A Celebration of the Life and Work of Donald Shoup
2025-10-03 | UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, 425 Westwood Plaza Los Angeles, CA 90095, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Join the Department of Urban Planning and UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies as we celebrate and remember the life and work of distinguished professor of urban planning, trailblazing advocate for parking reform, gifted teacher, and friend to generations of UCLA students, faculty and staff, Donald Shoup.
Friday, October 3, 2025
UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center
Centennial Ballroom AB
UCLA Campus
2:00 – 3:30 pm: The Shoup Doctrine Book Talk and Launch of the UCLA Center for Parking Policy
4:00 – 6:00 pm: Celebration of Donald Shoup’s life and work (light refreshments)
Learn more about Don’s vast accomplishments, read some of his writings, view tributes from far and wide, and share your own memories on the UCLA Luskin tribute page for Don.

Lecture Series: The Story of Peter Gallegos with Peter Chesney
2025-10-07 | Live Stream
Perloff Lecture Series on 100 Years of Transportation Research
Presented by UCLA Urban Planning and UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies
The Story of Peter Gallegos with Peter Chesney
Join us for a lecture based on original research documenting the experiences of Peter Gallegos, a blind Native American. Peter moved to Los Angeles from a Great Plains reservation with his seeing-eye dog. This talk will explore his mobility challenges and what happened after his dog was tragically killed by a hit-and-run driver.

DR. PETER CHESNEY is a graduate of UCLA’s Ph.D. program in history. Now he is a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt. At UCLA, he received a certificate in Urban Humanities alongside students in architecture and urban and regional planning. Later he participated in two Luskin Center for History & Policy research teams, which co-authored policy papers entitled “People Are Simply Unable to Pay the Rent” and “A Century of Fighting Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles (1920-2020).”

Lecture Series: The Making of Modern Los Angeles with Nick Patsaouras
2025-10-21 | Live Stream
Perloff Lecture Series on 100 Years of Transportation Research
Presented by UCLA Urban Planning and UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies
The Making of Modern Los Angeles with Nick Patsaouras
Nick Patsaouras will chronicle his role in modernizing Los Angeles’s transportation infrastructure, particularly his efforts in spearheading the development of the region’s subway and light rail lines and advocating for bus services. As an insider, he navigated the complex landscape of clashing egos, political maneuvering, and compromise to significantly shape the city’s transit systems.
Nick Patsaouras is the author of The Making of Modern Los Angeles. He is a former Board Member of the Southern California Rapid Transit District and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, where he was instrumental in advancing bus transportation. The Patsaouras Transit Plaza at the MTA Gateway Center/Union Station East is named in his honor.

NICK PATSAOURAS received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from California State University, Northridge. He established an electrical engineering company in Los Angeles and designed a wide range of projects, including commercial, industrial, educational, residential, medical, institutional, religious, and entertainment. Nick has been actively involved in civic life for over 40 years. He ran for Mayor of Los Angeles in 1993 envisioning “Transportation as a Catalyst in Rebuilding LA” after the devastating 1992 LA riots. He served on the Board of Zoning Appeals, the Board of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), and the Board of the LA Department of Water and Power, helping guide infrastructure and planning policy in Los Angeles. As president of the Southern California Rapid Transit District, he helped plan the transportation network for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. He is the author of “The Making of Modern Los Angeles.”

Lecture Series: Indigenous Transportation Knowledge with Adonia Lugo
2025-10-28 | Live Stream
Perloff Lecture Series on 100 Years of Transportation Research
Presented by UCLA Urban Planning and UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies
Indigenous Transportation Knowledge with Adonia Lugo
Local Indigenous groups have shaped the Los Angeles region’s landscape and mobility for over 10,000 years, a stark contrast to the brief, yet transformative, period of colonial settlement marked by intensive resource extraction and sprawling road networks. To envision alternative transportation futures, Adonia Lugo has collaborated with stewards of traditional Indigenous knowledge. This talk highlights their knowledge of the past and perspectives on how indigenous knowledge can shape the future of LA’s transportation systems.
Cultural anthropologist ADONIA E. LUGO was born and raised in traditional and unceded Acjachemen territory and now lives and works in traditional and unceded Tongva territory in Los Angeles. Adonia began investigating transportation, race, and space during her graduate studies at UC Irvine, when she co-created the Los Angeles open street event CicLAvia and the organization today known as People for Mobility Justice. Since receiving her doctorate in 2013, Adonia has applied her research on “human infrastructure” in sustainable mobility advocacy and helped to define the concept of “mobility justice.” Adonia is Equity Research Manager at the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, a core organizer of The Untokening, and a recent appointee to the California Transportation Commission.

