Parking Studies

Parking is one of the major problems that is created by the increasing road traffic. It is an impact on transport development. The availability of less space in urban areas has increased the demand for parking space, especially in areas like the central business district (CBD). This will affect the mode choice also. This has a high economic impact.

Before taking any measures for the betterment of the conditions, data regarding availability of parking space, the extent of its usage and parking demand is essential. The most common parking surveys conducted are in-out survey, fixed period sampling & license plate method of survey.

In this survey, the occupancy count in the selected parking lot is taken at the beginning. Then the number of vehicles that enter the parking lot for a particular time interval is counted. The number of vehicles that leave the parking lot is also taken. The final occupancy in the parking lot is also considered, but we won’t get any data regarding the time duration for which a particular vehicle used the parking lot. Hence, we can not estimate the parking fare from this survey.

This is almost similar to the in-out survey. All vehicles are counted at the beginning of the survey. Then after a fixed period that may vary between 15 minutes total to 1 hour total, the count is again taken. Here there are chances of missing the vehicles that were parked for a short duration.