[WildUtah]

Try the lead essay from Cato Unbound and see what you think. [0] There are a few more good short Shoup pieces linked at the bottom of that page.

I have some personal experience here. I have done training and volunteered as a community organizer and worked with my city council and planning department. I have organized neighborhood groups involved in planning. I have studied urban planning and urban form. Nothing helped me to understand American cities and why they work the way they do more than Dr. Shoup's work in the 1990s that is collected in The High Cost Of Free Parking.

Some of it is gritty and technical econometric research, but a lot of it is creative and insightful. It's not a single narrative, but a fun book to dip into in various places from time to time if you care about how cities work and how urban life can be made better for people.

This short 1997 paper introduced me to Dr. Shoup's work (I read it in 1998) and was like a shining blaze of insight for many readers like me when it first appeared. [1] One key insight is that free parking required by law costs the USA about three times as much as all the money drivers spend on cars and gas plus public subsidies for roads and highways. When you read it, you start to see that parking policy drives urban form much more than zoning or free markets or highway and transit construction or public preferences or anything else at all. A lot of the book is like that.

[0]http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/april-2011/there-aint-no-...

[1 pdf] http://www.uctc.net/papers/351.pdf

[zalew]

Thanks, I'll check that. While I got interested in urban design recently, TBH I fail to grasp all of the anti-automotive concepts that seem to get in fashion recently. Especially when I live in a place where I witness how it may go wrong. On a related note, tomorrow I'm going to "Brasilia, a day in February" as part of a doc festival we have going on around here, if you've studied urban planning you've probably heard a lot about this city, so just dropping in this title here in case you're interested (not that well known as, say, Urbanized and such).

[WildUtah]

Most of the anti-automotive concepts are rooted in the incompatibility of traditional cities and walkable urbanism with accommodating comfortable motoring. Unless you have infinite resources to build highways and parking deep underground, one or the other has to go.

Brasilia is famous for being extensively and carefully planned according to a mistaken theory that favored motor navigation over pedestrians and uniformity over creativity. I'd be fascinated someday to see what the benefits and drawbacks of that combination would be on the ground. I hope you enjoy it.

[zalew]

From what I've heard from people who have been there (obviously subjective), is that although it has Niemeyer's eye candies, the overal feeling of the whole place to a newcommer is that it's creepy.