Parking Supply Research Articles

Qualidade Ambiental e Promoção de Saúde: Um Estudo Sobre o Parque do Povo de Presidente Prudente – SP

Evidências encontradas em estudos recentes indicam que a oferta de parques urbanos está associada a benefícios na saúde da população local. Um mecanismo proposto para essa questão é que os parques influenciam positivamente a auto percepção de saúde do indivíduo e incentiva a prática de atividades físicas. Em Presidente Prudente – SP, o Parque do Povo é o principal espaço verde público de lazer e esportes da cidade. Qualidade ambiental e espaços verdes urbanos estão intimamente relacionados, e entre inúmeros benefícios, esses locais promovem oportunidades para a prática de atividades físicas (AF). Dessa forma, este artigo tem como objetivo verificar a relação entre a qualidade ambiental urbana e a prática de AF, e discutir como o ambiente pode agir em estratégias ambientais de promoção de saúde. A metodologia consistiu em uma abordagem qualiquantitativa e a técnica foi o uso de questionário aplicado a 200 frequentadores do parque maiores de 18 anos. A coleta de dados foi realizada durante o primeiro semestre de 2015. Os questionários mostraram que a maioria da população residia nas proximidades do parque, e os motivos relacionados a saúde foram os mais destacados para a prática de AF. O fator “ambiente verde” foi o mais valorizado no quesito “motivação” para escolha do local. Concluiu-se que os parques urbanos trazem benefícios à saúde, mas não garantem por si sós o aumento do nível de atividade física.

선형공원 조성에 의한 주변 주거지의 변화 분석 : 서울시 재생 가로공원과 복원하천 수변공원 사례 연구

선형공원 조성에 의한 주변 주거지의 변화 분석 : 서울시 재생 가로공원과 복원하천 수변공원 사례 연구

Healthcare representatives’ perspectives on hospital travel plans in England

The take-up of travel plans is increasing across the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, yet their impact on reducing car use is relatively low. Previous studies have investigated the determinants of generic travel plans but lacked an appreciation of the unique context of healthcare settings. This study investigated NHS travel plan co-ordinators’ views on hospital travel plans to identify the factors affecting the success of travel plans in changing travel mode choice behaviour. A nationwide survey was conducted among NHS travel plan co-ordinators in England, with a response rate of 51% (n=47). Findings suggest that despite having the potential for promoting walking as a key travel option among the hospital staff, measures to promote walking were reported as the least effective. Spearman correlation tests show that the effectiveness of measures to promote walking and reduce car use was positively associated with each other – highlighting the significance of designing effective travel measures to promote walking to attain the overall success in changing travel mode choice behaviour. Shift working patterns, personal circumstances, high car use, and staff attitude towards car use were reported as the key barriers to change travel mode choice behaviour among the NHS hospital staff. The use of robust methods, and evidence-base to develop, and monitor travel plan measures were found to be the key determinants of the success of travel plans. The provision of off-site car parks around 10–15min walking distance away from the hospital site will not only encourage the car users to walk, but also provide a realistic solution to the transport issues experienced by the hospitals. This study contributes to the knowledge gap by providing a valuable insight into the factors that may have affected the success of hospital travel plans, and form a basis for future research.

Feedback and the use of land for parking

Land-use patterns are often the result of feedback effects in which one agent's decision both influences and is influenced by urban form. This paper argues that such feedback---of a positive or negative kind---could plausibly arise in the provision of off-street parking. A stylized model is used to illustrate feedback in the case of bundled parking, to note how such feedback may change a neighborhood in the long run and to analyze several policies. A theme is that feedback opens the door to surprising effects that are hard to predict from the status quo.

