Past - Presidents ’ Award Peak Period Occupancy — A Parking Management TOOI

The conventional approach to assessing parking demands and regulating parking usage involves surveys of parker destinations, trip purposes, walking distances, arrivalkfeparture times, enforcement intensities, parking fees, etc. Parker destinations and characteristics are compared with the parking available on a block-by-block basis to identify locations of parking surpluses/deficiencies. Models for assessing the interrelationship between different parking characteristics, disutilities, and demands then need to be validated to predict the effect of parking regulation changes. Although the information obtained by the conventional approach can be used for other parking management purposes, that approach requires many surveyors to conduct parker interviews. Since this manpower requirement often cannot be met, the survey must be completed over an extended period, or the interviews must be limited to only a potilon of the parkers. This, however, would mean that the effect of the daily variations in parker characteristics (as demonstrated later in this article) would not be evident from the survey result. The number of workers and amount of time required for data collection, validation, and analysis also make it impractical to use this approach for year-to-year parking performance monitoring or before-and-after assessments of parking regulation changes. Depending on the design of the questionnaire, a certain degree of subjectivity and judgment would be inherent in asking/answering the survey questions.