A comprehensive parking enforcement system was recently introduced in the city of Patras, third city in population in Greece. The main purpose of the new system was to improve parking facilities in the area, providing more residents and shoppers parking, reducing the extent of long-stay non resident parking and eliminating illegal parking. A number of innovative features were included in the scheme, such as: the use of decrementing prepayment cards to pay for parking; pay-and-display equipment; provision of on-street "shared-use" bays for pay and display users and holders of resident permits; and installation of off-peak parking meters on designated roads. The paper first presents in brief the new parking enforcement system, its innovations and evaluation results from "before" and "after" studies. It also discusses problems of compliance with regulations, the reaction of population, the scheme costs and revenue. At a second stage, the paper examines the abilities of the system to act as a traffic and transportation management tool and presents some results in this direction. It is concluded that integrated parking policy models can act as successful transportation management tools, and that they have some powerful abilities in this sense, which in many cases of application remain unexploited. (A)
Abstract