“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.” So said Archilochus.
Donald Shoup was a hedgehog. He knew that parking — or, more specifically, parking policy — was ruining American cities. It was an odd thing to know: Certainly, for a good portion of the 50 years Don spent at UCLA, many of his colleagues regarded him with a combination of curiosity and bemusement. Parking, even among academic urban planners, was a neglected backwater. The land use professors thought it was a transportation issue. The transportation planners ignored it; cars were interesting when they were in motion, not when they were at rest.
Don was undeterred. That was the hedgehog in him. He was famous for his ability to enter any conversation and change the topic to parking, and for departing from conversations that drifted from parking to other subjects. He was also on to something: Parking policy was, in fact, ruining American cities. What Don had known all along had finally become clear to everyone else in 2005, when he published his magnum opus, The High Cost of Free Parking. The book, clocking in north of 800 pages, was a model of clarity and persuasion, translating the economics of parking into accessible and witty prose. It became an improbable cult classic for a generation of urbanists and spawned an international movement for reform. Don, 67 when the book was published, became a sought-after speaker. He won awards. A Facebook group called the Shoupistas, thousands strong, sprang up organically to advance his ideas. He was a founding board member of the nonprofit Parking Reform Network, formed to amplify this advocacy. Governments wrote and passed legislation modelled on his ideas.
Success changed neither Don’s message nor his method. He still biked to work each day, honed his message in his office at Luskin, and remained a genial and sometimes mischievous presence in the building’s corridors. He allowed himself, occasionally, to be amused by the success he’d achieved in the winter of his career. “It’s OK to be a late bloomer,” he said, “as long as you make it to the flower show.”
I met Don over 20 years ago. I was his Ph.D. student, and then his colleague, and he was my friend. He died last February; since then, people have occasionally remarked to me that I must have learned a lot about parking from him. And I did. But the biggest lesson I took from him had nothing to do with parking.
The hedgehog doesn’t, it turns out, know just one big thing. It knows the thing it knows, but it also, by definition, knows how to be itself. What Don showed me, by example, was that professors really can carve their own paths. Academic life, for all its pretensions about independent inquiry and free thinking, has more herd behavior than most of us in it would care to admit. Driven by a combination of anxiety, ambition and ideology, a lot of professors spend a lot of time with their fingers in the wind, rushing to and fro to ensure they are studying the right things, signing the right letters, citing the right people, and getting the right answers published in the right journals.
Don was as immune to all that as any academic I have ever met. He knew what was important, and he worked on it. If other people didn’t think it was important, that didn’t change what he thought — it just made him try to change their minds. Amid the changing seas of fads and opinions, Don sailed happily in the direction he chose. Though where he ended up parking remains anyone’s guess.
Michael Manville is a professor and department chair in the Department of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Winter 2026 issue.
