The Effects of Paid Parking

There is growing recognition that the imbalance resulting from poorly conceived parking policies is a major obstacle to the establishment of an effective and balanced system of urban transport, and it is also an important cause of high traffic and air pollution (Weinberger et al., 2010). This recognition led to large attention to the importance of paid parking policy. This paper comprehensively studies the effects of paid parking, which, more precisely, investigates whether paid parking affects urban car travel demand or not and evaluates the relationship between them by controlling variables of population, urban density, private car ownership, personal income on PPP1 (Purchasing Power Parity), urban GDP2 (Gross Domestic Product), employment rate and educational level. The preferred OLS regression model indeed provides some support for the view above. A dataset of 53 cities in Europe were searched from various websites and related journals, annual reports. After testing the correlations between explanatory variables and their distributions via Stata, we remove variable of urban GDP and set up two models with on-street and off-street parking price separately, which will be explained specifically in the section of Data Collection and Analysis. The final regression model turns out that parking price for both on-street and off-street shows no significant influence on car travel demand at 5% level. The major reason is that car use percentage data used in our model is searched by EPOMM, which is mostly based on commuters [1] PPP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity [2] GDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product - 3 - because it is easier to collect information from commuters than temporary parkers. Commuters, on the one hand, are more likely to park longer time. Therefore, commuters may subscribe for parking and pay once a month or even longer, namely, long-term parking contracts, and in this case, the change of parking price will not affect car travel demand a lot. On the other hand, subsidy from employers play an important role to affect its relationship between car travel demand. And there is always a special offer for the long time parking. However, on the other hand, variables of private car ownership, employment rate and educational level do show significant effects on citizens’ car travel demand, namely car use percentage, at 5% level. Policy implications, limitations and further researches are also presented in this paper.