Strategies for parking maximums and park-ride facilities: case of Kochi city

Abstract

Recent rapid urban development in India has resulted in transport problems such as traffic congestion and increase in traffic accidents in all the cities/towns. Although the state governments and the local administrations have made substantial efforts to improve urban transport, problems have been exacerbated by the rapidly increasing number of private vehicles. The study aims at assessing the possibilities of implementing Parking Maximums and Park and Ride facilities for efficient parking management in Kochi City. Urban planners typically set parking minimum requirements to meet the peak demand for parking at each land use, without considering either the price motorists pay for parking or the cost of providing the required parking spaces. By reducing the market price of parking, minimum parking requirements provide subsidies that inflate parking demand, and this inflated demand is then used to set minimum parking requirements. When considered as an impact fee, minimum parking requirements can increase development costs by more than 10 times the impact fees for all other public purposes combined. Eliminating minimum parking requirements would reduce the cost of urban development, improve urban design, reduce automobile dependency, and restrain urban sprawl. Parking Maximums means that an upper limit is placed on the number of parking spaces allowable in a construction project. This discourages excessive parking supply and the provision of under-valued parking spaces. With the increase in automobile dependency, the demand for parking spaces has increased tremendously. Parking in India is always viewed as a „problem‟ either as lack of availability of enough parking spaces when the urban infrastructure is not able to cope up with the vehicular growth or as a parking anagement issue when the available parking space is not utilized properly. With the increasing number of vehicles, we need to find out space to park the vehicle too. The parking policy should address both the issues of lack of parking spaces and parking management and should consider parking as an economic activity to boost up the urban transport. The benefits of park and ride systems are well established and accepted. The disadvantages however, have not received much concern especially when it comes to the location of these facilities. Although better accessibility may favour the central urban area, it would also result in more carbased trips towards the urban centres from great distances. Since park and ride is always associated with an increase in the total parking supply, it will bring in additional trip-end opportunities. Hence, it is ideal to locate these facilities in the outskirts of the cities rather than in the dense urban fabric. Only then, it would offer real benefits to both motorists as well as the city’s public transport system. The study makes an attempt to determine the various parking requirement adjustment factors for the implementation of parking maximums and find the optimal locations for the provision of park and ride services. For this a city wide public transport accessibility assessment was carried out based on service frequency and geographical access to service points. Parking surveys and OriginDestination surveys was carried out to determine the parking supply and demand. The potential locations for implementing Park and Ride facilities are identified on the basis of intensity of existence of the issue related to public transport accessibility and parking demand. From the analysis it was observed that 54.70% of the total study area had good public transport accessibility levels and 67.70% of the total households in the study area had access to a public transport service point within 500m radius. Parking Districts were delineated and Parking Maximum implementation strategies have been worked out for these areas after considering workforce distribution and trip attraction rates. Recommendations are made to regulate or reduce the future parking supply using Parking Maximums as a tool and on the possibilities of implementing Park and Ride facilities to reduce congestion and encourage the usage of public transport services available in the study area.