To Park or To Develop: Trade-Off in Rail Transit Passenger Demand

Rail transit systems often provide park-and-ride facilities as a way for passengers to access stations. Using the land around stations for development rather than parking would allow more passengers to access the system without driving and ostensibly go much further toward reducing dependence on automobiles. However, it is unclear whether ridership levels can be maintained without a park-and-ride option. This research seeks to illuminate this issue with a demand model for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system. Passenger counts are estimated for each origin/destination pair in the BART system based on such variables as parking spaces, housing units, and employment adjacent to stations. Parameters from this model are then used to estimate the amount of development required to replace the riders generated by station parking. Depending on the characteristics of a station and its spatial relationship with other stations, the level of development density required to effectively replace parking is found to be much higher than what is generally feasible.