Effects of spatial scale on assessment of spatial equity of urban park provision

Urban parks are widely-recognized to provide multiple social and ecological benefits, but an increasingly number of studies show that such benefits are often inequitably distributed across socio-economic and ethnic groups. This has led to a growing interest in assessing the spatial distribution and access to parks and other green spaces as an aspect of environmental justice. Even though such spatial studies require assessment at multiple scales, how results may be influenced by scale has not received adequate attention. This study assessed the effects of scale on park provision and spatial equity in Singapore. A range of park provision indicators were used to evaluate how they are affected by scale and to explore their correlations with wealth, income and ethnicity. Scale effects were assessed using planning units adopted for national land use planning, namely, region, planning area and subzone. Scale significantly affected park provision indicators, particularly for indicators that incorporate population. Correlations at larger scale tend to be stronger than at smaller scales. There were higher park provision and lower potential for park congestion in planning units with higher wealth and income. Inequity also appears stronger when studied at smaller spatial scales. Results also showed that park provision indicators are prone to skewed frequency distributions, especially at smaller scales. The implications of the results were discussed in relation to spatial equity assessment and possible causes of the disparities. We also highlight the need to direct park planning at smaller scale of neighbourhoods rather than at the town or regions levels.

An Evaluation of Spatial Distribution of Public Parking Facilities in Huizhou Downtown

The survey and evaluation of existing public parking facilities were carried out, which had important practical significance to resolve conflicts over demand and supply of parking facilities. Taking Huizhou downtown as a study area, we surveyed parking facilities mainly by daily observing and recording. Parking facilities supply, characteristics, and demand were analysed by calculating parking utilization and turnover rate. Based on GIS, the distance-based and time-based accessibility of parking facilities were analysed to evaluate spatial distribution. The results indicated that a large spatial difference in supply and characteristics of parking was shown in public parking facilities of Huizhou downtown and that the parking demand was large. Furthermore, there existed imbalance in spatial distribution of parking facilities in Huizhou downtown area. Our study suggested that it was imbalanced and irrational between parking facilities supply and parking demand, that the planning of parking facilities was inadequate and that management system was incomplete.

How does parking interplay with the built environment and affect automobile commuting in high-density cities? A case study in China

This study investigates an important but often overlooked problem – the interaction between parking and land use – to examine the effects of the built environment on car commuting. Using the case of Shenzhen, China, a structural equation model is employed to examine the tripartite relationship among the built environment, parking supply and car commuting. The parking–built environment relationship partly reflects the parking supply mechanism that is collectively influenced by the parking market and regulations. The results indicate that, because of the high cost of constructing parking, property developers are reluctant to build sufficient parking spaces for the residential population in densely built neighbourhoods with small lot sizes. However, minimum parking standards often lead to more parking provisions in dense central locations. Therefore, the benefits of compact land use and transit-oriented development (TOD) for reducing car use are either reinforced or offset depending on the various interrelationships between parking and the built environment. In the context of policy implications, a fine-grained urban fabric should be particularly supported, considering its significant effects in reducing car commuting, as well as its potential role in fostering a well-functioning parking market. Meanwhile, imposing parking caps in dense and central areas would be wise because parking oversupply encourages more car trips, which counteracts the sustainable merits of dense developments.

Parking equilibrium along the street

The paper studies the progressive occupancy of parking capacity along the street by candidate users, under the user equilibrium paradigm. The situation depicted typically applies to a parking peak period. In our model, the parking supply is made up of capacitated lots situated along a spatial axis, while the demand is disaggregated continuously in both destination place and preferred time of arrival. Each user selects a parking lot and time from among options on the basis of their trade-offs between walking, driving, parking price and schedule delay. Efficient algorithms are developed and an application instance is dealt with in detail. The dynamical equilibrium pattern exhibits parking lots “efficiency regions” in the plane of destination places and preferred arrival times. These efficiency regions are dynamic market areas with strong yet simple structural characteristics, making it easy to assign each parking user to his preferred option and to derive the lot saturation times. The latter are identified as the key state variables for the parking system, since they induce the lot efficiency regions. The equilibrium state is characterized as the solution to a fixed-point problem with respect to the saturation times. Our model improves upon previous parking models in economic theory, by adopting a higher resolution in space and time on both supply and demand side. The higher resolution is enabled by focusing on the street level, thus restricting the outreach of the model. Further research may be directed to extend the model to a network of streets, on the side of traffic assignment, and to study parking management policies, on the side of parking economics.

