Methodology of parking analysis

Cities are facing many challenges, in particular in relation to the mobility of people and the structure of land use. Parking management, which makes the link between land use and transportation, is one of the crucial ways to meet these challenges. In the Greater Montreal Area, data from origin-destination (OD) surveys is helpful in understanding typical travel behaviour. This study processes car driver trips from travel surveys to develop vehicle accumulation profiles and derive theoretical parking supplies from the observed parking demand, defined as the maximal number of cars parked in an area at a given time. This research also provides an assessment of the quality of the estimation by comparing the parking supplies derived from an OD survey to parking supplies estimated from public geographical information systems and field surveys. The paper shows that parking supply is subject to high variability and highlights that its assessment must take into account regulation data (obtained from on-street regulation parking signs data) that modulates the availability of the raw parking supply according to different days and hours of the day.