سیاست های مدیریت پارکینگ و اثربخشی راه حل های سیاست عمومی

For years, Portuguese public institutions, such as hospitals, offer free parking for employees, patients and visitors. Due to the economic pressure that the country is facing, public institutions are now being pressured to charge for parking. Such measure has been socially contested as free parking has been interpreted as a labor right. However, it is a fact that public institutions cannot keep buying additional areas to supply increasing parking needs. Along this paper, authors evaluate 4 alternative scenarios for parking management, demonstrating that it is possible to do more with fewer resources; there is to say, increase mobility with less consumption of resources. Using a real case study from a hospital area located in Algarve (Portugal), authors will perform an analysis of the effects of four parking management scenarios in terms of traffic and environment pollution. Those results will support the monetary quantification of the environmental externalities costs. The comparative results revealed that scenarios requiring the use of more resources and implying higher public expenditure are worst in terms of traffic, environment and externalities. When parking systems become controlled and restricted, the referring effects worsen, on the immediate term, with additional driving costs for users on the network up to 560 euros/workday, environmental externalities costs up to 102 euros/workday and CO2 emissions increasing up to 4,6 kg/workday.

Parking provision and management has been an important issue both for public authorities and for the private operators running those facilities. The relevance of the subject is not corresponded by universal or even integrated strategies. There are few specific requirements or regulations, both at national level and higher levels (European or International). Parking is an issue that has been addressed mostly locally, with municipalities imposing minimum ratios requirements to developers. Those ratios are mainly dependent of the land use and activities that will be served by the parking area. However, as there is no integration between parking policies, occasionally those minimum rations can lead to an oversupply of parking areas (Shoup, 1999). Parking areas usually create an impermeable surface that increases water flows in urban areas, degrade landscape and contribute to the urban island effect (Feitelson & Rotem, 2004). The excessive offer of parking also ruins urban planning purposes and promote automobile dependency (Cuttera & Franco, 2012, Shoup, 1997b,1999). Additionally, on-street parking and the search for a parking place can reduce the road capacity and cause congestion, lower the circulation speed and increase air pollution and noise. Moreover, on street parking also leads to an increase on cruising for parking. Shoup (2006) quantified this effect in congested downtowns and revealed that traffic cruising for parking can oscillate between 8% and 74% of the total traffic and that cruising time can vary between 3.5 and 14 minutes.Presently, several cities in Europe are reversing their parking policy and introducing parking maximums in order to contain the number of parking places available in their cities, as they consider the existing offer of parking places excessive. In fact, countries like Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Italy already set maximum parking requirements as national guidelines (Kodransky & Hermann, 2011). Additionally to the restriction of the parking areas requirements, most of the cities have payment systems for on-street, surface or structured parking under public management or concede to private parking managers.Along this paper, authors explore four different alternatives to manage parking demand in a hospital area,either through restricting the access to parking areas, introducing a payment system or by creating an additional parking area. Authors will estimate the traffic, environmental and monetary effects of those alternative parking management scenarios. The effect of cruising will also be taken into account on the calculations as it leads to increasing negative effects, aggravated by the fact that it takes place in a hospital area. The comparison between the different scenarios will allow determining if parking management can be done with less resources and without worsen the mobility of the area, as well as the environmental effects and monetary revenues. The comparison will also include the quantification of external costs, for each of the scenarios, in order to evaluate the society interest.These estimations will explicit the direct and indirect effects of each of the solution for parking manager, users and society. Such disaggregation of results is determinant to explicit all stakeholders perspectives into the decision making process and to acknowledge the impact of their options.

The comparison of traffic, environmental and monetary effects reveals that solutions requiring the use of more resources and implying higher public expenditure are worst in terms of environmental externalities and driving conditions. From this study, it was possible to conclude that when parking systems become more controlled and restricted, the referring traffic, environmental and monetary effects worsen on the short term. On the medium and long term, introducing a control system on the capacity of the parking areas or inserting a parking fee will expectedly contribute, to transference from private to public transport and to other sustainable transportation solutions, such as carpooling. On the particular system analyzed along this case study, there is however a social issue related with the fact that free parking might be seen as a labor right. Therefore, equally important as to balance the direct effects of each of the scenarios, public administrators also would have to face the obstacle of changing the paradigm of a new concept of parking. If parking would actually be a labor right, employees who do not drive their cars to work would have reasons to feel mistreated. Thus, the employer would have to compensate them, eventually with an extra payment on their wage. There are such policies in practice, for instance in California, where the law requires employers to offer commuters the option to choose cash in lieu of any parking subsidy offered (Shoup, 1997a).Offering commuters the option of choosing between free parking and the equivalent cash-value makes it clear that even free parking has an opportunity cost, the foregone cash. Therefore, some commuters who drive alone to work and park for free are more likely to take the cash and begin to rideshare. Privileging the equity issue, parking policies can actually help to promote sustainable transport. In opposition, interpreting parking as a labor right, without an adequate equity policy to compensate the others, leads to the promotion of automobile dependency and thus, is not sustainable in terms of mobility, environment and costs for society. Public administrators have to balance the social paradigm of parking with the need to find solutions that better serve the interests of all stakeholders involved on the parking scheme. One of the important stakeholders to consider, when exploring alternative parking management scenarios, is the parking manager, to whom the public administrator gives the concession. Its main interest is to increase his profitability, while respecting the contractual demands from the administrators. The scenarios that would contribute to a higher profitability are the ones that, on the short term, present worst results in terms of traffic and the environment. However, as their role on making decisions about alternative parking scenarios is rather irrelevant, the parking manager can only protect his investment in case there are changes to the contract. The final decision will be taken by the public administrator, who will balance both the impacts to society and the expectations of the parking manager. Lastly, on what refers to the drivers impacts, even if it was clear that the more controlled the system becomes, the higher costs for the drivers, more time they will spend driving and cruising, those costs are generally not taken into account on the pre-assessment of a solution. It is assumed that drivers take the decision to experience a specific delay and support a specific cost for its mobility when they decide to take their car to work. Thus, such cost is usually not considered by the public administrator when choosing parking management solutions. Moreover, the immediate effects are likely to lead changes to driver’s behavior, not accounted on this analysis and thus, the effects of a solution on the long term are likely to be somehow different from the ones observed on the immediate term.