Influence of land use and street characteristics on car ownership and use: Evidence from Jinan, China

This study examines the effects of land use and street characteristics on household car ownership and use, based on a travel survey of 2540 households in 104 neighborhoods of Jinan, China. We performed two-step instrumental variable models, composed of a multinomial logistic model predicting the car ownership in the first step and a double-hurdle model predicting the car traveling distances in the second step with the use of car ownership as a mediating variable. It is found that parking supply, neighborhood permeability and street design influence car ownership. Most land use and street variables along dimensions of density, diversity and design, as well as the proximity to regional transport infrastructures, influence either the participation probability or the distance travelled by car. Overall, our study points to the importance of strategic urban planning favoring bus rapid transit development, mixed land uses, human friendly streets and restrictive parking to reduce car dependency in rapidly motorizing Chinese cities.

Uso de los parques recreativos en Mérida, Yucatán

Este artículo es un análisis comparativo de la asistencia de los pobladores a parques recreativos de tres zonas de Mérida, Yucatán, que presentan diferentes y polarizadas características socioeconómicas. La metodología se basó en la aplicación de encuestas y de los softwares Google Earth y ArcGis 13. Los resultados muestran que ninguna de las zonas cuenta con una oferta suficiente de parques ni con los equipamientos adecuados; sin embargo, la accesibilidad de los usuarios, tanto física como percibida, sus contextos sociales y económicos, así como sus cualidades de consumo, hacen que cada grupo tenga particularidades en el uso de dichos espacios.

Car Ownership and Residential Parking Subsidies: Evidence from Amsterdam

Many cities around the world have introduced paid parking but implicitly subsidize parking for example by providing residential parking permits for street parking. We study the welfare effects of residential parking subsidies through changes in car ownership for Amsterdam. We employ a boundary-discontinuity design that exploits spatial variation in the length of waiting lists for permits and therefore in the size of the parking subsidy. In the city center, the waiting time for a permit is up to four years. Our results indicate that one additional year of waiting for a parking permit reduces car ownership with 2 percentage points corresponding to a price elasticity of car demand of -0.8. We demonstrate that subsidizing residential parking induces a substantial welfare loss. On average, a parking permit induces an annual deadweight loss of € 270. Furthermore, we show that the provision of parking permits is an income-regressive policy: rich households are five times more likely than poor households to receive these (implicit) parking subsidies.

On-street parking search: A UK local authority perspective

Vehicles searching for parking create an environmental and economic impact. Despite negative externalities for individual drivers and society as a whole, there is a dearth of research in the area of parking search. The aim of this paper is to ascertain the perceptions of expert public policy stakeholders in relation to parking search. Local authorities within the East Midlands area of the UK indicated a lack of recorded evidence regarding the volume of vehicles searching for parking, which created an issue both in terms of establishing the existence of parking search and in quantifying the level of the problem. However, Council Officers expressed consensus in the view that on-street parking search was more likely to occur within peripheral urban areas away from the core city centre, as such areas may be lacking in parking facilities of the type that are typically provided in central urban areas, such as large off-street surface car parks or multi-storey parking facilities. Furthermore, parking search appeared to be more prevalent in larger market towns which attract a large number of visitors for shopping and personal business purposes, but are not able to provide sufficient parking supply to meet peak period demand.

