Are parking requirements the solution in Asian cities?

[Update: Looking for more parking policy information?
Try Reinventing Parking.]

I left a comment at PT's Parking Blog in response to this John Van Horn item and its first comment.

My comment ended up quite long. I think it is worth cross-posting here.

I have been looking into parking policy around Asia. A report on it should be out next month (with luck).

It is true that Mumbai and Delhi have parking chaos and are now trying to follow the conventional suburban parking policy approach of minimum parking requirements with buildings. Dhaka, with car ownership below 50 per 1000 people, is doing the same. In a situation like that, is it really a good idea to force building managers and all of their customers to subsidize the parking of the tiny elite? So far, it is not working very well (see http://reinventingtransport.blogspot.com/2010/04/parking-dramas-in-south-asian-cities.html). Off-street parking does not magically suck cars off the streets if the streets are easy and cheap to park in.

By contrast, Japanese cities mostly have rather low parking requirements (typically one parking space per 150 to 400 square metres of floor space). And Japanese parking requirements ONLY apply to large buildings. Modest-sized buildings (below about 1500 to 2000 square metres of floor space) usually have no parking required. The full requirements only apply above 6000 sq.m. (they phase in between 2000 and 6000 sq.m).

Yet Japanese cities don't have parking chaos. In fact, they have very little on-street parking. And since 2006 on-street parking rules are quite strictly enforced. Where do people park then? (they are not ALL using the trains or bicycles). Answer: spillover parking goes mostly into commercial off-street parking, which seems to be ubiquitous (and some city-owned parking lots, usually underground).

The Japanese parking arrangements are not perfect but maybe they point towards a workable solution that is akin to John's (and Donald Shoup's) market-oriented one. At least it suggests that high parking standards are not necessary to avoid parking chaos.

Comments

Help improve this map of global sustainable transport advocates

I am working to map global "sustainable transport" advocates (for want of a better phrase). You can help! Submit suggestions or corrections via this google form . Here is the map so far. Please explore it and help me improve it.

Heavyweight champions for better buses

Many cities strive for better public transport. But too few do enough to improve their BUS systems. For Reinventing Transport this time around I discussed bus improvements with public transport planning veteran, Colin Brader of ITP. Colin has worked on numerous public transport projects around the world and is one of the authors of the 2019 EBRD report, " Driving change: reforming urban bus services ". A key point in our discussion: Cities need bus reform champions. We will see that one even has a bus improvement "heavyweight". Scroll down for highlights of our conversation or listen with the player below. Click here to learn how to subscribe to this podcast. Yangon bus stuck in traffic. Yangon has made drastic bus reforms recently. Colin Brader is the founder of the UK-based international transport consulting firm, ITP , and is currently ITP’s Chairman. For more than 2 decades he has worked through ITP on projects that have tran...

Transport-based City Types and their Trajectories

I want to help you get perspective on your city and its transport system with the help of simple city types based on their dominant transport modes, such as Walking Cities, Transit Cities, Bus Cities, Motorcycle Cities and Car Cities. This way of thinking about cities is a heuristic (an imperfect mental model or technique that is nevertheless good enough to be helpful). And it obviously is imperfect. For example, real cities often have various modes of transport, and modern cities are really all some kind of hybrid city type. But it is still useful, especially if we add the idea of a Traffic Saturated City , which is a very different beast from a Car City. It is important for change-makers in Traffic Saturated Cities to be aware they are not in automobile dependent cities yet. Options for digesting this: Read the brief article below and study the diagrams. They complement the podcast. For more depth, LISTEN to the 37 minute audio w...

Reinventing Transport

Search This Blog