This paper discusses the analysis of parking management policies in urban areas. Nowadays, transport planners have at their disposal a wide range of models designed to support the analysis and evaluation of alternative planning and management policies. However, significant gaps still exist in the scope of these models and these gaps can sometimes render existing models incapable of adequately addressing certain important policy questions. A case in point concerns the complex relationships that exist in central business areas between travel demand, parking policy, pedestrian policy and public transport provision. The comprehensive analysis of these issues has hitherto proved awkward because they fall outside the scope of both traditional land-use transport planning models and local area traffic management models. Whilst transport planning models provide some opportunity to examine the longer term interactions between travel demand and supply, their poor (or non-existent) representation of key factors such as parking behaviour undermines their applicability. Similarly, traffic management models are marred in this context by their characteristic assumption of fixed demand levels. Two years ago the Transport Studies Unit reported the development of a dynamic mode and parking type choice simulation model which bridges this methodological gap. This paper illustrates the way in which this model can be used to address key parking policy issues that would otherwise fall outside the scope of analytical treatment. Real data from a large suburban Centre in Greater London are used to construct a series of hypothetical policy scenarios which are analyzed using the model. The results of this analysis are used to illustrate some of the complex relationships that can exist between policy variables in these settings.
Samenvatting