What happens to travel behaviour when the right to park is removed?

Melia, Steve; Clark, Ben

Abstract

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd What happens to travel behaviour when the right to park at a destination is removed? This question, fundamental to travel demand management and land-use planning, has only been partially addressed in the literature so far. The impacts on travel to the destination concerned have been studied, but not the impacts on wider travel behaviour. This paper reports on a natural experiment related to destination parking, where a university removed the right of most undergraduates living off-campus to park on its main suburban campus. A survey was conducted to compare the travel behaviours of two groups of undergraduate students: the first group started before and the second group started after the introduction of the parking restriction (n = 858). The survey captured licence-holding, car availability during the term and vacation periods, and the mode of transport used to travel to campus and for the last trip to another location. The parking restriction was associated with a fall in the modal share of driving to campus of nine percentage points. Car availability during term-time fell by 14 percentage points and licence-holding fell by nine percentage points. The policy change was associated with greater changes amongst females than males. Overall, the results suggest that removing the right of young adults to park at a frequent destination delayed their acquisition of driving licences and cars. These findings may explain part of the fall in licence-holding observed amongst young adults in Great Britain in recent decades.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 9, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Jul 20, 2018
• Publication Date: Dec 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jul 12, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 20, 2019
• Journal: Transport Policy
• Print ISSN: 0967-070X
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 72
• Pages: 242-247
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2018.07.002
• Keywords: parking, parking restrictions, behaviour change, modal shift, gender differences, university campuses
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/865295
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2018.07.002
• Additional Information: Additional Information : This research was partly funded by a grant from UWE's Facilities Service. A longer report was published in 2016. See Repository ID 30990. This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published version is available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2018.07.002.
• Contract Date: Jul 12, 2018