SWUTC Research Project Description
Title of Project: Getting the Parking Right for Transit-Oriented Development
Project Number: 161027
Principal Investigator:
Ming Zhang
(512) 471-0139
P.I. Affiliation: University of Texas at Austin
Project Monitor:
Daniel Yang, Ph.D.
Program Manager of GIS
Demographic Forecasting and Travel Demand Modeling
Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization
One Texas Center, 505 Barton Springs Rd., Suite 700
Austin, TX 78704
(512) 974-6423
Project Status: Active
Date Started: 9/1/09
Estimation Completion Date: 8/31/10
Estimated Cost - Current Fiscal: $30,000
Estimated Cost - Total Planned: $30,000
Project Summary:
Project Abstract:
Increasingly MPOs in Texas are incorporating transit-oriented development (TOD) or similar concepts into their long-range transportation plans. An example from central Texas is CAMPO’s “Activity Centers” concept. In North Central Texas, NCTCOG has been expanding its TOD program along the DART system that is planned to nearly double by 2030. In the Houston-Galveston area, H-GAC is planning and implementing a “Livable Centers’ project that cluster jobs, shopping, entertainment, and/or housing. One major challenge to planning and implementing these TOD-type strategies is parking. While it is neither feasible nor reasonable to eliminate all parking in a TOD district, applying the conventional parking ratios to TOD projects would undermine the expected community benefits of TOD and can even cause the TOD initiative to fail. This is because the conventional parking standards have a serious suburban bias and are based largely on low-density single land uses. The standards likely generate excessive parking in the TOD area; these parking lots or garages take the limited prime locations and spaces near the station, increase project costs to the developer, and impede access to the transit by walking, biking, or feeder services. Experience from other states suggests that getting the parking right is essential to ensure the desirable form and functionality of TOD. There are few studies of the topic on Texas cities. The proposed research aims at filling the gap through a case study of Austin, TX.
Project Objectives:
Task Descriptions:
Task 1. Review the literature on parking and TOD; develop a matrix summarizing parking rate reductions for different land uses in TOD. The findings will become useful references for practice in Texas as there have been only a handful of TOD examples in Texas cities.
Task 2. Review the experience in the U.S. and abroad on innovative parking programs and conditions (spatial, fiscal and institutional) for successful implementation of the programs. Examples of these programs are: central parking, parking cash-out, and time-shared parking.
Task 3. Conduct a case study of the Austin, TX area to estimate a vehicle ownership model as a function of land use attributes and transit supply in addition to socioeconomic and demographic factors. The modeling results will be used to recommend residential parking ratio in the presence of TOD features. This task includes the following subtasks:
3.1 Geocode in GIS the residential locations of households in the 2005 Austin Activity Travel Survey;
3.2 Create a buffer of 1-mile radius from each home location and derive measures of land use for each home buffer. Typical land use measures to be derived include: population and job density, entropy of land use mix, street density and connectivity, block size and sidewalk continuity, transit supply (stop/route density and service frequency), along with others;
3.3 Estimate a regression model of vehicle ownership;
3.4 Estimate elasticities of vehicle ownership with respect to land use attributes and transit supply.
3.5 Based on the results of 3.4, estimate parking ratios for future TOD housing. Compare the suggested parking ratios with existing parking standards and suggest for revision.
Task 4. Prepare the final report and discuss transferability of the study method and the findings to other communities in Texas.
Index Terms: