Design implications of incorporating employee profiles and workplace activity levels in travel demand management led parking demand assessments

Abstract

In the urban areas of South Africa the provision of parking has historically been based on town planning schemes formulated by local authorities. The parking requirements in these town planning schemes were established from the results of numerous surveys that observed the actual use of parking spaces and related the demand on specific attributes of land use, and depending on the land use these could be unit of leasable floor area, availability of seats, availability of beds or the number of employees, in order to derive parking demand rates for design purposes. The fundamental problem with this approach is that the standards are derived from historically observed parking demand and therefore evolutionary socio-economic attributes do not necessarily influence the standards so developed. While these standards are supposed to be continuously updated, it would be difficult to re-demarcate parking spaces for built up areas. Therefore old built up areas remain with the problem of fixed parking spaces when the demand for parking is ever increasing. A more fundamental question, however, is how to better understand travel behaviour to enable the design of sustainable transport services, of which parking form part, in line with policy instruments such as travel demand management. It is the aim of the paper to help contribute towards answering such questions, by providing some empirically derived datasets assimilated within the context of better understanding travel behaviour related to parking demand. The paper isolates the case of a large firm in the City of Tshwane, employing 3 751 people, and interrogates relationships between work place travel activity patterns, employee profiles and parking demand. South African workplaces, in particular, especially in urban areas, are ever more characterised by increased parking demand and limited capacity to accommodate the demand. In this specific case study, the analysis is reliant on classified occupancy traffic counts at the workplace, employee records and some land use data. The main contribution of the paper is in the publishing of some empirically derived parking demand related datasets, to illustrate usefulness of more in-depth behavioural data in the formulation of designing sustainable transport services. The paper concludes that much insight is gained from understanding travel behaviour in the design of sustainable transport services to serve the workplace