COST Action 342: Parking policy measures and their effects on mobility and the economy

Objectives

The main objective of the Action is to produce guidelines in order to increase the available knowledge on best practice in parking management and in parking policies and their effect on mobility and the economy. These guidelines will contain information, including examples of case studies, on the effect of the various management measures and policies.

Another important objective of this Action is the dissemination of the knowledge gained through the organisation of international and national workshops, technical visits, participation in congresses etc.

Programme / Deliverables

The actual work to be carried out consists of the following steps:

• carrying out additional research.
• carrying out a structured analysis of the drawn up measures;
• the setting up of national inventories — according to the above mentioned framework — of parking policy measures and their effects;
• the formulation of standard approaches for parking management;
• the formulation of standard procedures for the description and analysis of parking policies and their effects as they relate to the objectives of this study;

The deliverables of COST 342 will be:

• A report describing standard parking management measures and the standard procedures for the description and analysis of parking policy measures.
• The reports on the national inventories. There should be one of these reports for each country participating in the inventory-phase.
• A Guideline of best practices on parking management and of best practices on parking policy.

Background

Increasing car-ownership and usage are adversely affecting accessibility to towns and cities as well as other types of business area (e.g. industrial sites, office blocks etc.). The provision of extra road capacity cannot keep up with demand. Other measures such as the reduction of car-use will be inevitable because it is not possible to continue providing extra road capacity. Parking policy is recognised as a potentially important tool in restricting demand for more roads.

It cannot be stressed enough that a good parking policy is an important tool in maintaining and enhancing the ‘urban quality’ of our towns and cities. It also plays an important role in the success of intermodal passenger transport systems. Parking policies have to be implemented by local authorities.

At the local level the perceived disadvantages of reduced parking very often outweigh the estimated effects of enhanced accessibility. The main explanation for this situation is a lack of knowledge on the effects of parking policy measures. Because of this, measures are often taken too little and too late. At the same time much experience and some research results exist concerning parking policies and their effects on car-mobility and the economy. The problem is that the information on these experiences and research is distributed throughout Europe (and America and Japan).

Based on some initial research it can be concluded that combining existing knowledge in a structured and concise way will result in an impressive insight into the effects of parking policy-measures. Since much information is available, the result of a co-ordinated inventory and analysis can almost immediately be turned into guidelines for best practice on parking policy.

A European approach has the advantage of providing a much larger body of knowledge upon which to draw. The greater variety in types of measures and conditions under which they were applied provide a much better basis for developing specific guidelines compared to a national effort only.

Benefits to different users

Policy makers at the local level will much better be able to estimate and communicate anticipated effects of intended policy measures. Needless discussion can be overcome and the proper policy, given a particular situation, can be selected and agreed upon.

Experts at the local level in charge of the preparation or implementation of a parking policy then have a sounder basis upon which to make their decisions.

Policy makers at the national level can much better estimate what can be done locally to fulfil national formulated policy-goals.