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This technical report is the outcome of a collaborative research effort between a transportation agency, the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA), and a graduate student research team at San José State University’s (SJSU) Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP). The focus of this research project is on parking utilization at transit‐oriented development (TOD) residential projects in the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. The intent of this research is to determine actual parking utilization for residents of 12 housing developments near VTA light rail and Caltrain stations, and to compare usage to parking supply and local requirements at these locations. The project has yielded information useful to planning practitioners and academia alike. The study follows recent research within the Bay Area that demonstrates many TOD residential properties are “over‐parked” (Cervero 2009). Locally, the study provides evidence to VTA to help inform…

Colliers’ 10th annual North America Parking Rate Survey again indicates that even in the face of economic hardship, parking garage owners  and operators have managed to hold rates steady, providing little relief to businesses or consumers. Over the past year Canadian and U.S. parking rates both registered little change, highlighting the high degree of stability in this often overlooked real estate sector.

The Charlotte Parking Collaborative is currently being implemented with a real time Parking and Wayfinding System that overcomes the perception that parking is not readily available in Charlotte’s CBD. The project conveys the feeling of a parking “system”, helps visitors find venues and parking more easily, and will facilitate balancing the parking supply with growing transit service while providing congestion mitigation and air quality benefits.

To determine the effects of reduced parking requirements on travel behavior, a survey was prepared and data was collected and analyzed to answer the following questions:

Introduction Among the central policy goals of the current New York City mayoral administration is accommodating rapid projected population growth while simultaneously improving the City’s overall environmental performance, addressing externalities arising from traffic congestion and providing increased access to affordable housing. In support of these goals, the City has developed a long term sustainable growth plan, PlaNYC 2030 (City of New York, 2008), is engaged in an active land use and planning program, and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing the construction or preservation of income-restricted housing. Potentially running counter to these related goals, however, is the longstanding requirement in the City’s zoning code that new residential construction in most neighborhoods be accompanied by a minimum number of off-street parking spaces. Such parking requirements, critics argue, could increase the cost of new housing by forcing developers to incur…

Report assesses opportunities to improve land use and transportation linkages in communities surrounding 70 existing and planned transit stations

Smart growth policy strategies attempt to control increasing auto travel, congestion, and vehicle emissions by redirecting new development into communities with a high-intensity mix of shopping, jobs, and housing that is served by high-quality modal alternatives to single occupant vehicles. The integration of innovative technologies with traditional modal options in transit-oriented developments (TODs) may be the key to providing the kind of high-quality transit service that can effectively compete with the automobile in suburban transit corridors. A major challenge, however, of such an integration strategy is the facilitation of a well-designed and seamless multi-modal connection infrastructure – both informational and physical. EasyConnect II explored the introduction and integration of multi-modal transportation services, both traditional and innovative technologies, at the Pleasant Hill Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) District station during the initial construction phase of the…

Compares two “eco-suburbs” of Freiburg, Germany, and the impact of differing parking restrictions on resident mode choice