Parking policies are an important component of contemporary travel demand management policies. North American parking policies have traditionally been developed as a means of simply accommodating traffic demand, with little or no effort made to identify how such strategies might relate to other urban transportation objectives. However, the City of Vancouver is creating parking policies that support environmental sustainability and transportation goals, particularly mode split targets. The City of Vancouver Parking By-Law is a significant factor in supporting the overall Transportation targets. This has helped Vancouver to achieve its goal of zero growth in automobile traffic entering the city. In fact, Vancouver is one of the few cities in North America where the amount of automobile traffic has actually decreased in the last decade. This paper reviews how the City of Vancouver Parking By-Law has continuously been updated over the last two decades to encourage sustainable modes of transportation and set parking standards that supports targets of reduced auto use. The paper explores the evolution of City of Vancouver policy and Parking By-Law including design changes, incremental updates, emerging transportation modes and economic influences. This paper presents some case studies where various sustainable modes of transportation were encouraged by requiring provision of car-sharing vehicles more bicycle parking and by applying maximum parking ceilings while reducing minimum parking requirements. This paper also identifies current initiatives of City staff for future parking policy changes. For the covering asbtract of this conference see ITRD number E217481.
Samenvatting