Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Parking Management Strategies

Todd Litman, "Parking Management: Strategies, Evaluation and Planning,"
Victoria Transport Policy Institute, Aug. 2007.

This report summarizes and evaluates various strategies for managing parking
with the goals of maximizing space use, optimizing payment for parking, and
encouraging alternate forms of transportation. If Downtown Berkeley is to
overcome its reputation for having a terrible parking problem, it could
definitely utilize many of these strategies to provide economic, social, and
environmental benefits while making parking more accessible to visitors and
residents.

Ten Parking Management Principles:
1. Consumer choice: people should have viable parking and travel options.
2. User information: motorists should have information on their parking and travel options.
3. Sharing: parking facilities should serve multiple users and destinations.
4. Efficient utilization: parking facilities should be sized and managed so spaces are frequently occupied.
5. Flexibility: parking plans should accommodate uncertainty and change.
6. Prioritization: the most desirable spaces should be managed to favor higher-priority uses.
7. Pricing: as much as possible, users should pay directly for the parking facilities they use.
8. Peak management: special efforts should be made to deal with peak-demand.
9. Quality vs. quantity: parking facility quality should be considered as important as quantity, including aesthetics, security, accessibility and user information.
10. Comprehensive analysis: all significant costs and benefits should be considered in parking planning.

Parking Management Benefits:
-Facility cost savings. Reduces costs to governments, businesses, developers and consumers.
-Improved quality of service. Many strategies improve user quality of service by providing better information, increasing consumer options, reducing congestion and creating more attractive facilities.
-More flexible facility location and design. Parking management gives architects, designers and planners more ways to address parking requirements.
-Revenue generation. Some management strategies generate revenues that can fund parking facilities, transportation improvements, or other important projects.
-Reduces land consumption. Parking management can reduce land requirements and so helps to preserve greenspace and other valuable ecological, historic and cultural resources.
-Supports mobility management. Parking management is an important component of efforts to encourage more efficient transportation patterns, which helps reduce problems such as traffic congestion, roadway costs, pollution emissions, energy consumption and traffic accidents.
-Supports Smart Growth. Parking management helps create more accessible and efficient land use patterns, and support other land use planning objectives.
-Improved walkability. By allowing more clustered development and buildings located closer to sidewalks and streets, parking management helps create more walkable communities.
-Supports transit. Parking management supports transit oriented development and transit use.
-Reduced stormwater management costs, water pollution and heat island effects. Parking management can reduce total pavement area and incorporate design features such as landscaping and shading that reduce stormwater flow, water pollution and solar heat gain.
-Supports equity objectives. Management strategies can reduce the need for parking subsidies, improve travel options for non-drivers, provide financial savings to lower-income households, and increase housing affordability.
-More livable communities. Parking management can help create more attractive and efficient urban environments by reducing total paved areas, allowing more flexible building design, increasing walkability and improving parking facility design.

Parking Management Strategies:
-Shared Parking: the parking facility serves multiple users or destinations. This is most successful if destinations have different peak periods, or if they share patrons so motorists park at one facility and walk to multiple destinations. Parking facilities can be shared in several ways.
-Shared rather than reserved spaces
-share parking among destinations
-public parking facilities
-in lieu fees
-special parking assessments
-Parking Regulation: controls who, when and how long vehicles may park at a particular location, in order to prioritize parking facility use.
-More accurate and flexible standards: parking requirements at a particular location are adjusted to account for factors that affect them.
-Parking Maximums: an upper limit is placed on parking supply, either atindividual sites or in an area. Area-wide limits are called Parking Caps. These can be in addition to or instead of minimum parking requirements. Excessive parking supply can also be discouraged by reducing public parking supplies, imposing a special parking tax, and by enforcing regulations that limit temporary parking facilities. Maximums often apply only to certain types of parking, such as long-term, single-use, free, or surface parking, depending on planning objectives.
-Remote Parking (also called Satellite Parking): refers to the use of off-site parking facilities. This often involves shared facilities, such as office workers parking at a restaurant parking lot during the day, in exchange for restaurant employees using the office parking lot evenings and weekends. 
-Walking and Cycling Improvements
-Increase Capacity of existing parking structures
-Mobility Management: a general term for strategies that increase transportation system efficiency by changing travel behavior.
-Parking Pricing: motorists pay directly for using parking facilities.
-Improve Parking Pricing methods. 
-Financial Incentives: offer financial benefits for reducing automobile trips.
-Unbundle Parking: parking is rented or sold separately, rather than automatically included with building space.
-Parking Tax Reform
-Bicycle Parking and Changing Facilities
-Improve User Information and Marketing
-Improve Enforcement and Control
-Transportation Management Associations and Parking Brokerage
-Overflow Parking Plans
-Address Spillover Problems
-Improve Parking Facility Design and Operation

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