Lecture Series: Fighting Traffic Congestion a Century Ago with Brian Taylor
2025-11-04
Perloff Lecture Series on 100 Years of Transportation Research
Presented by UCLA Urban Planning and UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies
Fighting Traffic Congestion 100 Years Ago with Brian Taylor
Professor Brian Taylor delivers a talk and presentation on proposals between 1920 and 1940 to fundamentally redesign the street system, transit system, and highway system in LA to cope with burgeoning traffic — why they mostly failed, and why LA is the worse for it today. These stories are excerpted from Taylor’s book, The Drive for Dollars, the story of the interplay between finance, freeways, and urban form in the 20th century and their enduring impact on American cities and neighborhoods in the 21st.
Additional reading: A Century of Fighting Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles: 1920 – 2020
BRIAN D. TAYLOR, PhD, FAICP is Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. He is the Director Emeritus of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. He studies travel behavior and transportation equity, finance, politics, and history. He has recently studied falling public transit ridership; public sector responses to new mobility services; the travel of Millennials, high-school students, and same-sex households; the rise of local sales taxes for transportation; and the economic effects of traffic congestion. He was recently named one of the Top 10 Academic Thought Leaders in Transportation by the Council of University Transportation Centers, and honored as a National Associate by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies. And perhaps most importantly, Professor Taylor is a former staff member of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Eliminating Minimum Parking Requirements: Stories from Cities Across the Country
2025-11-18
A Mini-Symposium from UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies
Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2025
In 2005, UCLA Professor Donald Shoup published “The High Cost of Free Parking,” revealing the shaky foundations of minimum parking requirements and explaining how these mandates cause problems far worse than the one they were intended to solve. Since then, more than 100 U.S. cities have eliminated any requirements to provide a minimum number of parking spaces from their zoning code, with hundreds more lifting their parking requirements in key areas like commercial corridors and historic downtowns. In this online event, planners, public officials, researchers, and advocates whose cities were among the first to eliminate parking requirements will share their experiences. Speakers will share why their cities chose to end parking minimums, the new development and opportunities these changes have made possible, and the lessons they’ve learned along the way. After the speaker sessions, attendees are invited to participate in breakout room discussions to share their experiences and consider the effects of parking policies in their own communities.
Session 1: Sharing City Experiences
In this session, we’ll hear from local leaders about why their cities eliminated minimum parking requirements and see examples of new housing and small businesses that resulted from the policy change.

Sara Bronin, former Planning Commission Chair, Hartford, Connecticut
Daniel Volland, City Council Member, Anchorage, Alaska
Aaron Qualls, former Planning and Community Development Director, Sandpoint, Idaho

Session 2: Sharing Knowledge and Resources
In this session, we’ll continue exploring local success stories. We’ll also learn about research and resources that can help planners and community leaders understand what to expect after eliminating minimum parking requirements and navigate what Professor Shoup and others have identified as next steps.

Daniel Hess, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University at Buffalo
Evan Manvel, former Land Use, Transportation, and Climate Mitigation Planner, Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development
Tony Jordan, President, Parking Reform Network

Session 3: Learning Together
The last portion of the mini-symposium allows attendees to connect with speakers and other attendees in small-group facilitated discussions.
Claim Your Credits
Attendees who are members of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) can claim up to 2.25 CM credits from the American Planning Association’s website.

CLAIM HEREVideo Recording
Speakers

Sara BroninFounder & Ceo of National Zoning Atlas

Sara C. Bronin is a Mexican-American architect, attorney, professor, and policymaker whose interdisciplinary work focuses on how law and policy can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places. She wrote Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World (W.W. Norton), and she founded and directs the National Zoning Atlas, which aims to digitize, demystify, and democratize information about zoning in the United States. She also served as Chair of Hartford’s Planning Commission.

Daniel B. HessProfessor

Daniel Hess is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Buffalo. Hess served as chairperson of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning from 2017 through 2022. Central to Hess’s research is addressing interactions between housing, transportation, land use, and other public concerns. He develops new pathways for understanding the complex socio-economic and ethnic landscape of cities and spatial inequalities. He also explores equal access to resources from urban neighborhoods, focusing especially on the changes in gay neighborhoods and the LGBTQ+ population diffuses to other metropolitan locations. Hess has authored papers studying the effects of parking reform.

Tony JordanPresident of Parking Reform Network

Tony Jordan is a nationally recognized champion for rethinking parking policies. Inspired by reading The High Cost of Free Parking, he founded Portlanders for Parking Reform in 2015 and went on to co-found the Parking Reform Network (PRN) in 2019. As PRN’s president, Tony leads a dedicated team and frequently presents at public meetings and conferences, including SXSW and YIMBYtown. He lives car-free in Portland, Oregon, with his family, enjoying multi-day bike trips and strategy board games when he’s not advocating for smarter parking policies.

Evan Manvelformer Land Use, Transportation, and Climate Mitigation Planner

Evan Manvel has spent three decades working on programs and policies to cut climate pollution. At the State of Oregon, he led the creation and adoption of Oregon’s revolutionary parking reforms, led several publications including Oregon’s Parking Management Jump Start Guide and “Lizard Brains on Planning,” and worked with several cities to reform parking management. He previously worked for some of the northwest’s leading conservation organizations and serves on the Parking Reform Network board.

Daniel VollandAnchorage Assembly Member

Daniel Volland represents District 1, which includes the urban core of Anchorage, on the Anchorage Assembly. He is passionate about housing abundance, active transportation, and public health. He is also an optometrist, small business owner, and dog dad.

Aaron QuallsSenior Project Manager

Aaron Qualls, AICP, is a senior project manager with SCJ Alliance Consulting Services, working out of SCJ’s downtown office in Sandpoint, Idaho — located within a historically remodeled building made possible by off-street parking reform. Aaron is a Strong Towns contributor, former president of APA ID, and the former Planning and Community Development Director for the City of Sandpoint. Aaron enjoys collaborating with diverse stakeholders, community members, and decision-makers to find common ground on even the most complex issues. Serving for over 14 years as a city official in both the private and public sectors, he has developed and implemented a wide variety of data-driven and community-focused plans within the Inland Northwest.
