This study explores the long-term trend of parking demand in the downtown of a mid-sized city, focusing on the fourteen off-street parking garages and lots that are owned and operated by the City. An important driver of the demand change is parking pricing. At the beginnings of FY’16 and of FY’18, the city adjusted parking rates across all the fourteen facilities. The change in FY’16 primarily focused on setting different weekday and weekend parking rates in response to the different demand levels. The change in FY’18 continued this weekday/weekend differentiation while enlarged the pricing gap between highly occupied facilities and less occupied facilities.
The demand is measured by three metrics: occupancy, transaction volume, and revenue. To better represent the condition of parking congestion, this analysis uses “daily peak occupancy”, defined as the highest number of vehicles that occupy a parking facility on a given day. The daily peak is then averaged across a period to measure the peak parking demand of that period. Transaction volume refers to the number of parking sessions (on in-and-out is one complete parking session) regardless of the length of stay and the amount of parking payment. Revenue refers to the amount of payment associated with each parking session.
Yuqi Wang 