Parking in inner versus outer city spaces: Spatiotemporal patterns of parking problems and their associations with built environment features in Brisbane, Australia

Abstract

The prevalence of parking problems has increasingly challenged urban planners in transport planning and become a crucial consideration in achieving sustainable city goals. Current studies focus on parking in inner city areas, giving less attention to issues in outer city areas that have different neighbourhood features. This study examines the differences in parking problems between inner and outer city spaces and reveals the nexus between built environment features and the prevalence of parking problems. We utilised a large-scale administrative dataset of civil complaints from Brisbane City Council, Australia and retrieved 162,986 parking-related complaints in 2014–2017 to account for parking problems. We examined its spatiotemporal patterns across the inner, middle and outer city rings, and how these patterns vary by problem types and calendar events, and associate with the built environment features. Our results show that parking problems are more concentrated in the inner city ring, with only some sporadically distributed local clustering in the outer city areas. On holidays and weekends, parking problems are relatively more obvious in the outer city than the inner and middle city rings. Furthermore, more problems are reported in areas where land uses are less mixed, land parcels are smaller, and on vacant land or areas with larger green space coverage, especially in industrial areas or areas near transport hubs and junctions. Our findings provide evidence for the need to consider parking policies beyond inner city conditions and to implement more sustainability-oriented initiatives on transport, mobility and liveability across all urban spaces.