Modeling on-Street Parking Scenario and Response to Paid Parking Policy Using Statistical Techniques for CBD Area of Vadodara City

Abstract

On-street parking is most popular among personal vehicle users, and it has become one of the major problems for CBD area of all metropolitan cities of India. Various ill effects such as accidents, congestion, reduction in carriage width, and air pollution has been caused due to on-street parking. To manage on-street parking demand, it is necessary to assess existing demand and formulate appropriate policy measures. National Urban Transport Policy [11] has given guidelines for managing on-street parking in urban areas. It clearly emphasizes on pricing of parking facilities to reflect actual land cost. However, due to poor social acceptability and lack of political will, the local government refrains from adopting paid on-street parking measures and prefers to offer free parking with odd–even date scheme. This results in spillover of parking demand, illegal, and chaotic parking behavior particularly in CBD areas where there is high a concentration of commercial activities. In the present study, two streets in CBD area of Vadodara city were selected for on-street parking demand assessment and response to proposed parking policy measures. Parking inventory using license plate method was carried out at 1 h monitoring interval for 12 h to determine peak parking hours which were observed as 5–8 PM. Further microscopic parking inventory was carried out at 10 min monitoring interval during observed evening peak parking hours on normal working day to determine parking characteristics like parking duration and turnover. Average parking duration of 40 min was observed with poor value of turnover (0.5–0.8). The parking survey observed dominance of motorized two-wheelers (M2-w) with uniform demand throughout the peak parking period. Further, the study conducted field survey of on-street vehicle parkers using stated preference method to collect responses for two proposed parking policies namely, “space restraint paid parking policy” and paid parking with “vehicle certificate policy (VPC).” Space restraint policy offers utilization of available on-street parking space on priority basis as per guide lines of NUTP 2014, while VPC permits use of only one vehicle per household and shop to use on-street parking space at subsidized parking charge. Response to both policies was modeled using multinomial logistic regression in SPSS software. It was observed that socioeconomic variable like household income and travel attributes like trip length, trip frequency, parking duration, searching time for parking and walking time from parking to destination significantly influenced the response of vehicle users. The study provides insight into on-street parking demand scenario in CBD area and assesses response to proposed paid on-street parking policies.