Modeling the response to paid on street parking policy for two wheelers and four wheelers on busy urban streets of CBD area - A case study of Surat city

Parking policy is one of the most powerful means and integral part of modern urban planning strategies which urban planners and policy makers can use to manage travel demand and traffic in city centers. For parking policies to be truly valuable and effective, they should be carefully integrated into a transport development plan aiming to achieve the long term targets of sustainable mobility. The study presented in this paper analyzed descriptive and statistical models to estimate the likely response to two proposed parking policy alternatives framed on the guidelines of "NUTP 2006" for on street parking around the city center of Surat, Gujarat. The city centers have mixed land use pattern with limited availability of off street parking facility and high potential of visitors for shopping. Very poor turnover of vehicles was observed on all the selected six routes of CBD area from 12 hour during on street parking inventory survey by License Plate method. About 50% illegal parking of two wheelers was observed during peak demand which causes spillover of parked vehicles almost whole day. The parking policy alternatives proposed were (i) time restraint policy (progressive parking charge policy) and (ii) space restraint policy with priority parking to emergency vehicles like ambulance, fire brigade or handicapped persons etc. The models derived were based on the response of city visitors to a road side field questionnaire survey. 600 samples were collected from all six routes of study area. Two logistic regression models, binary and multinomial were estimated for two wheelers and four wheelers separately. The results of binary models for both two wheelers and four wheelers shows that duration of parking is most significant attribute in deciding the response to both parking policy. For multinomial model the dominant variables observed were parking duration and travel time for two wheelers & four wheelers. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.