Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	336
Event Title:	Parking: Getting the Supply Right
Event Date:	Jan 23 2012 1:30PM- 3:15PM
Event Location:	Hilton, Columbia Hall 7
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Does Availability of On-street Parking Affect Car Ownership of Households with Off-street Parking? (12-2856)

Local governments¡¯ minimum street-width standards often force developers to over-supply, and residents to pay for, a large quantity of on-street parking in residential neighborhoods. Such a policy is believed to encourage car ownership while reduce the affordability of housing. This paper examined the car ownership impact and focused on households who already have off-street parking. A sample of 403 households are randomly selected from a household travel survey in the New York City region. Their off-street and on-street parking supply are measured through Google Street View and Bing Maps Birds Eye View. After controlling for the endogeneity between parking supply and car ownership and the correlation between off-street and on-street parking supply, this paper finds that free and readily available on-street parking increases private car ownership by 8.8 percent, or one out of eleven cars purchased by households with off-street parking in the study region can be explained by on-street parking availability. Because private developers are reluctant to provide on-street parking and residents are unlikely to pay for such parking if the cost is not bundled with housing, this increased car ownership is largely the result of (ineffective) government intervention in the market. Local governments should revise their street standards and make the provision of on-street parking optional. They should let the market decide whether, and how many, on-street parking spaces to provide in new residential developments.

Authors
Guo, Zhan , New York University