Donald Shoup, Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA, was honored as the 2023 SEASIDE Prize™ recipient for his radical rethinking of parking policy. In his groundbreaking 2005 book, The High Cost of Free Parking, and his work since then, Shoup changed the way cities view the relationship between parking and the built environment, traffic congestion, energy consumption, and local economic development.

2o22 Seaside Prize winner, Jeff Speck, wrote in his seminal Walkable City Rules: “Parking covers more acres of Urban America than any one thing, and yet planners have neglected it for years … that was until the research of one man, who helped change the way planners think about parking forever.” That man was Donald Shoup. As noted in The Wall Street Journal, Shoup is described as a “parking rock star” whose works have inspired a group of followers dubbed Shoupistas.

The New York Times wrote that Shoup’s work “has led to a revolution in ideas about relieving congestion.” The High Cost of Free Parking and Shoup’s 2018 book, Parking and the City, remain classics in the fields of transportation and city planning. Jeffrey Tumlin, the author of Sustainable Transportation Planning, wrote: “If your city wants to focus on one topic for reducing traffic congestion, improving housing availability, cleaning the air, lessening climate change, making government more efficient, and enlivening the economy—all at the same time—then it should focus on parking.”

In addition to his position at UCLA, Shoup is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, an Honorary Professor at the Beijing Transportation Research Center, a winner of the American Planning Association’s National Excellence Award as a Planning Pioneer, and the American Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Distinguished Educator Award. More on Shoup can be found at ShoupDogg.com.