Impacts of On-Street Parking Fees in Suburbs

Abstract

Street parking fees are common in many cities across the world. Knowledge on how such fees impact parking demand is crucial for designing charging schemes. Empirical studies of parking fees are however scares and often hampered by a lack of data systematically collected before and after policy changes. Moreover, almost all studies analyzing the impact of fees on parking demand focuses on dense city centers. This paper aims as showing how on-street parking count conducted before and after the introduction of parking fees of in the suburbs of Stockholm impact parking demand. This paper analyses data conducted before and after the implementation of the new parking policy in 2017, where on-street parking fees were introduced for the first time in the inner suburbs. At the same time, the amount of the fee was also increased in the inner city. Moreover, the fine was raised for the parking ticket issued to cars parked in breach of parking regulations. We find a 35-40 percent reduction in the number of parked cars in response to the introduction of parking fees in the suburbs. However, the increase in the parking fees in the inner city had a substantially lower effect or no effect at all on demand. The effect of increasing the amount of the fine had no impact on the number of the cars violating parking restrictions.