Study of Effect of On-Street Parking on Traffic Capacity

On-street parking is common in Indian cities and allows individuals to park close to their destination. This reduces the capacity of the through travel lanes of roads. The parking manoeuvre of vehicles moving in or moving out of the parking areas causes delay to through traffic along the roads. When parking lot is partially filled, vehicles slowing down to search for adequate parking gap also cause reduction in the capacity of the through lane. Many researchers studied the effect of parallel and angle on-street parking on various traffic flow parameters and delays of through traffic caused by entrance and departure manoeuvres of on-street parking. Limited research has been done to study the effect of different level of parking (percentage of parking length filled by parked vehicles) on traffic capacity. The present work attempts to study the effect of different levels of on-street parking on traffic capacity of four-lane divided urban roads for two Indian cities Patna and Bhubaneswar. It can be observed that for both cities, traffic capacity in PCU has decreasing trend with increasing parking occupancy level, but when the parking space is nearly occupied the capacity again has an increasing trend. It could also be observed that traffic capacities for similar parking levels vary for both the cities, which can be attributed to the difference in traffic composition. The PCU measure taken for unifying the traffic composition may not be adequate for studying traffic flow characteristics of the region.