On the morning commute problem with carpooling behavior under parking space constraint

Morning commuters choose their departure times and travel modes based on a combinational evaluation of factors associated with the chances of running into bottleneck congestion, likely schedule delays, parking space availability as well as monetary costs of traveling and parking. This study investigates a morning commute problem with carpooling behavior under parking space constraint at destination. We consider such a scenario that as a competing mode of the transit line, the highway contains a carpool lane only used by carpoolers while all solo drivers are forced to use a general purpose (GP) lane. Unlike the standard bottleneck model, the rush-hour dynamic departure patterns with a binding parking supply vary with the relative proportion of the two lanes’ capacities. The possible departure pattern domain with different parking supply and lane capacity allocation is explored in terms of the relative extra carpool cost and distinguished between the bi-mode and multi-mode equilibria. It is found that compared with solo drivers, carpoolers have shorter rush hour in order to smooth the extra carpool cost. With the decrease of parking spots, the number of solo drivers cuts down gradually, whilst the number of carpoolers climbs up firstly and then declines in the multi-mode system. Under mild assumptions, the best system performance can be realized with the joint consideration of total travel cost and vehicle emission cost through optimizing the lane capacity allocation and the parking supply.

Car ownership and residential parking subsidies: Evidence from Amsterdam

Many cities around the world have introduced paid parking but implicitly subsidize parking for example by providing residential parking permits for street parking. We study the welfare effects of residential parking subsidies through changes in car ownership for Amsterdam. We employ a boundary-discontinuity design that exploits spatial variation in the length of waiting lists for permits and therefore in the size of the parking subsidy. In the city center, the waiting time for a permit is up to four years. Our results indicate that one additional year of waiting for a parking permit reduces car ownership with 2 percentage points corresponding to a price elasticity of car demand of −0.8. We demonstrate that subsidizing residential parking induces a substantial welfare loss. On average, a parking permit induces an annual deadweight loss of €270. Furthermore, we show that the provision of parking permits is an income-regressive policy: rich households are five times more likely than poor households to receive these (implicit) parking subsidies.

Parking permits management and optimal parking supply considering traffic emission cost

Given a many-to-one bi-modal transportation network where each origin is connected to the destination by a bottleneck-constrained highway and a parallel transit line, we investigate the parking permit management methods to minimize traffic time cost and traffic emission cost simultaneously. More importantly, the optimal supply of parking spots is also discussed in the policies of parking permit. First, we derive the total travel costs and emission costs for the two cases of sufficient and insufficient parking spot provisions at the destination. Second, we propose a bi-objective model and solve the Pareto optimal parking permit distribution, given a certain level of parking supply. Third, we investigate the optimal parking supply in the policy of parking permit distribution, with the objectives of minimizing both total travel cost and traffic emission. Fourth, we provide a model of optimizing parking supply, in the policy of free trading of parking permits. Finally, the numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of these schemes, and the numerical results show that restricting parking supply at the city center could be efficient to reduce traffic emission.

The impact of curbside parking regulation on garage demand

Parking regulation is seen as a good option to encourage modal shift in order to tackle congestion and pollution in metropolitan areas. Market-clearing curbside pricing is rarely implemented and policy makers have tended to make off-street parking provision their main tool to address excessive curbside demand. Research devoted to garage parking is far less well developed, even though public authorities provide both curbside and garage parking that compete with privately operated facilities.In this paper the impact of garage fare and curbside regulation characteristics (fare and type of dedicated spaces) on garage parking demand are investigated. Aggregate occasional and subscribers parking demand is analyzed by means of two different econometric models estimated using a panel from Barcelona’s public parking authority (BSM) that covers 34 garage facilities with yearly data for the period 2006–2012.We find that both demand segments show a negative elasticity to garage fare. Only occasional parkers show a clear substitution effect with a curbside premium (€0.55/h). Our finding suggests that the actual pricing efficiency gap in Barcelona can range between €0.45 and €1.05 due to the mismatch between curbside and garage pricing regimes; for which we propose some policy alternatives. This stresses the need for a single integrated market approach to parking management, in order to overcome market distortions and achieve efficiency. Additionally, our results show that the characteristics of curbside parking spaces (allowance and time limits) play a role in garage demand determination, yet pricing is much more efficient trigger for behavioral change.

