“Parking Management Best Practices” Recommends Sustainable Solutions

Parking management can provide huge savings and benefits. Cost-effective parking management programs typically reduce parking requirements by 20-40 percent compared with what conventional planning specifies. This provides numerous economic, social, and environmental benefits. Parking management can reduce parking facility costs, increase housing affordability, reduce motor vehicle traffic, encourage use of alternative modes, support more compact and accessible land use patterns, create more livable communities, reduce impervious surface and stormwater management costs, and allow more flexible building design.

Current planning practices tend to overlook and discourage parking management solutions even when they are most cost effective and beneficial overall. This book identifies problems with current parking planning practices, discusses parking costs and the savings that can result from improved management, describes specific parking management strategies and how they can be implemented, discusses methods for parking management planning and evaluation, and describes how to develop the optimal parking management program for a particular situation.
 
Parking Management Best Practices was written by Victoria Transport Policy Institute executive director Todd Litman, and is published by Planners Press (www.planning.org).

For additional information see the free report, Parking Management: Strategies, Evaluation and Planning, which summarizes the ideas in Parking Management Best Practices. To access the report, click here.

Posted February 2006