Assessing park-and-ride efficiency and user reactions to parking management strategies

Increasing the number of spaces at overutilized park-and-rides often is not possible due to budgetary and other constraints. Instead, transit agencies may instead seek to maximize the number of people that are able to use the existing spaces through various parking management strategies. Unfortunately, the efficiency of park-and-rides is difficult to measure, so agencies cannot accurately quantify existing use or improvement after parking management strategies have been applied. This study proposed and tested a method to measure the person-efficiency of park-and-ride lots through an onsite audit. Additionally, a user survey was proposed to confirm the audit results and unveil reactions to parking management strategies to increase person-efficiency. The onsite audits and user surveys were conducted at several overutilized park-and-ride lots in the Central Puget Sound Region of Seattle, Washington. The results show that the person-efficiency can be measured easily, and several potential avenues to increase person-efficiency of park-andrides are identified.