Data monitoring for the assessment of on-street parking demand in CBD areas of developing countries

Abstract

On-street parking is considered as one of the essential and critical components of the urban transportation system. Despite urban sprawl, central business district (CBD) areas continue to attract significant number of trips, especially for shopping, trade and commerce purposes. Most of the cities in developing countries lack the mechanisms to monitor on-street parking demand. Further, the absence of unambiguous on-street parking policy has led to the phenomenon of largely disorganized on-street parking, especially in these cities. Therefore, to formulate parking management measures, it becomes imperative to assess existing on-street parking demand in a rational manner. To comprehend the objective, on-street parking survey using the license plate method was carried out for three days covering a normal working day, weekend and an event day at data monitoring interval of 10 min during peak parking hours for two diverse land-use types namely commercial and hospital in four metropolitan cities of Gujarat, India. Investigations revealed that the data monitoring interval significantly affected recorded parking demand. Recorded parking demand was observed to be insignificant after 30 min and 50 min data monitoring interval for commercial and hospital land-use respectively. The behaviour of parkers was probed by extracting percentage unique of parked vehicles (PUPV). PUPV revealed uniform parking behaviour in different cities, with progressively increasing trend as the data monitoring interval increased. Turnover (E2W/hr/bay) was evaluated for different data monitoring intervals and revealed a decaying trend with an increase in data monitoring interval. The consistency of PUPV (in form of the coefficient of variation (CV)) was observed at 30 min and 50 min data monitoring interval for commercial and hospital land-use respectively. Therefore, to capture all possible variation in on-street parking demand, the study proposes to perform on-street parking inventory and on-street parking evaluation at 30 min and 50 min data monitoring interval for commercial and hospital land-use respectively. The study provides a fundamental insight into the assessment of on-street parking demand using different data monitoring intervals and can accordingly facilitate planners and policymakers to formulate on-street parking demand management measures in developing countries.