Abstract
Parking management and planning can be used to address several issues related to sustainable urban development. For example, parking availability affects both car ownership and usage, and parking planning can affect both land use and building costs. A tool used in several countries is minimum parking requirements (MPR) and lowering these could be a pathway to more sustainable mobility. However, the actual effects of lower MPR have not systematically been studied. In this paper we present the results of a review of sixteen developments with low MPR in Sweden, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. Existing research and reports have been analyzed to compare these and draw conclusions on the effect of MPR on mobility patterns and mobility services. In addition, interviews were conducted with representatives from municipalities and developers. Our results indicate that the mobility patterns of individuals in the studied projects are more sustainable than in nearby projects. However, the causality of MPR and mobility is hard to establish due to the risk of self-selection and that all of the studied projects have good prerequisites for sustainable mobility practices. Many of the studied evaluations are also of poor quality with, for example, lack of appropriate control group.
Highlights
Faced with increasing challenges with global as well as local implications, cities are looking at new ways to address issues such as transportation planning and urban land use [1]
Combining restrictions on parking with access to mobility services such as carsharing may be an attractive solution to this dilemma [6]
We look at the different type of developments based on size and parking norm, the different type of measures that have been implemented to reduce car dependency, the effects on mobility patterns and other insights from the evaluations
Summary
Faced with increasing challenges with global (e.g., climate change) as well as local implications (air quality and land use), cities are looking at new ways to address issues such as transportation planning and urban land use [1]. One core issue is to move away from the status quo of the car being the dominant mode of transport [2]. In a study of travel behavior with regard to mode of transport and trip purpose (work, shopping, and leisure), car ownership was the most important variable—if people own a car, they use it [3]. There is a link between vehicle ownership, use of vehicles, and parking availability [4,5]. Reducing parking availability can have beneficial environmental consequences but might imply less mobility and accessibility for people. Combining restrictions on parking with access to mobility services such as carsharing may be an attractive solution to this dilemma [6]
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