened without Donald Shoup.

Shoup’s contribution was immense and something that will inspire me for as long as I walk this earth.

Tributes pouring in

Many tributes are being made in honour of Donald Shoup – such as this one on the StreetsBlogNYC site.

An unusual milestone in his career occurred when he became a cartoon character in a short for the hit US TV show Adam Ruins Everything, which neatly described his theories in just two minutes and accorded him the deserved status of being one of the world’s foremost researchers into the economics of parking.