New Delhi, Feb. 23 -- Very few people in India have heard of Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, who passed away earlier this month. That is a pity, because his life's work holds the answer to one of India's biggest challenges: improving the quality of life in our cities.

Shoup was the world's foremost scholar of parking policy. No, that does not do justice to his biography. He was, as one of his students described him in a eulogy, truly a prophet of parking. The book that he has left behind, aptly titled The High Cost of Free Parking, ought to be read by every economist, urban planner, civil servant and urban governance activist in the country.

One of the main reasons why traffic flow in India's ci...