Parking and Urban Form

This article analyzes the provision of residential parking in a monocentric city, with the ultimate goal of appraising the desirability and effects of regulations such as a minimum-parking requirement (MPR) per dwelling. The analysis considers three different regimes for provision of parking space: surface parking, underground parking, and structural parking, with the latter two regimes involving capital investment either in the form of an underground parking garage or an above-ground parking structure. Parking area is viewed as a dwelling attribute that, along with floor space, provides utility. In addition, road congestion in the neighborhood (which affects the commuting costs of local residents) depends on the average amount of off-street parking per dwelling, an externality that is ignored by profit-maximizing developers, making the equilibrium inefficient. The analysis explores the equilibrium spatial behavior of the two dwelling attributes as well as residential and parking structural density, and analysis of land rent shows which parking regimes are present in different parts of the city. Efficiency requires an increase in parking area per dwelling at each location, which can be achieved in a crude fashion by an MPR, whose effects are analyzed.

Public parks as an element of urban planning: a missing piece in Accra's growth and development

ABSTRACTPublic parks are important to urban environments, residents, and visitors. Among other functions, they provide environmental services, such as air and water purification, and they increase both recreational opportunities and the attractiveness of the urban environment. Because of their importance, urban parks serve as public spaces that provide visitors and urban residents with rights to the city. This paper identifies the dearth of urban public parks in Accra-Tema city-region as worrying. The Accra Plan 1958 underscored the significance of green spaces and designated the coastal strip for parks development but the areas have been lost to various urban uses. We argue that the continual neglect of public parks within urban planning and community development schemes in the Accra-Tema city-region is a major concern because it is depriving the citizens a right to the city and its public spaces. A number of factors have worked adversely against the provision of public parks and green spaces in the city-region. These include development pressures, undue political interference, a complex land delivery system, and ad hoc planning. The paper concludes by offering policy suggestions as to how to resolve the dearth of parks and green spaces in the city-region.

Effects of Parking Provision on Automobile Use in Cities: Inferring Causality

Many cities include minimum parking requirements in their zoning codes and provide ample parking for public use. However, parking is costly to provide and encourages automobile use, according to many site-specific studies. At the city scale, higher automobile use is linked to traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and negative health and safety impacts, but there is a lack of compelling, consolidated evidence that large-scale parking increases cause automobile use to rise. In this study, the Bradford Hill criteria, adopted from the field of epidemiology, were applied to determine whether increases in parking should be considered a likely cause of citywide increases in automobile use. Prior research and original data from nine U.S. cities dating to 1960 were relied on. It was found that an increase in parking provision from 0.1 to 0.5 parking space per person was associated with an increase in automobile mode share of roughly 30 percentage points. It was also demonstrated that a majority of the Bradford Hill criteria could be satisfied by using the available data; this finding offers compelling evidence that parking provision is a cause of citywide automobile use. Given the costs associated with parking and its apparent effects on automobile use, these findings warrant policies to restrict and reduce parking capacity in cities.

Mobility Infrastructures: Modern Visions, Affective Environments and the Problem of Car Parking

This paper builds upon recent research on mobility infrastructures to question the usefulness of the mobility/moorings binary and suggest that scholars should examine the practices of infrastructuring by which mobile subjects, affects and environments emerge. The paper outlines recent work on the affective qualities of mobility infrastructures before examining some of the diverse discourses, feelings and atmospheres which have gathered around the humble British car park over the past 50 years. It examines how the affective and experiential qualities of car parks and parking became commodified by car park designers, urban redevelopers and landscape architects, as new techniques and technologies were adopted to prevent wasteful ‘space-searching’ and design secure, safe, pleasant and aesthetically pleasing spaces. Finally, the paper examines some of the discourses and regulative practices which have gathered around the direct and indirect environmental impacts of parking provision and parking policies, from their influence on local ecology and hydrology, to the use of parking regulations and charges to try and reshape people’s mobility habits and reduce their environmental footprints.