America’s Driving Mandate: Don’t Call It “Freedom”

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America’s Driving Mandate: Don’t Call It “Freedom”<br>(A Belated Tribute to Donald Shoup)

Matthew Lewis<br>May 01, 2026

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If the left is popular, why mandate it? If the right is hated, why is it worth more?<br>There is a story Americans like to tell about ourselves: that we love our cars, our cul-de-sacs, our three-car garages and two-car commutes. That we “chose” this. That suburban sprawl is the natural expression of an American preference for space, privacy, and the open road, and that anyone who suggests otherwise is a coastal scold trying to force us into a crowded apartment over a noisy bar.<br>It’s a great story. It is also, in the most literal sense, advertising — sold to us for nearly a century by the auto industry, the oil industry, and others whose business models depend on robust car and oil sales. And the proof that it’s advertising, rather than reporting, is hiding in plain sight, in the price of a house.<br>Thanks for reading Longer Forms! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Start with a basic question. If Americans truly prefer car-dependent suburbia above all other ways of living, why is it illegal to build almost anything else?<br>If you want to know what people actually want, look at what they pay for. And what Americans are paying for is the thing we made illegal: Walkable neighborhoods.

Because that is the actual situation. In most American cities, on roughly seventy-five percent of all residential land, it is against the law to build a duplex, a corner store, a small apartment building, or anything denser than a single detached house on a large lot.<br>It is against the law to build a house without a parking space attached, even if the future occupant doesn’t own a car.<br>It is against the law in many places to build a building tall enough to be served by a single elevator, or to put apartments above a coffee shop, or to make a street narrow enough that drivers slow down.<br>And yet, the neighborhoods that most Americans say they love when they visit Paris, or Charleston, or Greenwich Village are functionally illegal to build.<br>Free Lunches, Free Parking, and Free Markets<br>We have not had a free market in American housing or transportation for at least seventy years. What we have had, instead, is the most ambitious land-use experiment in human history: a continent-scale effort to make one specific lifestyle — single-family house, two cars, every trip outside the home only possible by driving — not just available, but mandatory.<br>The rules went by polite names, though YIMBYs have done our level best to make them pejoratives: Zoning. Parking minimums. Setback requirements. Street level-of-service standards. Floor-area ratios.<br>But strip away the planning jargon and what you find is a driving mandate dressed up as land-use regulation. If your neighborhood requires every home to come with two parking spaces, every store to come with a parking lot four times the size of the store, and every street to be wide enough for a fire truck to do a three-point turn, you have not built a place where people can choose to drive. You have built a place where they have no choice but to drive.<br>Prior his death last year, I was fortunate enough to work with the economist Donald Shoup on some groundbreaking housing legislation. Actually, it was parking legislation – arguably, these are the same thing – that ended the common and extremely costly practice in California cities of mandating (there’s that word again) parking in new housing developments.<br>Before he joined YIMBYs in helping to pass AB 2097 in Sacramento, Shoup spent his career documenting the scale of the economic, fiscal, and behavioral distortion of government driving mandates. His 800-page magnum opus The High Cost of Free Parking makes a case that ought to be obvious, but somehow isn’t: there is no such thing as free parking.<br>Asphalt costs money, land costs money, construction costs money — somebody pays. When the law forces every developer to build parking that customers and tenants haven’t asked for, the cost gets baked into the rent, the price of groceries, the price of a haircut, the price of everything.<br>Shoup estimated that the value of all the “free” parking in America runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars per year — a subsidy to driving that dwarfs anything we spend on transit, sidewalks, or bike lanes. And everybody pays for it, hidden in every transaction, every lease, every meal out. We have built an enormous cross-subsidy — it touches almost every corner of our economy — to subsidize car-dependence, and called it the natural order of things.<br>Homes in walkable neighborhoods sell for an average of 34 percent more per square foot than homes in drivable suburbs. Renters are willing to pay a 41 percent premium for the same car-free or car-light access.

And then, having banned the alternatives and subsidized the mandate,...