Parking

From Storage to Strategy: Rethinking Parking's Role in Mobility

Parking has a big impact on transport systems. This UITP report examined how we can turn parking into a strategic lever for better mobility.

Key Takeaways

• Position parking not merely as a space for vehicle storage, but as a strategic component of sustainable mobility, supporting multimodality, active travel, and inclusive accessibility within integrated transport systems.
• When planned and managed effectively, parking can actively shape travel behaviour, enable meaningful modal shift, and support seamless first- and last-mile connectivity.
• Parking can serve as a gateway to multimodal networks, a driver of improved customer experience, and a platform for broader sustainability and economic outcomes.
• Recognise mobility as the objective, not parking revenue.
• Parking can be transformed from a fragmented, car-oriented function into a coordinated system that actively supports sustainable mobility using these enablers:
• Governance, to align stakeholders, integrate policies, and ensure effective enforcement
  • Harmonising governance and institutional alignment
  • Embedding parking in sustainable urban mobility and land-use policies
  • Repositioning parking within the mobility ecosystem
  • Aligning financing and revenue with public value. Identifying parking pricing and enforcement as policy instruments
• Digital technologies to enable data-driven management, improve user experience, and support multimodal integration.
  • Integrating parking into multimodal platforms
  • Implementing digital enforcement and regulatory compliance
  • Facilitating digital payment and dynamic pricing
• Knowledge Building & Sharing
  • Understanding travel behaviour and user preferences
  • Monitoring curb utilisation and on-street parking patterns
  • Communicating and educating through factual data
• The transformation of parking is not about eliminating it, but about correcting distortions created by its abundance and underpricing.

Comment

I suspect that a big part of the reason parking is rarely looked at strategically is that it can be a political hornet's nest, so it is often best avoided.

However, having undertaken a range of parking reforms, the benefits are definitely worth it, and there are many strategies for gaining stakeholder support for parking reform.

One area that needs more focus, not covered in the report, is autonomous vehicles, where curb space is already proving contentious and will become more so as the technology scales.

What Next?

Do you have a strategic parking policy in your jurisdiction?

Strategic Planning

Beyond Equity: The Economic Case for Accessible Transport

Making public transport accessible for people with disabilities is usually portrayed as an equity argument. This report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in the UK makes the economic case.

Key Takeaways

• The economic benefits of improving transport accessibility for all are rarely taken into account when making decisions about infrastructure investment.
• While construction costs are calculated, social benefits such as greater access to services, jobs and tourism are often undefined or even ignored.
• As the UK population ages, demand for inclusive transport will only increase.
• Disabled individuals in the UK consistently take 38% fewer trips than their non-disabled counterparts,
• Research for the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) indicates that access to public transport is one of the key determinants of disability employment status. Those located near well-provisioned, inclusive transport links are significantly more likely to find and sustain employment.
• If the UK successfully equalised public transport access to remove these barriers for disabled people, the Direct Transport-Linked Gain for the economy would be an annual boost of around £88.2 billion (nearly 3% of GDP).
• Closing the ‘disability gap’ in the workforce represents a transformative commercial opportunity for the UK transport network, with the potential to inject between £10.25 billion and £34.17 billion in additional annual fare revenue through increased ridership.
• With half of all disabled professionals saying they had to decline job offers due to transport issues, resolving these barriers for just 5% of disabled people currently excluded from the workforce would unlock a £2.1 billion annual dividend for HM Treasury through reduced welfare spending and increased tax receipts.

Recommendations:

• Introduce an enhanced capital allowance. 130% tax relief to incentivise private investment in accessibility beyond minimum standards.
• Create a national open accessibility data platform. A single, real-time, open-access system for transport accessibility data across the UK.
• Embed inclusive design in engineering standards. Make accessibility a core requirement in education, professional accreditation, and Continuing Professional Development.
• Make co-production the default. Require meaningful collaboration with disabled and under-represented groups in transport design and delivery.

Comment

It is good to see an economic case being made for investments in accessibility. However, I think it would have been good if it had been done in conjunction with a reputable economics institute.

I have previously made the case that we need to shift priorities around accessibility from compliance for stations to ensuring adequate public transport coverage. An accessible station is no use if the person with the disability cannot get to the station in the first place.

What Next?

Have you got an economic analysis of the benefits of making public transport more accessible?

Public-Private Partnerships

Contracts for chaos: why PPPs need room to bend

​This paper looks at the lessons from two public transport public-private partnership (PPP) contracts in Colombia - one that was rescued and another that went into liquidation.

Key Takeaways

• The difficulty is that no contract written today can anticipate everything that will happen over decades: demand forecasts prove optimistic, costs move in ways no one priced in and the financial model the contract rests on stops adding up.
• A well-designed concession can share these risks sensibly – but only if it was written to bend.
• PPP contracts are often drafted for a single, optimistic future and locked down in the name of certainty, leaving no legitimate way to adjust them when that future fails to materialise.
• Authorities are left choosing between an expensive rescue and the collapse of an essential service.
• The contrast between the experiences in two cities points to five conditions that determine whether a public authority can adapt a long-term contract when it must. Two are foundational:
  • The capacity to act. The authority needs in-house expertise to design a defensible solution, model the finances, draft the changes, and justify them.
  • The will to bear the cost. Someone in authority must be willing to absorb the political and procedural price of acting, rather than waiting out their term and leaving the problem to a successor.
• Three further conditions decide whether adaptation actually happens:
  • Legal room to adapt. The contract and the law must permit adjustment.
  • A clear authority to decide. One identifiable body must have the power to act and be answerable for the result.
  • Protection for the decision-maker. The official who signs must be able to act without facing disproportionate personal risk.
• The central lesson is that flexibility cannot be improvised in a crisis; it must be built into a long-term contract before the crisis arrives. In practice, this means three things:
  • The room to adapt should be written into the contract itself. This includes defining in advance the events that can trigger an adjustment, the procedure for making a change, and who has the authority to decide.
  • Place that authority in a single body answerable for the outcome, rather than splitting it across actors who can each block but do not commit.
  • The capacity to use this authority should be built inside the public institution, since the judgement required to redesign a complex contract rests on an understanding of that contract and its counterparties that cannot be hired in at short notice.

Comment

Over the years, I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly of transport procurement. In each case, success was not dependent on whether something was in-house or in the private sector, but on the transport agency's capacity and capability to design and manage the contracts.

What Next?

How good is your capacity and capability to design and manage contracts, and how well designed are your PPP contracts to bend as required?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Beyond time: why accessibility is more than just minutes - a blog based on some research arguing for moving from perceived accessibility to what is actually accessible.
• ​Fatbikes: Solution or Nuisance? - an Urban Cycling Institute blog sensibly discussing the challenges of fatbikes.
• ​Is Reducing Exposure to Motor Vehicles a Road Safety Strategy? - a research paper arguing that less automobile-oriented places have better road safety.

Tool

TransLink, the regional transportation authority responsible for Metro Vancouver's public transit network, has produced this report on how it has improved bus speeds and reliability, examining its progress since 2019 and what still needs to be done.